Summary
“Cleo en Jutta” lets the courtroom drama take up most of the focus to great effect in one of the season’s strongest and most important outings thus far.
This recap of The Twelve season 1, episode 8, “Cleo en Jutta”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Check out our spoiler-free season review.
The Twelve episode 8, “Cleo en Jutta”, continues the show’s current hot streak. Opening 18 months prior to the present day with Stefaan undergoing a lie detector test in relation to the murders, we’re immediately tantalized with some mistruth, but the show keeps that card close to its chest for now.
With Lola suffering an allergic reaction, Mike and Delphine’s relationship continues to be strained, but there’s little time for too much of this business, let alone time to care what Arnold’s up to before we return to court, where in the absence of all the key witnesses attention is turning to various experts. This is real meat and potatoes courtroom drama stuff and it’s always great to see. We get a re-enactment of Frie leaving the party – did she have time to return, or to reach a phone booth? We go over Britt’s video, filmed in the attic of Marc’s house. Would Frie have been able to move the body from the bed where she was presumably suffocated to the attic? Was the same bolt gun used on Britt as was used on the dogs?
This is all good stuff, no doubt. There’s a lot going on here but The Twelve episode 8 rockets through it confidently. It’s when it comes to the reconstruction of Rose’s death that things get a bit shakier. We get the details: a timing of just after 10 pm, polyester gloves, a rock, and so on and so forth. But the coroner floats a theory that the perpetrator was left-handed, something which incriminates Frie – at least as far as the court is concerned, though she might not be the only person who regularly uses her left hand.
Despite Frie’s mental health being brought up, when we bring up the lie detector test that we saw at the top of the episode, some suspicions are confirmed: Stefaan, it turns out, failed the test when asked whether or not he killed Britt. Frie, meanwhile, passed.
This, and the last-minute confirmation of Stefaan using his left hand, positions him as the strongest suspect thus far. The Twelve season 1, episode 8 ends by rounding up the various goings-on among the jurors, including Delphine staying with Noel, although under strict sleeping arrangements, and Yuri confessing to Holly about the dead illegal immigrant, though at this point it’s difficult to care about much other than the case, which is picking up some serious steam towards the end. Whereas the balance being off in a previous episode made for one of the season’s worst outings, here that balance, in favor of the courtroom drama, makes for one of the best. Funny, that
