We swooned like giddy schoolgirls the second Rio (played by Manny Montana) waltzed on to the screen in Good Girls with his threats and homicidal tendencies that he didn’t follow through with because Beth (Christina Hendricks) sold him on her and her fellow good girls’ (Retta and Mae Whitman) worth, giving us the ultra-sexy bad boy who did bad things that we didn’t have to witness (instead of an ultra-volatile psychopath who shed blood smack-dab before our very eyes), so it was all good.
Then he shot Dean (Matthew Lillard) and we realized he was a little more serious than we thought.
But Dean lived. So it was fine.
And Beth agreed. Her fantasies kept surmounting and her long-anticipated affair with Rio finally happened and we were oh. so. thrilled. But then he became such a pain in the ass that she shot him and stupidly thought she was rid of him for good.
Uh huh. No such thing.
A guy like Rio doesn’t stay dead just because some housewife fires a few rounds into him. So our hearts fluttered because our Rio was ALIVE! And he could come back into Beth’s arms and their love-hate thingamajig could pick up where it left off.
Right?
Wrong.
Rio has the good girls (and us!) scared senseless, his interactions with Beth make us feel weirdly self-conscious, and the sexual tension is GONE. But luckily he’s not killing Beth or trying. Dean did tell Beth that Rio hasn’t killed her because he won’t kill what he loves, and we really really wanted to believe that was true. But Beth’s point about how it’s not her that Rio loves, it’s money that Rio loves, and she’s his cash flow, and that’s what’s keeping her safe, was an unwelcome revelation that we wanted Beth to take back. Because we want Rio to love Beth dammit! But we also want the old Rio back. We want the less scary Rio with the dreamy eyes that put us in full meltdown mode as our hearts fluttered and we forgot what we were doing for a sec.
Apparently Beth’s attempt to murder him in cold blood has changed him. Oops?
(Although I still think Beth is only partly right about the whole love thing and Dean kinda knows what’s up.)
The past few episodes, however, have been unnerving. Rio’s evil side has gotten real. And no, not in the grouchy, demanding, threatening kinda way that we’re used to, but in the “Rio really does kill people!” kinda way that we’re so not used to and would very much like to not get used to.
When Beth tricks Lucy (Charlyne Yi), her graphic-design-genius coworker friend, into helping the good girls make a passable Alexander Hamilton, she doesn’t realize that the end result is going to be a Rio-ordered bullet into Lucy’s head. And okay, Rio’s a bad guy and bad guys do bad things (like kill people), but they aren’t allowed to kill people like Lucy, who we were hoping would stick around as a series regular with her weird ramen noodle setup and mushy boyfriend (Wesam Keesh) who shopped for her feminine hygiene products and used pet names that made us cringe. (And she had that cute bird.)
And then Rio stole Beth’s furniture. What a way to arrive home with your husband and four children (and did they have that new pet snake with them?). That was typical Rio behavior, but the glaring warning that came with it gave us goose bumps now that we have that memory of his henchman (Carlos Aviles) killing Lucy.
And now Leslie (David Hornsby)! Okay, so Leslie has been problematic since day one. He’s creepy and racist and a little bit of a tattletale. He also might be a rapist. But he’s too pathetic not to feel sorry for when Rio’s guys are hauling him off kicking and screaming in a body bag. Not that we’ll miss him even a little bit, but couldn’t they just let him go to Canada?
So this is Rio now. He kills adorable Asian girls and whiny grandma’s boys.
We don’t love him anymore. I repeat: we don’t love Rio. Whether or not we change our minds later is beside the point. Right now, we wish Lucy’s boyfriend had shot him instead of wetting his pants.
(But yes, we’ll check back in later with an update on our willpower.)
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