Sterling Point, Season 1, Episode 3 Review: What Ramona Was Willing to Let Go Of (and What Annie Couldn’t)

Annie wakes up to hammering at what is, by New York standards, an offensively early hour. Though, if you live in the city, the noise never really stops. She finds Ramona balanced on the tallest ladder I have ever personally witnessed on this show, working on the roof before the sun’s fully committed to the day. That is definitely way too early in the summer.

There’s something almost funny about how disoriented Annie looks by the quiet of Sterling Point – as she was raised on sirens and delivery trucks, genuinely thrown by a morning that only has one loud thing happening in it. Ramona’s winterizing the cottage, as it turns out, because she wants to live there year-round now instead of splitting her time between the island and wherever they wintered a few hours away. It’s a small detail, but it says a lot about what the cottage and the island mean to her. Ramona isn’t just inheriting a house. She’s choosing, deliberately, to root herself in the one place that still has her grandfather’s fingerprints on it.

I just wonder if she’ll feel the same once she realizes that she owns the cottage with Connor and Annie.

OFFERINGS

Annie offers to help, and Ramona respond as she knows how emotionally adjacent — by finding her a task that requires zero actual conversation. She asks Annie if she knows how to use a caulking gun, to which you can tell that Annie has clearly never held in her life. Annie answers the only way she knows how – she deflects with a joke about not trusting her own arms, which, fair, some of us were also not built for manual labor. What Ramona actually needs help with is smaller and heavier than home repair: she wants to clear out a box of Goldie’s old things.

Their grandfather never threw away anything and she’s tired of seeing it. Annie, who has never once in her life had anything that belonged to her mother, opens that box like it’s a treasure chest – a dress, a Collie lamp, a mixtape, all suddenly the most important objects on earth. It’s a quietly devastating contrast dressed up as a chore: one sister needs distance from all this stuff, and the other would give almost anything to keep even a fraction of it.

AN OFFER AND A SECRET

At the docks, Ellis does something I don’t fully understand and, honestly, I want to understand. Ellis seems so good and pure so what he does – it doesn’t make sense. At his family’s shop, he quietly overcharges a customer and stashes the extra cash in a tackle box that’s clearly not for tackle and it is filled with cash. He is, by every other measure, the most wholesome person in this entire ensemble, so either he’s saving for something he can’t say out loud yet, or this show is about to reveal a much more complicated Ellis than the one we’ve fallen for so far. I don’t love not knowing and I don’t hate it.

I love the mystery of it all.

Ellis offers Annie a ride to the mainland, and the second he actually sees what’s in the donation box – the lamp especially – Annie admits she can’t go through with it. She asks him to just hold onto her mother’s things instead, since bringing them back to the cottage isn’t an option and letting them go to strangers isn’t either. It’s a small, telling compromise: she can’t keep the box, and she can’t lose it, so she finds someone gentle enough to be trusted with the in-between.

THRIFTING

But then why go to the thrift store? She needs a tape player for the mixtape she found. There’s a genuinely funny beat where Annie wonders how to charge the tape player, with visible amusement, Ellis cracks a smile, and tells the sweet summer child, you plug it into the wall. I suddenly felt both old and ancient.

Annie, who is technically on a mission to get rid of things, ends up buying the tape player, Ellis a pair of sunglasses and impulse-purchasing a chair for Ramona. For two people tasked with subtraction, they leave with more than they came with, which feels like the most honest thing as most can not manage this feat. This show has offered another safe space for how grief actually works: you try to clear space, and somehow you just keep finding new things worth holding onto.

Rory shows up, as he always seems to, as Ellis is trying to load the chair into his boat. Rory helps, delighted to see Annie, and Ellis goes visibly, quietly tense in a way Rory doesn’t seem to register at all. I don’t think this is a fun love triangle so much as a sad one — Ellis isn’t in an emotional place to compete for anyone’s attention right now, and some part of him seems to already know it.

DON’T DO IT

Annie decides, against every other person’s solid advice, that what Ramona needs is a thank-you party. Ramona is, by her own friend group’s account, deeply antisocial, possibly the only person on this show more antisocial than me, and that’s saying something. Ellis tries gently to warn Annie off the idea. She says she’s going to do it anyway. She invites Rory and the look on Ellis’ face feels like he was slapped and he will be out of place.

