Summary
Cassie’s investigation and family life collide in “Conspiracy Theories”, which has the strongest emotional core of any episode yet.
This recap of The Flight Attendant Season 1 Episode 4, “Conspiracy Theories”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
“Conspiracy Theories” is very much an episode of two warring halves, and how they intersect in an emotional battlefield where Cassie’s determination to figure out what happened to her dead lover supersedes every other concern she might have, including her personal and familial relationships. Previous episodes have dabbled in the latter but this one really delves into Cassie’s relationship with her gay brother Davey (T.R. Knight) and his kids and by extension both of their relationships with their late father.
So, as it happens, Cassie and Annie’s fella Max (Deniz Akdeniz) are able to decipher some more information by piecing together shredded paper, which leads Cassie to a very mysterious flight to Maine that she needs to bribe another dude of her acquaintance in order to board as part of the crew. When she does, she discovers the plane empty of passengers and a big ruse evidently taking place, which just so happens right around the time she’s supposed to meet up with Davey, his partner, and the kids at an aquarium.
“Conspiracy Theories” changes tone a little bit during the aquarium sequence; the way Cassie interacts with her nieces is a lot different from how she interacts with everybody else, even if she gets distracted long enough to lose the pair of them and then manically berates them out of terror. But either way she clearly loves the kids and the kids clearly love her, and Davey can see that, but he can also see that Cassie is deeply unreliable and possibly drunk and self-centered enough to buy them presents when he specifically asked her not to, thus undermining him and trying, at least in his mind, to buy their affection by making them like him less.
This, we learn, is something that stems from their childhood; their father was clearly awful, considered Cassie “the son he never had”, and got her onto the booze as a child – almost all of which she has conveniently forgotten but gets to relive with Alex in her hallucinations. Cuoco is really good in the scene in which Davey confronts her. She can’t understand why her brother is making such a big deal of her doing something as innocuous as buying her nieces a gift, but once all the toxic memories begin to unspool the guilt is written all over her face and it’s another thing on an increasingly long list that she has to deal with. In her desperation, she retreats into the needy arms of Buckley (Colin Woodell), whose role in the narrative seems to be nothing except incessantly texting her.
In typical Cassie fashion, this is as good as it gets since when she pursues her next lead she ends up with a body falling out of a window and splattering on the ground right next to her.
Thanks for reading our recap of The Flight Attendant Season 1 Episode 4, “Conspiracy Theories”.
