Sterling Point Recap Season 1 Episode 6 ‘I Still Bleed Through My Pants All the Time’
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Nearly 20 years ago, Steven came to the island with a lawyer to take Annie and Connor away from Goldie. Goldie had been unhappy and she no longer wanted the life they had planned in New York. She was also pregnant, after years of trying with Steven and eventually adopting the twins. Steven’s excuse to his baffled children, on why he never told them about their sister Ramona, was that telling them about her would have meant telling them about their mother’s affair, and he did not want them to think of her like that. Life is messy, and Steven made a choice, and now he was back on the island making more choices and leaving a mess, including, on his own face. Steven lost his temper with Joe and tried to go off on him, and Joe casually punched him in the eye. ‘See that’s what happens when you don’t think you’re as weak as you really are.’ Cold. Also, has anyone noticed how Joe has not been verbally acknowledging with anyone that Ramona was his? Joe and Goldie were high school sweethearts, and it looked like they reunited whilst Joe’s wife Kate was away with baby Ellis taking care of her sick mother. That Joe was Ramona’s father seemed a reasonable assumption. But, Joe was kind of being squirrelly about it, and I am putting a pin on this until we get confirmation that was not coming from Denise.
Steven arrived at Muskoka just as Annie was leaving Rory’s house after a night of impulsively sleeping with him. Ellis also happened to be Steven’s transport guy, and so in a morning when Annie was just trying to get out of there after losing her virginity, she had to contend with seeing her father and the guy she had been vibing with. Annie agreed to dinner, when her father tried to give a condensed version of the past, but things went further south when Steven found out Ellis was Joe’s son, and he told Annie she could not hang out with him. Annie, who has found companionship and a semblance of peace with the Sterling Point crew, tearfully told Steven that she could not understand why it was an insane thing for Goldie to come to the island when she was unhappy and wanted to make things better.
Oona invited Annie to come join them at Maple’s talent show, to escape her father. It was a healing trip, with Annie and Ramona bonding as they witnessed how sweet Oona was to Maple, how she tried to make Maple’s first period special. Maple totally arranged having Annie and Ellis share a cabin with her, and her tender question about childhood being over, along with Steven’s recent appearance, triggered some long buried anger in Annie. She went to the now empty hall, followed by Ellis, and she ranted at how mad she was at her dad. ‘Why was it my responsibility to make my childhood a childhood?’ Some of us were just trying to survive absent fathers and narcissistic mothers, and did not even think of having a childhood. Annie was trying to process her memories through the lens of everything she has now learned, and her father was not coming up well in her examination. She wished she could go back and do her childhood differently, so she could be fixed. Ellis gently told her she did not need to be fixed.
I am wary of putting the sole blame on the big bad New York finance guy for this web of tangled emotions. Was it not Goldie who left her marriage and had an affair? Was it not Joe who cheated on his wife whilst she was going through something difficult with her mother? Of course Steven showing up in the middle of the night with a lawyer to take Goldie’s children away from her was terrible, but as things stood, it looked like there was plenty of blame to go around.
Steven, however, earned his villain (esque) crown when the kids arrived back at Gordon’s cabin, happy from their trip, and found Steven, Denise, and Connor inside. Steven told Annie that it was time to go, as though he did not hear his daughter at that dinner, as though she was still a toddler he could take away because he willed it so. Denise acted the chaos agent (and real estate agent, she really wanted to buy the island) and just blurted out that Joe was Ramona’s father. Ramona quickly figured out that Annie and Ellis knew, and she ran off. Oona tried to chase her, but Ramona had already taken the boat and was speeding through the lake.
As hurtful as it was to find out that a guy she has known her whole life was her father, it must have been doubly painful for Ramona to process what must have felt like a betrayal. Ever since Annie learned that Ramona was her sister, she has wanted to hug her, to build that connection that had been denied to them all their lives. It took time for Ramona to get to the same point, but she reached it at the camp. She found herself wishing that she and Annie had the same bond growing up as Oona and Maple. She made Annie a flower crown, similar to the one Oona did for Maple, to belatedly commemorate her first period. They hugged. The gulf of years fell away, and they were sisters. And now, the person to whom she opened her heart hurt her with her silence, with keeping something so fundamentally important from her.
Rating: B+
Strays
🏚️Annie coming home hung over in the morning and laying her head on Ramona’s lap was so sweet.
🏚️Ramona told Oona about her weird insecurity about her breasts. Later, in one of the cabins at camp, they spent the night together, and Ramona took off her shirt. There was a healing quality to the openness of their conversation, their effort to be okay with being vulnerable with each other, and actually seeing them take steps to grow with each other.
🏚️Aw at Sully tearing up whilst listening to Maple sing. Their mother may not be present, but Maple was growing up loved and adored by Oona’s friend group.
🏚️Ellis left Goldie’s tape for Joe, because he thought as the adult, he should be the one to talk to Ramona. Only, it was his mother Kate who found the tape and listened to it. Kate confronted Joe about the affair.
🏚️Ellis to Annie: ‘I can’t even think of one thing I don’t like about you.’ I do not often think of going back to my teens, but this is one of those rare times when I do, if only to view Annie taking one step toward Ellis, and Ellis taking one step toward Annie, through a more youthful lens.
🏚️Annie made sure to tell Ellis that she and Rory were not dating.
🏚️Denise, after Steven asked her to convince his kids to come home: ‘Just explain how socialist taxes work.’ This is extra funny when you remember that Denise told Rory his father has not paid taxes for the past 15 years.
Episode Title: I Still Bleed Through My Pants All the Time
Episode Writer: Raffi Donatich
Episode Director: Andrew Ahn
Original Release Date: August 5, 2026