#4.12 analysis

Sort of, yeah!

This is Annie and Mick's conversation:

MICK: But he was like a grandpa.

ANNIE: That's sweet.

MICK: The kind of guy you want to do things for. Like that sister of yours. [At first, this seems like Mick could be referencing Annie choosing to put her fingerprints on the gun for Beth.]

ANNIE: It's not the same thing. [Annie doesn't think Mick protecting The Janitor is the same as her protecting her sister.]

MICK, doubtfully: Mm... [beat] How can one bitch have a hold on so many people? ["To have a hold on" someone is to "have a controlling influence over" someone. While Mick is primarily talking about Rio in this instance, Annie and even himself would be included considering he has done several favors for Beth without repayment—because of Rio. The statement goes beyond that, however, for the audience, even if not for Mick and Annie. Stan thinks Beth has a hold on Ruby; Beth has had and thinks she currently still has a hold over Dean, but it's slipping from her grasp; Nick is playing into the idea that she has influence over him.]

ANNIE: She's not all that. [Annie balks at the insult, but also doesn't see the ways this would be true. It's hard to see Beth as having influence over Rio when, from their perspective, he's often making their lives hell]

MICK: Then why are we both here? [This statement reframes things for Annie. Mick's here on his day off, and while Annie has no power and control in the situation and she's scared, nothing happens to her. At this point, she even realizes that she's safe. Rio also told her explicitly that people wondering/worrying where she was is "kinda the point." It's an acknowledgment that if they were different people, they wouldn't be in this situation. Beth would be handled, and Annie wouldn't be used as a pawn to control her. Mick is suggesting that Rio won't harm Beth because of the "hold" Beth has over him. Annie recognizes that Beth has no real power over Rio, so it must be about his feelings for her.]

ANNIE stares at him, realization dawning.

It's less about Rio doing things for Beth and more about what Rio won't do to Beth because he loves her. In the exchange, Annie seems to recognize the weight of this information. Rio will do anything to them, but he won't hurt them. It defangs him in a pretty significant way, but it's also a loaded truth because that love is still dangerous. While he won't lay a hand on them, he will destabilize their lives, threaten them, control them, and make their families worry about them. It's not the type of romance you would wish for someone you care about—particularly because Rio and Nick's scene establishes that Rio didn't really have to do this. It was an action borne out of him feeling out of control and jealous.

When Beth then confesses to Annie that she wishes he had taken her, Annie says, "He never will," which is Annie telling Beth that Rio doesn't have the capacity to hurt her.

I have to admit that the longer I watch the show, the more I am disturbed by the “I am mom” side of Beth. She does not seem to me like well written mom, to be honest. Like this is something they put aside with “cookies and some worrying faces would do the job”. But some real interaction with the kids? Big round zero. The last time with the icecream topping and coke should be it? Pure joke. So unbelievably pathetic in the contrast how they depict Annie and Ben or Ruby and her kids. Why is it?

Tbh, I'm actually really bothered by how much of the fandom can't believe that Beth loves her children without extended scenes where she spends time with them for a few reasons.

One reason is that the fandom seems to have absolutely no problem believing that Rio loves his son or his grandmother based off of approximately five scenes in four seasons. In fact, the common consensus is that Rio is a wonderful, loving, giving father who is heavily motivated by his love of his family. I don't think this is an incorrect conclusion to draw; I do think the show wants us to believe that (though I do think they want us to believe Rio is an imperfect father, just as Beth is an imperfect mother). But we don't stop believing it just because we haven't seen Rio engage with Marcus since 3.01. People want to see more Rio & Marcus, but they don't start to question what type of father he is or whether he loves his son because of the lack of seeing those interactions on-screen. Those scenes establish that fact, and the fact holds, and there's an understanding—even if reluctant—that those scenes may not be part of the main storyline or Rio's character arc.

Hell, people even disagree how good of a father Dean is, but I don't see much doubt that he loves his children.

