'American Rust' Recap: Season 1 Episode 2

Tonight's American Rust episode two plays out mostly in a shotgun wedding scene of a Buell couple, the only lively thing so far to have happened in this decaying fictional town, except, of course, the murder that opens the season, whose vague investigation now plods on for its own sake. 

Without the urgency of an investigative thriller, we are left to ponder the lives of the townies and the characters whose motivations still elude us up till this point. Lee English, Isaac's sister returns to Buell, after Isaac flees, to take care of their dad. 

Mr. English is, at once, a standoffish and a hard-to-please man, and this could explain partly why Lee had run off on her own to marry her rich man in the first place. He is incapacitated from the legs, and on a motley of drugs, yet it doesn't stop him from smoking and drinking. 

Chief Del Harris still happens to be on his own jumble of drugs, and he does a good job of keeping them out of sight. Still, on the trail of the steel mill murders, he meets Billy, who lurks around the mill, and advises him to do away with his size 13 shoes and get a size 14 from another town where nobody recognizes him. Billy doesn't say much and does as he is ordered. 

This hints so much at the possible culprits of the murder, seeing as Chief Del tries to maintain control of whatever evidence turns up to make sure he inspects it before his other officers. They watch the video from the CCTV across the exterior of the mill, and Del wastes no time in implicating a random man before his counterparts, suggesting his job might be more to cover up the culprits of the crime than to find them. 

Billy eventually takes out his size 13 shoes to the woods to burn them at the end of the flashforward sequence. Suspicion rests heavily on him, and Isaac as well, given their encounter at the end of the wedding where Isaac accosts him in the safe shadows. He talks anxiously about turning himself and Billy in, but Billy slaps him out of the ridiculous idea, and tells him to run away to where he had always wanted to be, and forget the entire thing. 

They hug affectionately, but before he goes Billy advises him to call Lee, that she has been worried sick about him. Billy, on his own, is elated to be reuniting with Lee. They bond over past times and have sex, despite Lee's marriage, confirming Grace's assumptions of their getting back together. 

During the course of the wedding, Grace seems quite unhappy with Virgil, and his usual knack for his brazen display of promiscuity and gets with Del eventually. Isaac is now on his own, away from his nagging father, and left to his devices. He calls his sister to ensure she is okay and hurls the phone in the water.