The party? It’s a lovely, slightly reckless gesture from someone who still doesn’t fully understand her sister yet, and you can already feel the evening it’s going to become.

Over at Sully’s, Oona is openly flirting with a girl while Ramona watches, visibly bothered and absolutely unwilling to name why. Sully, who seems to be the one person allowed to speak plainly to her, needles her about how “fine” everything apparently is with Annie, and points out that Ramona has just as many unanswered questions about their shared mother as Annie does. They can mutually be there for each other if they just allow each other to hear what the other one is saying. Neither just know how to answer the questions yet. Oona, meanwhile, makes her way over to them and jokes about having “met her wife” again, which is apparently a running bit at this point. It’s a nice reminder that Oona flirts the way other people breathe — constantly, easily, and without much at stake.

THAT IS VERY BLUE

Back at the cottage, Ramona notices the new chair and says something about the loudness of the color. It’s a small, funny moment that Annie has to walk back, explaining she just thought her sister might like it, even mid-purge. It’s a sweet, clumsy attempt at closeness, the kind siblings make with each other regardless of how new or complicated the relationship is. Ramona tries the chair and says it is good, ultimately trying to make her sister feel seen and appreciated.

Annie is out on the patio and presses play on the tape player, expecting music from the mix tape, and gets their mother’s voice instead. I don’t think either actress oversells this moment, and that’s exactly why it lands as hard as it does. These two women who’ve spent the whole series circling the same absence suddenly hearing it speak. Ramona shuts it off almost immediately, tells Annie not to follow her, and dives straight into the lake, swimming the whole way to Oona’s.

There’s something achingly familiar in how easily Ramona and Oona fall back into orbit around each other – but that is what best friends are for. It is not romantic yet, not exactly platonic either, just two people who apparently always know where to find each other when something breaks.

THE TAPE SPILLS SECRETS

Annie, alone on the porch, presses play again. This time she hears her mother say I love you, Joe — and I will go to my grave believing that Joe is Ramona’s biological father. Show writers, please prove me right. When Annie brings the tape to him, Joe is careful, evasive, admitting only that he knew Goldie well, because it’s a small island and everyone knows everyone. He asks to borrow the tape, which I think is both about curiosity and more about wanting one more excuse to sit with a version of his own past he never got to keep.

What he does give Annie is something nobody else on this show has offered her yet: a real, specific memory of her mother. Goldie used to get up before anyone else and canoe alone around the lake, naming every tree she passed like they were old friends. It’s a small, lovely detail, and it does more character work in one sentence than most of the exposition this season has managed — suddenly Annie’s mother isn’t just an absence or a photograph. She’s a woman who liked mornings, liked solitude, liked giving names to things that couldn’t answer back. I understand exactly why Annie needed that.

PROTECTION

Ellis returns just as Joe’s leaving, surprised to find Annie there. Joe exits and Ellis, well he gets Annie telling him that his father and her mother dated in high school. He shrugs it off. There’s an ease between Ellis and Annie that I keep coming back to — not just purely romantic tension, also two people who’ve quietly started seeing each other’s lives a little more clearly by being near each other.

Out on the houseboat, Oona gently reframes the tape for Ramona — not as one more loss, but as proof that Ramona didn’t fully know her mother either, which might make Annie’s arrival feel less like an intrusion and more like a shared excavation. It’s a generous, insightful read, one that I hope that Ramona genuinely hears. What I can’t stop noticing, though, is what is sitting right underneath that friendship: the way Ramona looks at Oona is unmistakably, achingly more than the way Oona looks back. Ramona is quietly begging to be seen. Oona just isn’t looking that hard yet.

WE DON’T HAVE THAT RELATIONSHIP

The next morning, Annie greets a returning Ramona with visible relief and Ramona shuts it down almost instantly, reminding her, not unkindly, that they don’t actually have that kind of relationship. It’s a small, dry correction, and it’s also true, which is what makes it a little funny instead of just cold. They do, carefully, start talking about the tape, about how strange it is to hear a dead woman’s voice. Annie admits she has exactly one memory of Goldie — being scratched on the back — and she doesn’t even know if it’s real. You can watch her hoping it is, quietly, the whole time she says it.