Why is the same not true of Beth?

We see Beth enter crime because she wants to protect her children. We see that before that, her entire life was her children. Dean explicitly tells her that he would "never tell her how to raise the kids," so we know all responsibilities outside of fun fall on her shoulders. Dean doesn't know basic facts about his children's schedules; Beth does it all.

We also see scenes of her hugging her children (1.04), crawling into bed to cuddle with them (2.03), rubbing their backs after nightmares (2.06), playing games with them (2.07), helping them with school projects (3.11), cooking for them. We see her worry about them and frantically try to knit an entire blanket to make up for one lost. We see and share stories with them (like she did with Rhea).

So why do we doubt that she loves her children?

Why don't we understand that, like Rio, her relationship with her children is just not part of Beth's arc the way that it is with Annie and Ruby—and even Annie and Ruby's relationship with their children took a backseat when it wasn't the main part of their storyline?

Harry and Sara have barely been in Season 4 because Ruby's storyline is examining her relationship with Stan right now, whereas before it was examining her relationship with her family broadly (she worried her family discovering the truth and what kind of role model she was being). Ben was hardly in Season 3 when Annie's arc was about her individual growth in therapy, but he featured heavily in Season 1 and 2 as Annie was fighting for custody and Ben was coming close to discovering the truth about her actions.

In the same episode where Beth allowed her son to eat ice cream and drink Coke for breakfast (trying to be "fun mom" and spoil him after he'd broken his arm and she couldn't be with him in the hospital—not exactly the worst crime of motherhood), Ruby and Stan taught Sara accounting through having her calculate their profits in their illegal fake purse scheme and Ben easily bought the story of his mother running off to Mackinaw with a stranger because he thinks of his her as irresponsible and selfish. They're all flawed as mothers and they all make unique choices based on their own beliefs and values and situation at the time. Beth may be least like the type of mother I had or least like the type of mother I want to be, but I still see why she does what she does and I still see that is motivated by a love for her children... even if that's not the only thing motivating her.

Beth's arc over all four seasons has been about struggling to figure out who she is and who she wants to be outside of being a wife and mother. It's all she's been since she raised Annie and got married and had children of her own, and the show established that through Annie telling her she's like a "Stepford wife without a pulse," Dean reminding her she'd never held a job in her adult life, and the repeated emphasis on how little Dean knows about parenting his own children, from not knowing who needs a booster seat to Beth having to make him an elaborate calendar to Dean struggling to even make sure milk is in the house so his children can eat breakfast.

Beth discovered that what made her feel good outside of her regular duties as wife and mother—which she still struggles to try and maintain!—is crime. Because of that, she's experimented with putting herself and her own wants and needs before everyone else's for the first time in her life. She's being selfish and she's also been put into sometimes impossible situations where she has to choose between crime and her family. Season 4 in particular has shown how she's caught in the middle; she wants to choose crime, but when it comes down to it, she chooses her family and gets Rio arrested. She wants to choose her family, but when it comes down to it, she's stuck in Canada during a family emergency and she puts the strip club in her own name, planting roots in Detroit while giving up the supposed goal of running off to Nevada.

Yes, Beth has made mistakes—big ones. She regularly makes choices I wouldn't make as a parent all the time. But I empathize with a story about a woman who has never put herself first doing it for the first time, just as I empathize with her children who struggle to adjust to the new normal where their mother isn't available every waking second of the day to attend to their needs.

She got into crime for her kids. She stayed in it for herself (just as Rio has). Again—I disagree with many of the choices of all the parents in the show. All of them are doing bad things because they all actively choose to participate in crime, and I don't think that should be entirely divorced from evaluating them as parents and role models.

The "lover's spat" is Rio making an assumption based on Nick telling Rio that he's "not making things easy for me," to which Rio answers, smugly, "Nope." Rio knows what Beth is like and because Nick has come to Rio in response to Beth being upset, Rio knows that Beth caused trouble—specifically because Nick references the "position you put me in," meaning Beth asked for a favor, one that Nick couldn't easily deliver on like he did the parking ticket.

