A Moment of Sadness and Goodness from Haven “Countdown” 

[Warning: Spoilers for last night’s episode.]

Y’all know how truly, madly, deeply afflicted I am by Haven, so what I’m about to say comes from a place of love, but “Countdown” was a seriously bi-polar episode. We went dark, dark, dark with Jordan in a Moment of Sadness that was a long time coming, and then Audrey and Nathan’s reconciliation from a MULTIDIMENSIONAL separation was lighter and less epic than I wanted it to be. But we got there. So I’m going to give the aha! a Moment of Goodness, but it came nowhere close to what I had in my head. I’ll share that with you later.

Moment of Sadness: Jordan’s Good Intentions Get Her Killed

We’ve been treading water a bit with exactly who Wade Crocker is and why he’s still in Haven. He’s been a lost soul in the wake of his wife’s affair, and Duke hasn’t been able to kick his ass back to the city. So when Jordan comes calling, it wakes something up in him–sexual, you bet–but also empowerment, which we can gather is something Wade is not at all familiar with.

Jordan reels him in and they have a strange kinetic scene where he wears gloves so he can touch her, and at her bidding, he bugs the police station. And then she tells him the deep, dark family secret about absorbing Troubles, and Fiction 101 tells you this is a capital bad idea. She’s put the gun on the table, so to speak, and it doesn’t take long for Wade to use it.

When the Trouble of the week starts turning people to stone and Wade wants in it on it, Duke, Audrey, and Nathan shut him down and Audrey resolves it peacefully. Wade goes outside and takes a hit of liquid courage and comes back in and stabs the guy anyway. Then he gets the heroin rush Duke mentioned, and game on.

Jordan decides after kidnapping Vince and hearing that he, too, triggered a Crocker back in the day, she’s had enough of waiting for a non-Troubled life to begin and it’s time for a fresh start (she also confesses that she was in love with Nathan, hence being so hellbent on having him killed).

Unfortunately, she meets Wade (at the same cemetery where she sat a few times last year with Nathan) to tell him goodbye, and he wants to know what the big dark secret is about how to end the Troubles but she won’t tell him. He cuts her and she won’t tell him. She doesn’t have enough time to unglove and drop him before he wipes the blood on his hand and emboldened by another hit, finishes her off, relishing the blood high. And that closes the door on Jordan.

Moment of Goodness: Nathan Figures It Out

Duke and Audrey begin their day with Baileys and coffee and Audrey shares that she knew when she came through who she was, and she remembers Lexie like a dream state, but she didn’t pull recollections of Lucy and Sarah. She also tells Duke she remembers Colorado. Duke tells her she has to stay away from Nathan because he’s going to figure it out and that’ll get him killed. Audrey agrees.

Then Nathan shows up with coffee and gets the badass “Spike it, please” card from her until Duke suggests that he’ll come with Nathan while “Lexie” goes into the station to do paperwork. Nathan thinks it’s odd but goes along with it. Duke and Audrey stay in contact during the case and then she catches Wade in her office when he’s planting the bug but doesn’t twig that he’s up to something.

When Nathan arrives at the station and Audrey says something about “Tater,” the cop who was just killed, something finally registers for him. He pauses and they talk about what might be causing the Trouble, and the way she phrases it makes Nathan realize the jig is up. “Audrey?” he asks. “Yes” she answers. “Parker?!” She confesses yes again and then he races toward her in a hug and she tells him it’s always been her.

They argue about why she didn’t tell him before, and she reminds him that everybody wants her to kills him. He asks about when they were alone and she reminds him he wanted her to kill him, too (and first). Then Duke comes back in and realizes what’s what and Nathan jumps on him for knowing first until Audrey dials them back to the investigation.

At the end of the episode, the case is resolved and Nathan comes into the office. Audrey is at her desk and when he closes the door behind him, the slightest look of fear crosses her face as she seems afraid of what he might say. But he sits and they banter and she makes a dumb joke and he tells her he missed that and he’s glad she’s back. She asks him why he’s glad and it flusters him, and then she’s agitated.

He asks her if she’s mad at him. She tells him she decided to go in the barn to end the Troubles and he screwed it up by killing Agent Howard. He tells her he couldn’t let her go. She responds that he’s now asking the same thing of her and she won’t do it. She made the decision to leave him, and it was essentially for nothing, so now he doesn’t get to leave her.

She tells him it’s not the Guard’s decision to make because they will never find out she’s Audrey. Nathan says he thought it might be his, and she says it’s not. She loves him, so that makes it her decision. And then she walks out and closes the door and he sits there alone while that hits him. And I throw things at my TV.

So the way those scenes should have gone… In the first one, Nathan realizes it’s her, he races to her in a hug and then they kiss and Duke opens the door and smarts off with something like “Oh, good. We’re all caught up. Case is waiting.” And the second scene would have had more gravitas about how much time Nathan spent looking for her and that he was lost without her, and that he loves her and they’ll figure all of this out but they are together.

The dial back to awkward/can’t quite get there was just maddening to me. MULTIDIMENSIONAL separation, y’all. You’re finally back in the same realm. You’re behind closed doors. Say what you need to say already. Plus, we just had Nathan remind Duke that he knows he loves Audrey, too, and tell him to take care of Lexie once he’s gone i.e. people still saying “I love you” around each other and not to each other. This would have been the opportune moment to pull that trigger. Points to Audrey that she said it first. (I know, I know…slow build. But… FOUR YEARS!)

In some ways I think we rushed Nathan finding out to serve the story that Jordan had to find out about Audrey before her death. Without that requirement, we could have had it later in its own episode. Lucas Bryant and Emily Rose can kill the heavy emotional stuff, so I want them to have the chance to play it. We have the second half of the season to have the big conversations (please, let us have the big conversations). Plenty of time to get there. I just really, really hope we do.

As for losing Jordan–I’m OK with it in the scheme of things because she was running out of things to swing and rage against in trying to get un-Troubled, and in the reality of the show, that was never going to happen. That she was complicit in her own undoing is the insult to the injury but it sets the stage for more amazing work from Eric Balfour when we get to the point that Duke is going to have to kill his brother to prevent him from killing Audrey (that’s 100% a guess but I’m throwing it out there.) I’m sorry to see Kate Kelton go, and I wish we’d had just one more scene where Jordan really let Nathan have it about the pieces he left her in last season. I can’t wait to see what Kelton does next.

Sidebar: Vince’s confession was significant, but not a MOG for me because I think we’re due another one with the specifics–the scenes here felt designed to propel Jordan’s arc to its conclusion. We’re definitely due a chat between Vince and the Brothers Crocker.