For every painfully over the next year Dead to Me‘s initial Netflix debut, many fans — myself included — thought Steve Wood (James Marsden), was shot to death by Jen Harding (Christina Applegate). As it turns out, Executive Producer Liz Feldman had a very clever plot twist to hide in his sleeve, and Steve’s real cause of death is slowly but surely revealed throughout season two. It’s quite the doozy if I do say so myself.
In the first place, here’s a quick refresher on the last that we see of the handsome, however, hateable, Steve Wood. In Dead to Me‘s final season, Jen pointing his gun at Steve while fighting with him in the courtyard of his house, and moments later, we see Jen and Judy Hale (Linda Cardellini) looking at your bloody corpse floating in the swimming pool before the screen fades to black. We don’t technically hear a gunshot or see the moment in which he killed her, but, naturally, we assume Jen firearm is the culprit.
Fast forward to the second season’s first episode: while Jen looks back on the security camera footage from that fateful night, we see that she puts the gun in the pocket of his robe for your pool altercation with Steve, instead of shooting him. It is not until episode three that we can take a look at what really happened next.
Although Jen’s story is that she shot Steve in self-defense because he was choking her, the mother of two in reality bludgeons him to death. She asks him to do so when Steve says that she and her late husband, Ted, jumped in front of his car and “wanted to succeed” because she made him miserable. In a fit of rage about her horrible comments, Jen repeatedly bashes Steve on the head with a bird porcelain figurine of one that his youngest son winds found in the bushes and sleep with, nothing less — before you throw your lifeless body in the pool. I told you it was a doozy!
Filled with guilt, Jen reveals all the truth about Steve, the death of Judy in the ninth episode. Of course, Judy, being the giant with the heart of a angel, she is, ends up forgiving her best friend in an effort to start again. What you do not know, that a new start would soon be derailed by a drunken Ben Wood (Steve “semi-identical twin brother, also played by James Marsden), who is moving in Jen’s new car and quickly drives away before they can see you. The Detective Ana Perez says it best when she says chaos follow Judy wherever she goes and can’t wait to get even more of a mess in season three.