Ramona, deflecting the way she always deflects when things get too tender, mentions she spent the night at Oona’s. She is self-deprecating about not being Oona’s usual type — Oona, apparently, goes for the conventionally beautiful and put-together. Annie’s response, that Ramona looks exactly like their gorgeous mother and is therefore beautiful by definition, is sweet and a little clumsy, and Ramona can’t quite take the compliment gracefully. When Annie asks if she can just touch her arm, Ramona says no, flatly, and Annie takes it in stride. It’s obvious how badly she wants even the smallest physical proof that they’re actually sisters now, not just two strangers sharing a house.

DADDY’S LITTLE GIRL

Back in New York, their dad finally reaches Oliver in Thailand and learns Annie was never actually there, which sends him straight to Connor demanding answers. Connor, cornered, spills everything at once – Canada, the secret grandfather, the island, the secret sister. Their dad reacts exactly like a man discovering his carefully maintained silence has completely collapsed. He also reacts exactly like a father wanting to protect his babygirl. He wants to fly up immediately. Connor, out of character, volunteers to go instead, and the show is not subtle about hinting why. He’s clearly been quietly pricing out the island on his own, and I don’t think it’s out of concern for his sister. We’ve all had ulterior motives, Connor’s just happen to be worth several million dollars.

LET ME HIDE

Predictably, Ramona hides in her room when the second guests start arriving, and just as predictably, Annie can’t stop the party even when she tries. Sully shows up with an excellent charcuterie board. Rory shows up with gifts and friends and, unmistakably, an agenda. He and Annie fall into an easy rhythm – trading childhood Halloween costumes, looking through old photos, Annie noting she genuinely can’t always tell Ramon apart from her mother in pictures, all while wearing the exact dress Ramona wanted to donate, which nobody in this scene seems to clock but me.

Sully checks on Ramona upstairs, gently ribbing her for hiding from a party in her own house, and there’s real affection under the teasing — Sully might be the only person who can tell Ramona the truth without her flinching away from it. She needs people. She’s going to have to figure that out eventually, whether she wants to or not.

A SHIP NAME FOR RORY AND ANNIE PLEASE

Downstairs, Rory and Annie’s flirtation gets genuinely charming — the are you single/are you single back-and-forth is the kind of mutual, low-stakes negotiation that made me smile more than it probably should have. Meanwhile, Ellis is quietly restoring the lamp for Annie, putting real care into something small, and his dad clocks it immediately. Be careful, he tells him — and it’s not about the lamp. It’s a father trying to protect his son from loving someone who might not stay, the way, presumably, someone once didn’t stay for him.

Ramona watches Oona flirt with someone else at her own party and unravels quietly, unable to name the jealousy out loud. She retreats to the dock, and Annie – reading the situation with more clarity than Ramona’s given her credit for – sends Oona down to find her. Down at the water, Oona finally seems to register that Ramona’s feelings aren’t casual, and the silence between them says everything neither of them will. They almost kiss. Someone calls for Oona. The moment slips away again, the same way it always seems to for these two.

Up at the cottage, Rory and Annie’s dry, sarcastic rapport tips into an actual kiss on the porch — and Ellis, arriving at exactly the wrong moment with the finished lamp in his hands, watches it happen. He doesn’t say anything. He just turns around and leaves, his father’s warning clearly louder in his head than it was an hour ago.

SISTERLY BONDING

Once everyone’s gone, Annie goes up to needle Ramona and Ramona ends up needling her about kissing Rory — I saw you kissing Timothée Chalamet, basically — and Annie corrects the record. Rory kissed her first, she kissed back, and it was good, though she’s still baffled by the mixed signals. Annie admits something quietly revealing of her own: she’s never actually felt that way about anyone. It’s a small confession, tucked into a much bigger conversation, and I don’t think the show wants us to skip past it. When Annie gets up to leave her alone for the night, Ramona tells her to stay instead — the two of them finally, genuinely talking, sister to sister, for what feels like the first real time all season.

YOU’VE GOT A BROTHER

And then Connor walks in and announces he wants to sell the island.

Annie never told Ramona that Gordon left the property to all three of them, which means Ramona is finding out, in real time, that the home she’s rebuilding with her own hands technically isn’t just hers. Connor rattling off a $22.7 million valuation like it’s a party trick, with zero awareness of what this place actually means to the person standing in front of him, is a gut-punch precisely because it undoes everything gentle the episode just spent an hour building. Two sisters finally finding their footing, and one careless brother, arriving right on cue, to remind them both how much is still unresolved.