Just when the loony mother grabbed Emma’s hand, the first episode ended, leaving everyone wondering what happened next. Well, we see Emma panting and rushing her way to the car to see the red spots her mother caused on her flawless white skin. Patricia terrorized and traumatized her two little girls when she lost sleep all those years ago, and now she lies dead in a hospital bed, looking like somebody’s traumatized her instead. The second episode of Paramount Plus’ Insomnia is titled Bad Blood, and if you don’t immediately think about the Taylor Swift song, you are probably the right audience for this show.
Spoilers Ahead
What does Phoebe tell Robert and Emma?
Not being able to get a hold of Chloe, Robert calls Phoebe to babysit Will while he’s out. Phoebe notices Will being a little more off than usual, and Robert agrees, but he can’t figure out the reason behind it. Phoebe tells Robert about her pregnancy, and Robert is genuinely happy and excited for his sister-in-law, whom he clearly adores like his own sister. Phoebe says that she wanted to raise a baby on her own, so she got a donor and did IVF to have her own little family. Robert leaves while already addressing himself as Uncle Rob, and Phoebe gets back to Will, trying to cheer him up. Emma is still not over the dictaphone as she stares into it and then notes down the series of numbers she recorded. She then checks Robert’s voicemail, reminding her that she should be nice to Phoebe since she’s the only family she has. When the cops took Patricia away, the sisters grew up in a children’s home named St. Agnes. Even though Phoebe forgave her mother, Emma never got over the fact that Patricia tried to murder her sister. When she comes back home, Phoebe tells her that Patricia has died, and she’d like it if Emma could come with her to the hospital the next morning to collect her belongings.
Why does Emma refuse to represent Pete Stockwell?
Emma’s boss tells her that the prospects of her partnership are looking good, but there’s only one board member who isn’t on her side yet. Baxter, the aforementioned board member, is trying to get a renowned property developer, Richard Davies, as a client for the firm. Now Richard Davies is Amanda Stockwell’s brother-in-law, and Amanda also works for him. Emma represents Pete, Amanda’s ex-husband, and if she were to put the firm’s interests first, she’d have to let Pete go and refer him to another lawyer. Emma’s told to let Pete know that she can’t represent him anymore, and she tells her assistant Rosemary to set up a meeting with Pete the next day. Meanwhile, Emma gets an invite to a dinner Baxter is organizing, and that’s the final step for her to secure the partnership.
Why does Patricia’s body undergo a postmortem?
Emma’s sleep trouble is in no way getting better, as she keeps tossing and turning so that her creepily dilated pupils get some rest. She finds herself sleepwalking again, this time lighting candles just like Patricia used to do when she was losing her mind. Emma and Phoebe watched everything Patricia did, and that obviously has had an effect on Emma. She spends another sleepless night, and in the morning, Robert tells her that Will hasn’t been doing great lately. Emma says she hasn’t noticed anything, but the kid is going through the same thing she did when she saw her mother wandering around the house doing absurd and erratic things. Chloe is another problem on top of their already burdened shoulders, as she comes back home from a party after having gone AWOL all night. Chloe skips the lecture from her parents, and Emma goes to the hospital to meet Phoebe. Phoebe wants to see her mother for the last time, and that agitates Emma. Phoebe tells her that she should get over the bad blood and second child curse, as they’re nothing but the words of a crazy woman. According to Patricia, every second child of their family had ‘bad blood’ and would suffer the same fate as she did. Soon, a doctor arrives to interrupt their conversation, informing them that they can’t see Patricia’s body yet because it’s being moved to another facility for a postmortem. The doctors suspect that she didn’t die of natural causes, and they need to look into it further.
What’s happening to Will?
Will being a little moody and distant had been bothering Robert for a while, and it goes even further when Will pushes another kid in his playgroup. Robert asks him to apologize, but he refuses to do so. Robert lets it go and tucks him in his bed later on and asks if he wants to talk about anything, but Will is silent and only replies reluctantly to get it over with. When Robert asks if he wants to talk to his mother, Will says he doesn’t want to talk to her. It’s evident that Will has seen Emma sleepwalking, and he’s creeped out by her. Later at night, when Emma regains her senses in a pond near her house, she sees Will staring at her through the window. Every time she checks on him, he pretends to be asleep, while he’s just being traumatized by his mother’s antics.
Did Emma kill her mother?
Robert finds a pouch of coke in Chloe’s clothes, and now the water has gone above their heads. Chloe’s rebellious phase is clearly going off the rails now, and even Robert, who’s usually patient with her, seems concerned. Emma lashes out at Chloe, and Robert doesn’t hold her back this time. Chloe has some luck, I must say, as the doorbell saves her from the several-hour lecture that was about to come. Two detectives show up at the door, asking about the nature of Patricia’s death. They ask Emma about her visits to the hospital, and Emma replies that she barely wanted to be there and only went because Phoebe fooled her the first time. It was obvious that her lies wouldn’t hold up for long, as the detectives asked why she did not tell her sister that she visited her mother the day she died. The lawyer now faces a situation when it’d be wiser to not say a word without her own lawyer, and it’s a given that she suffocated her mother to death based on the opening scenes of this episode.
