Sterling Point Season 1, Episode 4 Review: Everybody Wants To Keep the Island, Nobody Agrees On Why

Sterling Point is quite complicated and yet so simple at the same time. It is a lot of emotions and a lot of secrets. I feel like we haven’t even scratched the surface of all the secrets. With Connor in Sterling Point now – there are a lot of things that need to be worked out.

Connor immediately does the thing Connor does best: pitches an idea so aggressively unhinged that it loops back around to being kind of good. He wants to turn the island into some kind of multi-season resort deal with Canada’s first Erewhon, and both sisters look at him like he’s lost his mind. I have to admit that buried under the delivery, the actual business logic isn’t bad. Connor wants to make money. You cannot fault a person for wanting money. What he doesn’t seem to register is that neither of his sisters is negotiating from the same starting position he is. For Ramona, this island is the entire architecture of her childhood. For Annie, it’s the first place she’s ever found her mother. Two women valuing memory over margin, and one brother treating the whole thing like a spreadsheet with a nice view.

CONNOR CHALLENGES ANNIE

Connor, to his credit, does call Annie’s bluff and tells her to make her own case, memories over money, right now, no prep time. She bombs it spectacularly, rambling something about fresh squash and freshwater like she’s presenting a farmers market instead of a childhood, and Connor’s deadpan “I can see why you didn’t get into the business program” is the kind of sibling cruelty that would’ve gotten him decked in my house growing up.

Ramona, naturally, delivers the pitch Annie couldn’t – effortless, specific, emotionally precise – because she’s not performing a case, she’s just telling the truth. They land on a compromise: Connor gets a week on the island before anyone talks seriously about selling. It’s not really a business negotiation at that point. It’s a chance for a brother who’s never had to share anything to actually learn what it feels like to want to keep something.

The girls take Connor to see the cliffs, and his first, most urgent question — no wolves, right? — is exactly the kind of anxious, useless-in-nature energy I’ve come to expect from him. Somewhere on this show’s writing staff, someone clearly agrees with me, because I would also very much like a wolf to show up eventually, purely for comedic justice.

WHY IS THE LAWYER CALLING JOE

Meanwhile, Ellis gets a call from Gordon’s lawyer, asking for Joe and then, separately, for any contact information for Ramona. He doesn’t have it, and — tellingly — doesn’t mention the call to either of his parents. Whatever this island’s adults are protecting, the kids have started absorbing the same instinct without even realizing it. Joe, for his part, is shown sitting in his truck, cassette in hand, completely unable to bring himself to press play. I don’t think that’s a small detail. A man who can’t listen to a dead woman’s voice is a man with a very specific reason not to.

At Sully’s family restaurant, the group reconvenes over a plate of what Sully calls Beavertails — a Canadian pastry, not, as Connor sincerely believes for one glorious moment, an actual piece of a beaver. It’s a small, dumb joke, and it’s exactly the kind of dry, unbothered humor this show does best: nobody overplays it, they just let Connor be wrong and move on with their lives.

Ellis pulls Ramona aside, worried the lawyer’s call means something’s happening with the island’s ownership. She reassures him — she knows she owns it jointly with her siblings now, and she’s not selling, because Annie promised her she wouldn’t. It’s a small, steadying moment for both of them, and it also quietly plants the idea that Ramona’s whole sense of safety here is now resting on a promise made by a sister she’s known for a matter of weeks.

CONNOR SEES FRIENDS

Rory shows up commenting on Connor’s oddly glowing skin — humidity, apparently, does wonders for him, which is the kind of throwaway compliment that only Rory could deliver with a straight face — and Connor, ever the fish out of water, has to have the actual concept of a cliff explained to him before they can leave. Ellis backs out of the trip entirely, citing boats that need cleaning, but not before fumbling an invitation to Oona for a “double feature” at the movies — a clear, if badly executed, attempt at a date that Oona reads with total sincerity as a hangout. He wants to spend real, focused time with her. She hears “group plans.” It would be funnier if it weren’t also a little sad, watching someone try this hard and get so thoroughly missed.

