Midnight, Texas Season 1, Episode 4 Recap: Why Are You Following Me?

If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Tonight, we open on a morally bankrupt young man who just stole and pawned his daddy’s Rolex. The West Texas highway is flowing beneath his wheels and he has not a care in the world. So when he spots a blonde woman who looks a lot like Miranda Lambert sitting on the side of the road (because in Texas there are picnic tables covered in red checkered cloths in the middle of nowhere, and we like to stage them without shade), he pulls over to say howdy. This young man, whose shirt is unbuttoned all the way down to his navel, opens his car door and tells her he won’t take no for an answer. So naturally, she gets in, they pull over to neck, and she eats him alive. Oh, so that’s what the final scene of episode 3 was about.

Okay, now back to the writers’ favourite way to begin episodes: Manfred (François Arnaud) and Creek (Sarah Ramos) are in the shower. She’s still insisting their relationship is a "friends with benefits" thing, he wants to be her boyfriend, and neither of them can stop talking about her dad. It is probably time to get your own apartment, Creek.

Bobo (Dylan Bruce) hatches a plan to bust the Sons of Lucifer because the cops aren’t doing it quickly enough for him — despite Fiji (Parisa Fitz-Henley) urging him not to. But when he comes home and finds a swastika painted on his wall and his house ransacked, there’s no stopping him. Oh yeah, and the Rolex-pawner just happened to sell his daddy’s watch to Bobo, who drags Manfred into the mix to find him, and that’s how the Midnight gang gets involved in yet another mess. Anyone else getting Scooby vibes?

The show is still hawking that “Fiji has a crush on Bobo” storyline, so ladies here’s a dating tip from Olivia (Arielle Kebbel): Men don’t like peasant skirts, so put on a little black dress and stiletto heels. Hey, did anyone ever think that if Bobo doesn’t like how Fiji dresses, maybe he’s not the right dude for her? Just me? Cool, cool. Bobo stands her up anyway, because of swastika rage and she hangs out at home talking to her cat. Literally, because someone on the writing team is still trying to make this talking cat happen.

Olivia, meanwhile, is back in Alias mode while she performs some quick corporate espionage, taking out an embezzler. It’s the first look we’ve gotten at her actual work life. She seems to be an assassin for hire, with sensibilities that lie closer to vigilante than Robin Hood-esque. She clocks a smarmy looking dude on her tail, so she drugs him and kidnaps him. As you do. She drives him back to Midnight and Lemuel (Peter Mensah) casually unloads the body from the stolen car like NBD. Seriously, most unconventional couple on TV but legit partners. Olivia then tortures the guy for information, only to find out that her father hired him to follow her. When the guy tells her that her dad just wants to know if she’s okay, she loses it and has to have Lemuel drain her energy so she can regain her composure.

Thanks to a hot tip from the ghost of the Rolex dude, Manfred goes looking for a blonde, starting at a strip club. While he’s hunting up all the wrong trees, she’s about to eat another guy’s face in a rest stop somewhere in West Texas. It’s nightfall by the time Manfred stumbles on the now-blood Caddy and that rest stop where the beautiful monster is getting cleaned up. Knowing he’s got more in his little basket than he can handle, Manfred rounds up the Midnighters for a City Council meeting about catching monsters. Joe (Jason Lewis) draws up a suspect sketch and Lemuel I.D.s the monster as a succubus. Serious question: why do supernatural shows never do episodes about the succubus’s male counterpart, the incubus? Stop perpetuating the black widow legend, give us more glamour spell spinning men. Anyway, they Wikipedia-ed it, and now they need some dragon’s breath to stop the succubus.

Since dragons aren’t real in this universe (sorry Game of Thrones fans), Fiji concocts a spell to strip the succubus of its glamour. The whole gang gets little squirters of the stuff, including Olivia who needs the break at this point, and they all head down to the local honky tonk to find her. Bobo immediately spots a Sons of Lucifer jacket and splits off to pick a fight with a backroom full of ‘em. Fiji breaks it up and scares the shit out of everyone at the same time, so I guess Bobo’s message to leave him alone finally got passed on.

Creek spots her little brother Connor (John-Paul Howard) trying to use a fake I.D. to get into the bar. While she’s giving him a big sis talk about adulting in the parking lot, she spots the succubus — or rather, spots her spider web tattoo. One spritz of that spray and her teeth start showing, so Lemuel sprints her away from the public. You know the way the succubus story works, right? Once their false outer beauty comes off, they’re always a hideous old crone. Here is why we need to leave this trope alone: it reinforces the age-old myth that youth is sexually desirable while age is not, plus it creates some false fear about how women are always trying to swindle men. Playing right into that trope, the succubus starts chasing Connor through the woods. While she’s going on, yet again, about how all men are bad and deserve to be killed so she can eat them, Manfred turns a propane tank into a flame thrower and kills her.

In the end, Olivia lets that guy she was torturing go, but not before disabusing him of the notion that her dad misses her. She tells him that her father abandoned her as a child and her stepmother sold her as a sex slave. She also asks him to relay a message: If he sends anyone else, they’ll die. She means it — she tells Lemuel that all those men who raped her as a girl are dead.

Creek might be coming around to Manfred’s boyfriend tendencies, now that he’s saved her family’s life — twice.

Bobo and Fiji share a kiss, and it all feels just a little too pat as an ending.