The Last Thing He Told Me season 1 episodes 1 and 2 recaps & review

Open Go TV / April 17, 2023 / Reviews

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The Last Thing He Told Me follows a woman named Hannah and her stepdaughter, Bailey. When Hannah’s husband disappears, she starts searching for him with Bailey and ends up forming a bond with her. The first two episodes are streaming on Apple TV+.

Episode 1 recap: Protect Her

A woman frantically looks for a girl named Bailey in a hotel. She rushes back to her room and realizes that her broken phone is no longer functional. Someone enters the room, and just then the scene cuts to four days ago.

Hannah, a woodturner, has been married to Owen, a father of a 16-year-old girl named Bailey, for 14 months now. Bailey does not like Hannah, but Hannah is trying very hard to get along with her.

Hannah gets recognized for her work when a magazine does a feature article on her. The same day, Hannah ends up missing several calls from her friend, Jules, and a girl comes to her house to hand her a note from Owen, who had run into her at school.

The note has just two words written on it, “Protect her”. Hannah tries calling Owen, but she fails to contact him. Since he does not come home when he is supposed to, she decides to go to his workplace, The Shop, to find out what is going on.

When Hannah reaches The Shop, she sees that the whole place is being raided by the FBI. Additionally, neither Owen nor his car is anywhere to be found. An anxious Hannah then decides to pick Bailey up herself from her rehearsal.

Bailey comes out of the building with a bag full of cash as well as a note that her father left for her in her locker. The note says that Bailey knows what matters about Owen and what matters about herself, but Bailey cannot make sense of it.

Bailey and Hannah have not been able to contact Owen, and Owen never packed with the intention of leaving. When Jules, who is a journalist, comes to meet Hannah, she tells her that her partner, Max, got a tip this morning from her contact at the SEC.

Max was told that The Shop’s new software does not work, even though the CEO, Avett, who has now been arrested, told Hannah sometime ago that the sales were great. Jules informs her that there were no sales and that anytime a buyer showed interest in the demo, Avett noted it as revenue.

Avett inflated the company’s valuation and drove up the stock price in advance of the IPO, which is a fraud, and now the stockholders will lose half a billion dollars. When Max and Jules found out about this in the morning, Jules called Owen to inform him about the same.

Owen was the lead engineer for The Shop, and when Jules called him, he did not ask her anything about the fraud. Instead, he asked her how long he had to get out, which makes Jules think that perhaps he knew about the fraud.

After Jules leaves, Hannah sees a man who has been watching her. Despite that, she sends a reluctant Bailey to school the next day and fails to get Bailey to open up to her.

Hannah also meets a US Marshal outside her house. The man claims that he is there to protect Owen. He suggests that Hannah get a lawyer and gives her his phone number on a napkin. He also tells her that he can help her get through all this and that Owen is not who she thinks he is.

Episode 2 recap: The Day After

Hannah thinks about the time she talked to Owen about going to Austin for a vacation, but Owen suggested that they should go to Taos instead. He had not been to New Mexico since college.

Owen acted strange while talking about that time of his life, and Hannah assured him that he can talk to her about his past.

In the present, Hannah tries to contact her lawyer, Carl, but he does not pick up her call either. She then takes Bailey to school and gets paranoid when she thinks someone is tailing them.

Everyone at school knows that Bailey’s father worked at The Shop, and people stare and whisper about Bailey the whole day. Additionally, her boyfriend, Bobby, did not tell her that he had accepted the scholarship offered to him by Duke, which upsets her further.

When Hannah discovers that the US Attorney’s office is looking for Owen and that he might be in trouble, she decides to go through his work computer. She finds his most recent will, but she cannot access the document, as it is password protected.

Two FBI agents, Naomi Wu and O’Mackey, show up at her studio and take away the laptop. They also tell her that if Owen does not return in the next 24 hours, the state may get involved.

Hannah asks them to talk to the US Marshall, Grady Bradford, who came to see her. The fact that a US Marshal came to see her surprises the two agents, and they ask her to be careful. Unbeknownst to Hannah, Grady has been following her.

Since Hannah has not been able to contact Carl, she goes to see him at his house, and Carl’s wife, Patty, rudely dismisses her because Carl and Patty invested most of their life savings in The Shop; she believes that Owen betrayed them.

Owen had told Hannah that his ex-wife, Olivia, died in a car crash when Bailey was four years old; it was a hit-and-run case. Now, Owen loves Bailey more than anyone, which is why Hannah does not think that he would ever leave like this.

With no other option left, Hannah seeks help from her ex-boyfriend, Jake, who is a very successful lawyer. Even Jake thinks that it is odd for Grady to approach Hannah, as tech fraud has nothing to do with the US Marshal’s office.

An upset Bailey leaves school before the day gets over. She comes home and thinks that someone has broken into their house. She rushes to Hannah’s studio to tell her about it, and Hannah calls the police.

The police check the house and do not find anything. Nothing has been taken from the house, and even the bag full of cash is still where Hannah left it.

That night, Max and Jules come to their house. While Jules comforts Bailey, Max talks to Hannah. Bailey tells Jules that she wanted to go away with Bobby and his parents for the weekend, but her father acted strange and scared at the thought of Bailey being so far away.

On the other hand, Jules shows Max the paper napkin that has Grady’s number on it, and Max points out that the number has an Austin area code. Hannah remembers that Owen once seemed uneasy at the idea of her going to Austin.

She then leaves the conversation midway to talk to Carl, who has come to see her. Carl tells her that they never invested in The Shop; he lost the money because of something else and lied to Patty.

Carl also tells her that Owen’s behavior was strange when they talked about Austin once. Owen kept insisting that he had never been to Austin. Apart from Grady, the man Hannah had seen earlier is still watching her.

At home, Hannah asks Bailey if she had ever gone to Austin with her father, and Bailey tells her that she once went to a football game there with him, even though her father is not a football fan.

To confirm if the game was really in Austin, she asks Jake about the Austin football club’s team colors, and he tells her that orange is one of the colors, which Bailey remembers seeing.

Hannah tells Jake that Grady is from Austin; she had called his office to confirm that. She thinks that Owen might be running from something else. Jake advises her not to get involved in all this, but Hannah decides to go to Austin with Bailey to investigate.

Review

The Last Thing He Told Me is a miniseries, so the audience is introduced to the central conflict within the first few minutes of the first episode. It takes a while before the audience gets to know the characters, as their background information is provided through flashbacks at the time when it is needed the most.
The show sets a satisfying pace in the first two episodes. The developments are neither too slow nor too fast. It gives the audience enough time to get comfortable with the characters and the plot, and it does not feel dragged out either.
However, the show fails to create a tense and anxious atmosphere in at least these two episodes, and the audience cannot get fully invested in the mystery of Owen’s disappearance.
On top of that, even the performances by the actors do not impress the audience in these two episodes. As a result, the audience never feels for or relates to Hannah or Bailey.