I wish that were true but I have a feeling Alex has been taught exactly the opposite for his entire life, and seen it proven time and time again
Bribes! Bribes to keep his psycho kid out of prison, payment for dirty work done by local criminals etc. Like
@Mirandartv says, "favors". That term has a good broad meaning yet somehow also doesn't really adequately express just how despicable it is.
Honestly it hasn't even occurred to me that someone might take a sad event like someone having a heart attack or stroke and suddenly dying in their home, install one of their cronies to represent the deceased's family and
sue themselves for negligence they weren't even guilty of to get a large settlement from their own insurance company, nearly all of which they would then steal from the family. I would have thought it wasn't worth it but I definitely don't know nearly as much about lawsuits and insurance as Alex Murdaugh
I have started imagining that Paul's appeal might have started with Satterfield's death, however it might have occurred. He may have seen first hand that his father could dictate the circumstances around people's deaths and Paul being an actual psychopath born into a "normal evil" family, upon realizing just how powerful they also were, at that point entered into the wildest time of life with zero regard for human life. Someone like that might hit someone with a baseball bat from a moving car like they were a mailbox or drunkenly crash a boat full of other kids in the middle of the night with the utmost confidence that his dad could sweep it all away.
Especially if his mother also coddled him and made him believe he could do no wrong. A relationship like that could easily be seen by a father as being the cause of his son's psychopathy, psychopathy that was slowly but surely consuming more of the family's resources than were being replaced. Then when that wife starts poking into the finances that you blame her son and have come to indirectly also blame her for wrecking, making signals like she might be considering
leaving the family she made and is seeing how much money there is left for her to get her piece of... Well, that mother and son might just find out how big the rug is and how much can be self under it.
I originally wanted this to be a victim's family taking the law into their own hands on Paul. I didn't like that Maggie would have been collateral damage but it gave me a sense of hope to think that a "little person" might have gotten some justice against Paul and it might have set a series of events in motion that would undo the generations of injustice in that county. I guess that's
my pioneer spirit but as things unravel it looks more and more like it's just another echelon of corruption and even if Alex swings for it, we'll never know who all he paid off and they will continue to sit there getting paid off by whoever the next Alex Murdaugh is. Makes me sick.