Harper’s Island has come up before, but I had a chance this past week to watch it for myself for the first time. It was a 13-epsiode limited series that aired in 2009 about a group of wedding guests on a secluded island who get picked off one by one by a rampaging killer.

It’s a fun slasher series and mystery so I want to be as ambiguous as possible in my description. It’s relevant to our interests because of one of the characters has a surprise parentage (that they are aware of) and ends up being the half-sibling of one of the other characters. Although the series is not very overt with the incestuous aspect, there is very clearly an obsession there, and there are subtle hints that the character in question seeks a romantic relationship.

The series is good enough and the relevant characters/relationship are prominent enough (though its true nature you don’t learn until near the end) that I do think it’s worth watching for the incest as long as you know in advance that it’s not exactly shippy. With the full truth on the table about everything, it’s definitely one-sided, though whose to say if things had been (very) different.

I’ll get into the spoilers now, but if you think you might watch the series I recommend you avoiding them. After I first learned about the incest in Harper’s Island I waited several years to watch it until I had forgotten the details I had learned, and I’m glad that I did.

For those interested in the full story: the groom of the wedding is Henry, and he is one of the mainest of main characters along with Abby, who is his best friend. The murders are believed to be perpetrated by a man named Wakefield, who massacred a group of people on the island (where Abby grew up and Henry spent summers) some years earlier. However, it is eventually revealed that Wakefield had a child with Abby’s mother, and that this child is helping Wakefield with this new string of killings. It turns out that Henry is that child, making Henry Abby’s half-brother. Henry found this out a year after the earlier murders, and we learn this entire wedding was just a ruse to bring Abby back to the island.

Wakefield taught Henry that he needed to kill everything that was holding him back in order to free himself, and is goading him on to kill Abby too (nearly everyone else is dead at this point), but instead Henry kills his father and abducts Abby. He reveals to Abby that this was all about her, and he just wants them to live alone together forever, something she had said she wished when they were children. Henry says he had to kill everyone else because they were in the way. He has made sure that the mainland thinks they are both dead.

Inevitably Abby escapes Henry, and kills him in doing so, and gets away with her love interest, who Henry had saved in order to frame. Interestingly, she might not have been able to get away if he hadn’t tossed his weapon away to show her that he didn’t intend to hurt her. I don’t have any major complaints about how any of this played out, only that for someone who managed to live normally his entire life, have best friends and a fiancee, and hide this secret the entire time on the island, it’s hard to imagine that he could be so clueless about how Abby would react. Doesn’t it always seem like when surprise killers are revealed - ones who are obsessed with something - their IQ always drops dramatically after the reveal. But it wasn’t as bad here as it sometimes is.

So, I will say a few things about Abby’s side. Henry was sympathetic/a party to the deaths of both of her parents and very recently her father, not to mention dozens of other people some of who Henry killed himself including his adopted brother and fiancee, so she doesn’t have a lot of fuel to feel any sympathy for him. She does seem quite shocked after he dies when she stabs him. They had been best friends their entire lives and he was her brother, and I think she does feel something when he dies and you can see that. Also, it doesn’t seem like Henry ever attempted a romantic relationship with her before, so we don’t know how she might have reacted while he was in his “prime”. Her love interest, the one she survived with at the end, was basically the best guy ever, and yet she never said goodbye and never called him after she left the island, and was in no hurry to resume things with him when she came back for the wedding. I do ship it so I don’t want to attack the relationship - it’s not like I think she should be with homicidal maniac Henry instead, but I do think she treated her love interest really badly and I wonder if there might have been room for the fake Henry, the Henry that he showed the world, in there. I did ship Henry and Abby in the first few episodes and was disappointed when I realized they weren’t love interests. And then it turned out that they kind of were!

As for the subtle hints I mentioned. Obviously Henry orchestrating everything to get her to the island and killing everyone except Abby and being obsessed with her and wanting the two of them to be together forever is HIGHLY suggestive, but if he was in some kind of arrested development, trying to relive their happiness together as children, he might not necessarily want to be with her romantically, but I think he did. He had to let Abby say goodbye to her love interest, Jimmy, because that was what Jimmy demanded in exchange for signing the fake confession, and Henry got upset when they start kissing and ripped them apart. He did say, “I love you” to her, twice. When Abby mentions that they are brother and sister, Henry basically says that it doesn’t matter and that everyone who knows is dead. Why would they need to keep it secret unless they were a couple? It felt like that moment was a definite nod to the incest but it was brushed over so quickly on purpose. Henry also put her into her bed in her underwear after knocking her unconscious. I don’t think he did anything that might be considered a violation but there was definitely a *weirdness*/uncomfortableness for her to be semi-undressed. The other thing is that Henry had his fiancee, Trish. He tells Wakefield that killing Trish was “harder than the others”. (And at the beginning I noted that it seemed like they were having sex all the time.) My point is, Henry had a woman to be with who loved him and who he almost-loved. He wanted Abby instead. He wanted to replace his romantic/sexual relationship with Trish with a relationship with Abby so it would make sense if he wanted that relationship to romantic/sexual as well.

I think that’s about all I have to say. I want to thank everyone who recommended the series back in the day. I really enjoyed watching it.