Bookish Season 1 Episode 5 Review: Such Devoted Sisters, Part 1

On Bookish Season 1 Episode 5, “Such Devoted Sisters, Part 1,” a pair of princesses, a captain, several hotel staff, and many of our characters walk into a bar. One does not walk out again.

After learning the truth about Gabriel, Trottie, and his own father, Jack has run off to new employment as bodyguard to a pair of princesses forced to flee their homeland. They all wind up in a bar with Trottie and Victor, a man she’s on a date with.

Victor is suddenly poisoned to death. Book arrives to find his wife held for questioning. His own inquiries reveal the princesses switched Victor’s drink for one of theirs. They also have another sister who defected to their homeland’s new politics.

Clear-cut political motive? Not really. There’s also a maid who hates Victor (he made a pass at her) but hates the princesses even more. Everyone spends the night at the hotel the bar is at, creepily underscored by flickering electricity.

The maid’s boyfriend, the bartender, is seemingly arrested as Book peruses a book from the princesses’ homeland. Yet shots still ring out during the night. Also, we see more tragic details of just how intimate Gabirel and Jack’s father really were.

For a show set in the fragile political spectrum of the years after a world war, this potential level of international scandal is appropriate as the final one of the season. I have a feeling we’re only getting a hint of the potential motives at play.

That said, it’s very possible we’ll see the more mundane choice of Victor being the actual target. He’s the kind of victim nobody’s going to be too broken up over. Did the sisters switch his glass knowingly? Or this comeuppance from somewhere else?

I am grateful that the point of Trottie being a suspect was more downplayed than the promos suggested. For now, she seems to have been eliminated as a suspect, but I won’t let my guard down for her or Jack just yet.

Of course, there’s still plenty of tension in the current and former ranks of the Book’s Books staff. I never expected Jack to take the news well, particularly when it came to his father, but it’s sobering to see just how deep a trench has grown.

I don’t really blame him, but for the moment, I have more sympathy for the Books, who are clearly desperate to give the younger man the answers he needs but doesn’t currently want to hear. It’s not going to change the truth either way.

I did love getting to see more into just how their messy but very loving “arrangement” works.  On that note, the scene of Gabriel and Jack’s father being forced apart as the Nazi reign began is heartbreaking, especially given the other man’s likely fate.

I have no guesses as to either who is guilty or where our characters will wind up, whether or not we get more seasons. I’m largely confident everyone we like will survive, but am less sure about being granted a real happy ending in these dark days. 

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Bookish airs Sundays at 10/9c on PBS.

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