‘Murdaugh: Death In The Family’ Episode 6 recap: “June 7th”

“I got a hearing on Thursday about opening up my financial records for the civil suit,” Alex tells his brother Randy early in Murdaugh: Death In The Family Episode 6. “I got Paul’s criminal case, I got everything going on with Daddy, and now a grand jury investigation?” (Yes: state officials are looking at charging Alex and Randolph for their pretty brazen obstruction of justice in the hours and days after Paul’s boat crash, trying to keep the surviving kids and their parents quiet.) “It’s starting to feel like I’m locked in— in a room, and the walls are just getting closer, Randy, they’re getting closer and closer and closer and closer, and I can’t breathe.”

Hey, that’s what I said two episodes ago! It’s so hard to know how to feel right now: I love to be right, but I hate to end up aligned with Alex Murdaugh.

This episode opens on the titular night, showing the moments immediately after the premiere cold open: cops are on the scene, flashing lights on Paul’s and Maggie’s corpses as Alex sobs that it’s bad. Then the scene rolls back a few days to show us how Alex’s closest loved ones, having moved out of the home they shared with him, are thriving. 

Maggie walks on Edisto Beach with her dog, works on plans to redecorate the house, gets rid of old clothes (including her wedding gown, it seems); she’s even changed her name to Margaret on her outgoing voicemail message. When her sister Marian comes to visit and reminds her about the divorce lawyer she recommended, Maggie darkly says, “Murdaughs don’t get divorced.” But, having taken all her family photos down for the painters, she admits she’s not sure if she’ll ever want to hang them again. By June 7th, Maggie is leaving a message at the law firm introducing herself as a new client, and taking off her engagement and wedding rings.

Paul is still seeing Mallory in place of other blonde girls in his eye line, and getting anonymous death threats via text, but otherwise he’s doing well: being a dependable employee to his uncle John Marvin (Patch Darragh); respectfully making the guest bed he’s been using, which I wouldn’t have assumed he even knew how to do after growing up with Gloria; and praying with his uncle and cousin when they hear Randolph’s pneumonia may be bad enough for him to require hospitalization again. 

Okay, yes, amid all this growth Paul also accidentally runs over a dog who’s gotten out of his yard, but Paul takes it straight to an animal hospital, where the dog’s injuries are determined to be minor and the tech can check his microchip and get its owners to come pick him up. The tech tells Paul he did well getting the dog to them as quickly as he did, and Paul seems gratified to be thought of as a responsible citizen who owns up to his mistakes. Knowing how the episode ends makes it all the harder to see how much effort Paul has put into remaking himself from the reckless brat he was back in the series premiere.

At the opposite end of that spectrum is Paul’s father — who, on his own, is crumbling. He’s downing pills. He’s worrying about opening his financial records. And it’s not just his personal finances that have come under question: Jeanne (Monica Wyche), the law firm’s CFO, can’t find a $750,000 check for his client, Mr. Alvarez; she thinks Alex knows what happened to it and isn’t telling them. Alex hasn’t even had a chance to select which mode he’s going to respond in — charming? threatening? lovably absent-minded? — before he gets a call from Randy saying Randolph has been readmitted to the hospital, and everyone seems to be assuming he won’t come back out. As Alex breaks down, Jeanne tells him to forget about the check and hurries out in a fluster.

Randolph’s health crisis continues to prove useful to Alex: by this point, Paul was planning to return to the family home for his laundry (…okay, so a little more growth couldn’t hurt), but it also gives Alex a pretext for guilting Maggie into returning, as if Maggie isn’t already dealing with enough Murdaugh men’s health issues, between scolding a pharmacist for holding up Buster’s eczema medicine (something I would think most 28-year-old men can handle for themselves) and getting Paul compression socks since his high blood pressure has caused foot issues due to bad circulation. 

Before Maggie’s agreed to come back, Alex fronts to Paul as though she has, holding off on going to the hospital with Paul so that all three of them can see Randolph as a family. They kill time by shooting handguns at bottles, the newly enlightened Paul gently questioning Alex about his ongoing painkiller dependency even amid the family’s constantly mounting troubles. “We’ve just gotta do better than we’ve done, be better than we’ve been, you know?” says Paul. “We don’t gotta let it bury us.” Sorry, Paul: more burial talk is probably coming soon.

By the time Maggie makes it back to the family home in Moselle, it’s 8:15 PM and hospital visiting hours are over. Earlier, we saw her — back in her gold freedom sneakers — talking about Randolph and her imminent divorce with the technician giving her a manicure at a nail shop, but from the time Maggie arrives at the house, everything she says and does is a matter of speculation by the show’s writers. Was the real Maggie reluctant to let Alex hug her?

Did the real Alex notice Maggie had taken off her rings? Did she tell him she didn’t plan to move back at the end of summer? Did he promise to go to rehab? That may all be what Alex claims (and is what we see), but since every episode thus far has portrayed Alex as an inveterate liar, what actually happened is anyone’s guess.

What we see after Maggie and Alex’s tense conversation about their marriage is Maggie putting a suitcase in her trunk and saying goodbye to Paul. Their conversation is even more unknowable, since Alex isn’t present, but it’s probably reasonable to suppose the subjects they discussed are the ones we see dramatized: she tells Paul she’s ready to leave the marriage, but that she doesn’t regret it, because it gave her Buster and Paul, who both possess goodness she thinks their father lacks. Brace yourselves, because Maggie’s about to find out how right she is.

Alex opens the front door just then and reminds Paul that he has to go check on Cash, a dog his friend Rogan (Callan Wilson) is boarding in the Murdaughs’ kennel for a few days. Paul invites Maggie to come with him while, inside, Alex turns the TV on and lies down on the couch. Before bringing a dish of food to Cash, Paul gets a text from Meagan Kimbrell, asking for a movie recommendation; Paul obliges with Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born. (Peacock really missed an opportunity here not acquiring the rights to stream the movie, if you ask me, but if you hurry you can catch it on Netflix!) Maggie walks around the side of the kennel to look at a small patch of wildflowers. Paul hears back from Meagan, who doesn’t want to watch something sad. Before he can reply, he looks up and gets shot in the chest, staggers a few steps, gets shot again, and falls. By the time Maggie comes around the building, Paul is face-down on the ground, but Maggie can barely react before she is shot in the leg; in the hand, when she instinctively puts it up to protect herself; and twice more once she’s prone.

Then we cut to Alex, watching TV and eating ice cream with his mother, who has to be reminded who he is. She might not be a reliable witness in court, but he interacts with her nurse, too — he even invites her to join them, perhaps so she can later say what a great guy he is.

When Alex gets back to a quiet house, we see him call Paul and Maggie’s names, then phone Maggie as he drives to the kennel, gasping at the sight of them both lying in pools of blood.

Time passes and we’re back in the scene from the start of the episode. Alex tells a cop about Paul’s boat accident and the death threats he’d been receiving over it. “I know that that’s what this is,” he sobs. Personally, I’m a lot less certain.

Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV co-founder Tara Ariano has had bylines in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Salon, Mel Magazine, Collider, and The Awl, among others. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great, Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), Listen To Sassy, and The Sweet Smell Of Succession. She’s also the co-author, with Sarah D. Bunting, of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She lives in Austin.