Making Sense of the Confusing Boomer Situation on NBC's 'Good Girls'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | May 21, 2019 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | May 21, 2019 |

NBC’s Good Girls heads into its season finale on Sunday, and at this point, the whole season is a big ball of knots, but knowing how network television works, someone will pull one string and it will all magically un-knot itself. There are a lot of balls up in the air. The Feds know they’re counterfeiting; Stan’s lawyer is speaking to the Feds, who have Stan dead-to-rights and he’s about to cop a plea; Annie’s undercover FBI agent boyfriend, Noah, knows everything; Beth’s marriage has fallen apart; and Rio, uh, he’s still playing it cool, as always.

One of the most interesting and yet confusing turns this season of Good Girls, however, is the fate of Boomer (David Hornsby), Annie’s former manager/attempted rapist/Mary Pat’s former boyfriend/actual rapist/dead body/guy living in his grandmother’s attic.

Recall that, back in episode three of this season, Mary Pat — who was forcibly engaged to Boomer in order to protect her secrets — is raped by Boomer after she tells him to leave. The next morning, Mary Pat takes the kids and tries to sneak away but accidentally backs over Boomer. She wraps him in tarp, and she tells Beth and Company that she disposed of his body in her meat freezer.

Beth and Company get rid of the body, which finds its way to a landfill, where Rio picks it up and begins cutting off pieces of it and sending it to Beth in order to blackmail Beth into getting back in the business. Beth then endeavors to find the corpse, which Annie successfully does. Beth buries it in her backyard, the dog digs it up, and we discover it wasn’t Boomer, after all. It was Jeff, Mary Pat’s dead husband. He’d suffered a heart attack, and instead of reporting the death, Mary Pat cuts him up and puts him in her meat freezer so that she can continue to collect his disability benefits. Beth and Company thus realize that Boomer must still be alive, and Annie tracks him down to the attic of Boomer’s grandmother.

I have so many questions. For instance:

— Does this mean that Mary Pat knew that Boomer wasn’t dead, but still exploited the situation to get Beth and Company to dispose of the corpse of her dead husband? That’s ice cold.

— We know that Boomer was taking advantage of his grandmother, stealing her money and not paying any of her bills, even the rent. Why did Marion take him back and stash him away in her attic?

— Why did Boomer hide? At the time, he was under FBI protection. When Mary Pat accidentally ran over him, why did he run away and hide in his grandmother’s basement instead of simply going to the feds and telling them everything? Unless he was afraid he’d be outed for rape.

— Rio removed body parts from the corpse. In doing so, did he not know that it wasn’t Boomer, but another guy? Or did he just not care?

— In episode 5, Mary Pat lies and tells FBI Agent Turner that it was Beth and Company who backed over Boomer, killed him, chopped up his body, and hid him. Why would she do this if she knew that Boomer wasn’t dead and still out there somewhere, capable of undoing her story?

— Here, however, is the most confusing part: Back in episode three, after Beth, Annie, and Ruby toss the corpse into a dumpster, they hear a phone ring from inside the bag holding the corpse. They presumably unwrap the body enough to retrieve the phone. How did they not notice that it wasn’t Boomer? Also, why was Boomer’s phone in with the corpse of Jeff? (We know that it was Boomer’s phone because when Annie retrieved it, the phone kept receiving calls from Boomer’s grandmother, Marion).

Initially, I thought this was probably a continuity error. Perhaps the writers decided to kill off Boomer in episode 3 but thought it would be fun to bring him back in episode 12. The writers, therefore, had to essentially rewrite episode three to reveal that Boomer escaped, but in doing so, the writers forgot about the phone in the bag with the corpse.

Not true. The writers actually planted Jeff’s death way back in episode four. When FBI Agent Turner visits Mary Pat’s house to talk to her about the disappearance of Boomer, Mary Pat’s kid keeps interrupting, asking for a popsicle. Finally, Mary Pat says, “Honey, they’re probably in the freezer.” Her kid responds, “No they’re not. You took them away when you put Daddy in there!” The kids knew their father, Jeff, was in the freezer the whole time.

In other words, it’s not a continuity error. After Mary Pat ran over Boomer, and after Boomer escaped, Mary Pat must have put Boomer’s phone in the bag with her former husband’s corpse. Why? I have no idea, and that might be sloppy writing that the script supervisor should have cleaned up. But otherwise, it kind of tracks, save for Boomer’s decision to hide in his grandmother’s basement instead of immediately running to the feds, as well as the story Mary Pat made up and told Agent Turner about Beth and Co. killing a guy who isn’t dead.

Either way, I suspect that FBI Agent Turner will discover that Boomer is still alive in the finale, which will end his investigation into murder … for now. He does still seem to have them dead to rights on counterfeiting unless Noah helps out in that regard.