Rio's mad for a few reasons. I do believe he is legitimately mad about Beth losing the money, which is what he tells her and what he tells Nick. But we know it's not just that, and that's not the reason he "kidnapped" Annie. As @mego42 points out, Rio has dialogue for each of his baskets, and he makes all of them except when he says he "did what he had to do," suggesting he's rattled and fudging the truth.

He's making it appear as a detached, logical decision about his money—and he does care about his money—but that's not driving his decision-making. Rio was visibly affected in 4.11 by Beth's "guardian angel" comment and the fact that he brings it up again, referencing Beth and Nick "planting trees or doing whatever the hell you're doing," suggests that he's bothered by them spending time together and specifically bothered by not knowing what they are up to. Then he adds what is supposed to be a playful jab about them being "lovers" and "fighting"—which, when coupled with him being smug about the fact he caused it with his "nope" line—suggests that he's really Feeling All Sorts of Things about this developing relationship, even as he pretends that he's unphased.

Yeah, it sounds like it, anon! I imagine Beth has Nick's number from their gardening initiative.

After failing to negotiate with Rio (and with Rio implying that Annie would be harmed, although he never truly seemed to have any real plans for her, though Mick let Annie worry about the same prospect) Beth's hands were pretty tied. She was feeling powerless and panicked and went to the one person she thought had power to fix the situation without implicating herself, Annie, and Ruby (which—fair. At this point, Beth's seen Rio wriggle out of enough consequences with the law).

There are a few things that strike me as interesting, though.

Nick reverts to calling her "Beth"

Beth's wearing her all-black crime ensemble in the scene

Nick never offers to (and Beth never asks) for Nick to appeal to Rio. He only goes the route of calling the police, and Beth stops him from doing so. Not only does Nick pretend he doesn't have leverage over Rio here, he doesn't actually pull rank with Rio in the alleyway, either. Sure, he criticizes Rio for failing to see the big picture, but ultimately he does nothing.

Rio refers to Nick and Beth as "lovers" and Nick says he was "making progress" with Beth and that Rio's kidnapping of Annie disrupted the flow—but it's somewhat unclear whether Nick was teasing that he messed up Nick's attempt to get closer to Beth personally, or whether Rio's in the know about some way that Nick plans to use Beth professionally.

Nick tells Rio to "keep his eye on the ball," which implies that there's a game afoot and that Rio's getting distracted from the goal. At the end of the scene, Nick pointedly leaves with the ball, refusing to return it to Rio. Symbolically, he's now in control of the game.

This seems further confirmed when he smiles when Beth comes to him asking for career advice. At this point, it seems like his goal is to drive a wedge between Beth and Rio in order to separate them. However, it's possible something bigger is at play. It's unclear as of yet how Nick would benefit by Beth entering politics.

He was being mean but I think he was also unknowingly revealing his hand. By even suggesting that Annie was worth the price of all the money they lost—which was a significant amount, an entire cooler's full, maybe even as much or more than Rio charged Beth to spare her life—

—he was putting a value on her that she doesn't really have to his operation. This is confirmed when Annie tries desperately to convince Mick that she's necessary and he tells her, "You know who the really important people are? The ones who don't have to tell you how important they are."

Basically, by even offering a deal in exchange for Annie, it further signified how many exceptions Rio was making for Beth. He certainly didn't offer the same opportunity for Lucy, and the benefits of her knowledge and expertise were unique and worth far more to Rio than Annie's. Nor did he offer a similar grace to Eddie, who had been a loyal member of his crew that hadn't done half of the things to him which Annie has been associated with, including getting him arrested, dumping his drugs, stealing from him, and hiring a hitman.

I did know she was Anya from Buffy, mostly because at the exact moment she appeared on screen my entire dash was ANYA ????? hahaha. I haven't seen Buffy though!