At the cliffs, Connor and Ramona dive in without hesitation, while Rory and Annie hang back, and Rory’s line about her hesitation being “your intelligence trying to stop you” is exactly the kind of dry compliment-slash-tease their whole dynamic runs on. I loved it. He wants to show her something and pulls her off to the side, leaving Connor with Ramona and Oona — where Oona needs help retying her bathing suit and both Jacobsons volunteer immediately, Connor calling dibs like an idiot and Ramona shutting him down without so much as breaking eye contact. There’s a live current running between Ramona and Oona in that exact moment that neither of them is naming out loud yet, and it’s genuinely lovely to watch, even knowing – because of course we know – that it’s not going to stay this easy.

WHAT IS ELLIS UP TO

Over at Denise’s, she’s on the phone hustling some kind of deal while Ellis quietly fixes sher boat, visibly holding something in that I wish he’d just say out loud already. When she asks about a new boat, he lowballs it to just needing new wires, then quotes her a price that creeps upward mid-conversation — $450, then somehow $650 a beat later — the same slippery arithmetic from the tackle-box incident a few episodes back. I don’t know what Ellis is building toward, but it’s getting harder to write off as a one-time thing, and I have a feeling his dad is going to find out at the worst possible moment.

Back at the water, Ramona can’t stop watching Oona swim, and Connor — surprisingly perceptive for someone who needed cliffs explained to him an hour ago — tells her flatly to just say something. Ramona deflects into a bit about twin telepathy, which Connor immediately corrects, since he and Annie are the actual twins here, not the two of them. What she finally admits, underneath the deflecting, is more honest than anything else she’s said all season: she’s not the person who dates. She’s the person who gives someone the best two weeks of their life and then disappears before it can get complicated. Connor, against every expectation I had for him, doesn’t let her off the hook. Not smart, he tells her. Tell her anyway.

SAUNA HEAT

Rory takes Annie to a sauna, and if you’re looking for the single most attentive, emotionally present love interest this show has produced so far, it’s him. Their conversation drifts into his own history — a childhood prodigy who played Carnegie Hall at seven, before a freak accident with a car door ended his ability to play piano for good. Annie apologizes instinctively, the way she apologizes for almost everything, and Rory gently waves it off, unbothered in the specific way of someone who made peace with a loss a long time ago. When he tells her she looks hot, she genuinely doesn’t know what to do with it — Oliver, for all the years they were together, never once said anything like that to her.

It’s in the Jacuzzi afterward that the episode gives Annie her most honest scene of the season. Asked how she’s really doing with her mother and Ramona and all of it, she finally stops performing composure and just says it: this is the first time in her life she’s actually had to sit with the fact that her mother is dead. Annie had never thought she was that affected by it. She is. She keeps imagining a version of her life where Goldie is still alive, and she doesn’t know what to do with any of these feelings or how to fix them, and she’s sorry for even bringing it up.

Rory’s response — that she doesn’t have to apologize for feeling things — lands like it’s the first time anyone’s ever told her that, because it probably is. I think Rory understands Annie in a register nobody else on this show has bothered to try yet, and I like that for her, even knowing this show rarely lets its nice things stay simple.

DO YOU WANNA GO

That night, Oona catches Ramona on the way out to confirm the movie plan is a real date, not a hangout, and the two of them settle on together, which reads like the show finally letting one of its slow-burns actually breathe for a minute.

Back at the house, Annie comes home glowing about Rory, and Ramona — turning the tables on Annie’s usual habit of asking a hundred personal questions a day — asks when Ramona knew she was gay. Just always knew, is the honest, simple answer. Annie offers something she’s clearly never said out loud before: she spent her whole life assuming she was asexual, which is part of why she stayed with a closeted boyfriend for so long without it costing her anything emotionally. Now for the first time, she isn’t sure that’s actually true.

It’s a quietly significant confession, tucked casually into a late-night conversation, and I don’t think the show wants us to treat it as a throwaway line. For either of them. The two of them end up admitting, almost as an afterthought, that neither has ever had sex — Ramona because she doesn’t think she’s conventionally attractive enough, Annie because she simply never wanted to before now. When Ramona mentions she doesn’t know if the movie thing with Oona counts as a date, Annie’s answer is the most quietly wise thing she’s said all season: if you don’t know, it’s definitely a date.

ON A SPIRAL

Naturally, none of this stays contained. Rory only agrees to come once he learns Ellis invited Annie, at which point his reluctant “I need a break from Annie” flips instantly into “yeah, we’re going,” and he brings his friend Lincoln along for good measure. Denise, meanwhile, is angling to represent the island sale as its real estate agent, working Connor from an entirely different, entirely self-interested direction — which tells you everything about how many adults on this island have a financial stake in how this family’s grief resolves.

