'The Sinner' Season 3 Episode 3 Review: Jamie's despair and nihilism hints at a planned double suicide
Spoiler alert for Season 3, Episode 3 titled 'Part III'
That Jamie Burns knows he's an attractive male with considerable grip over people he comes across in his day to day life is no secret. It's also no secret that he very much watched his old college friend slash possible lover die from a car crash, deliberately not alerting 911 in time to save his life. But the most recent third episode of 'The Sinner' Season 3 also paints Jamie in such dark hues of self-destructive tendencies and manipulation that even Harry Ambrose's recurring visits to Sonya's estate and his legitimate suspicion about the painter can't distract us from it.
The episode, entitled 'Part III' kicks off with Jamie once again deliberating burning his palm on the oven. Leela Burns entering the kitchen stops him this time, but it also manages to trigger Jamie's deep-rooted sense of despair and nihilism. His feelings, however, find themselves directed at the prospect of bringing a child to this messed up world and so very conveniently when Leela is just days from giving birth. Jamie talks about things he's trying to process, given Nick Haas's 'mysterious' death - something that makes him go on a rant about his evident existential dread, somehow triggered by the fact that his wife is about to give birth to a baby.
Jamie talks about the futility of life and how selfish and cruel it is to bring a new life into the mess that is the world we live in. When Leela confronts him asking about his dubiousness over having a baby, she also insists this is a sense of privilege that Jamie is coming from, because suddenly he has somehow realized having a baby would be a bad thing. Leela also asserts the tribulations her father went through when he decided he couldn't afford to raise Leela and this somehow makes Jamie instantaneously defensive, as he ends up saying what could be the most relevant line in the contemporary pop-culture scene: "I don't get to have a moment just 'cause I'm a white man?"
When not expressing his newfound doubts over having a baby, Jamie spends the rest of his time divided between reminiscing about Nick digging the grave in Sonya's estate, aggressively trying to impose and manipulate his high school protege with nihilism and of course - trying to walk into full traffic because he is just self-destructive like that. But these patterns in Jamie's behavior, especially the fact that he keeps thinking back to Nick digging the grave even as Leela goes into labor and throughout her birthing process also could hint back to Ambrose's theory about Nick's psychological grasp on Jamie. Even from beyond the grave, Nick's hold on Jamie is only getting stronger, if such a thing actually exists.
The fact that Jamie is also immediately resorting to imagining how to harm people who have caused him the slightest incovenience during the day is quite telling; his former college roommate attesting to Ambrose that Jamie would often sit on the floor and stare at the wall for hours is also concerning. It's evident that Jamie and Nick go way back, thus further stressing the possibility of this 'hold' being a long-term one, effectively explaining his sudden change of mood and opinions on daily life with Nick's murder. But could this suspected hold also be the reason why Jamie decided to let Nick die because he was tired of being enslaved to the then sinister man's evil demands?
Apart from Jamie's suicidal tendencies, we are also plagued with the endless possibilities of this supposed 'hold' that Nick continues to have on Jamie, who even gets escorted to the police station for trying to kill himself. To the rest of the world, it might look like a new father's signs of stress following the sudden death of an old friend, but to those who know better, he self admittedly also feels 'trapped' by the fact that they are alive. Could this all be the consequential trauma from a premeditated double suicide for reasons unknown? Did Jamie, even after telling Nick he doesn't feel the same way anymore, decide to go ahead with their plans of dying together in a fit of a trance?
That's the question 'Part III' conveniently chooses to delay answering and as suspicions surrounding Sonya get heightened, what the third episode really asks is whether she was a crucial third element in the mystery of Nick and Jamie. Sonya offering Ambrose a thank you coffee in the morning after he spent the night on her patio as security might make her look like an unsuspicious member of the plot, but our beloved detective isn't convinced. He has seen too many kind faces committing the most brutal of crimes in the past to believe this artsy hippie painter's claims of not knowing why a random man died on her property. And thus the third episode brings us back to where we started connecting the dots and hooking the strings on the metaphorical board of suspects because three episodes in and all we know is that Jamie possibly killed a man who tried to manipulate him too hard and is now doing the same to those surrounding him.
'The Sinner' Season 3 airs on Thursdays at 10 pm only on USA Network.