Down at the marina, Oona spirals through outfit options for camp while Maple delivers the most clear-eyed warning of the episode: if Oona’s actually going to date Ramona, she needs to be careful, because Ramona isn’t like the string of casual flings that have come before her — she’s a friend, and there’s a real chance of genuinely hurting her, which wouldn’t be okay. Oona insists there’s nothing there. Maple, without missing a beat, tells her she’s already doing the damage, whether she admits the feelings or not. It’s the kind of warning that lands exactly right and still probably won’t be heard in time.

A DATE INTERUPPTED

What was supposed to be a date turns into an unplanned group outing, and the pressure of it visibly overwhelms Oona — enough that when the girl she’d hooked up with previously turns up, she abandons Ramona entirely to go be with her instead. It’s a small, cowardly retreat dressed up as spontaneity, and Ramona is left standing there absorbing it in real time.

Elsewhere, Sully calls out Ellis for being annoyed that his date turned into a crowd, pointing out that he’s never actually told Annie he likes her, so he doesn’t really get to be mad that other people are moving faster. Ellis protests that surely it’s obvious without saying it; Sully’s blunt reply, that boys like Rory actually say it, clearly rattles him more than he wants to admit.

Ellis finds Annie anyway, and the two of them decide to do something stupid together, which turns out to mean getting caricatures drawn of themselves, laughing the whole way through it. And then, with no real buildup or grand gesture, he just tells her — I really like you. Her answer, I really like being near you too, is soft and understated in exactly the way that suits both of them. Naturally, Rory and Lincoln show up looking for Annie roughly four seconds later, because this show has never once let its characters have an uninterrupted moment when it can help it.

CONNOR IS HILARIOUS

Connor, meanwhile, has apparently been hustling small children at a carnival game and winning constantly, which is somehow both the funniest and most on-brand thing he’s done all episode. Have to admit though that part of the joy of this episode was watching Connor and Ramona bond. Ramona, well into way too many drinks that Connor probably shouldn’t have handed her, spots Oona with the other girl and unravels fast — confronting them both, saying something genuinely cruel to the girl in the process.

Ramoona then turning on Oona directly, demanding to know why she was invited here at all, why the thigh touch at the last party happened, why any of it happened, if none of it was real. Oona’s answer — flat, panicked, and almost certainly a lie — is that she doesn’t feel anything. It lands like a slap. Ramona runs, the way she always said she would, except this time it’s her own heart doing the leaving.

FINDING RAMONA

Ellis goes to find her, with Annie trailing behind despite his protest that he hates when she does that, and the two of them locate Connor and a thoroughly drunk Ramona surrounded by an absurd pile of stuffed animals. Annie’s fury at Connor for letting it get this far is immediate and completely justified; Connor, characteristically, deflects with a joke while still quietly grabbing every prize to bring home with them. It’s a strange, tender little detail buried inside a genuinely upsetting scene — he might not know how to say sorry, but he knows how to make sure she doesn’t leave empty-handed.

Back at the marina, Joe meets them as they’re unloading a drunk, heartbroken Ramona, and mutters something about how “you all do it in New York,” followed by a line that stops Annie cold: this is exactly what Gordon was afraid of. She pushes, immediately assuming the worst — that she and Connor were kept away specifically because their grandfather feared his New York grandchildren would somehow corrupt Ramona. Joe backpedals, insisting that’s not what he meant, but Annie isn’t letting this go anymore.

A LIES TRUTH TOLD

She calls out the contradiction that’s clearly been sitting in front of her for episodes: Joe claims he barely knew her mother, and yet he knows exactly how she died — not the cancer story everyone’s been quietly repeating, but something else entirely. When she demands the truth, Joe finally says it: Goldie died giving birth to Ramona. And when Annie asks, disbelieving, how he could possibly know that, his answer is the one I’ve been waiting four episodes to hear out loud.

Because he was there.

I called it in episode two, and I’m not going to pretend I’m not thrilled to be right, but underneath the fan-theory satisfaction is something much heavier: an entire family built its silence around a woman’s death that wasn’t what anyone told her children it was, and a man who has spent this whole season quietly, carefully protecting a secret that was never really his to keep alone.