Summary
“After Dark” sees Cassie search for answers in the bottom of a bottle, as usual, and the journey takes her down a surreal spiral of self-destruction.
This recap of The Flight Attendant Season 1 Episode 6, “After Dark”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
Cassie is under a lot of stress. She’s embroiled in an international criminal conspiracy, people are trying to kill her, and now her best friend’s lover, Max, has been hit by a car. “After Dark” picks up with Max alive but comatose, and Annie absolutely fuming about both his condition and Cassie’s responsibility for it. Unsurprisingly, no incessant talk of conspiracy and Hello Kitty flash drives is enough to calm Annie down. Zosia Mamet is great here, and you totally buy it when she tells Annie that she’s done with this whole thing.
Cassie buys it too, which is why she gets blind drunk and tries to holla at all of her friends while Alex’s ghost, aka her conscience, tells her that she has systematically alienated every single person she cares for — something I’ve been saying in all of these recaps, so it’s nice to see the show pay it off. Now she needs someone, nobody is there for her, though she does manage to accidentally tip Megan off about the Korean voice message she left on her phone, which she also threatens to translate later. Left alone with internal arguments with Alex, Cassie tries to stave off the guilt by hooking up with Buckley.
The bender continues. By the time Megan and her son Eli catch up with Cassie — they track her using Snapchat — she and Buckley are extremely drunk. Cassie is so drunk, in fact, that she asks her supposed stalker outright if he’s an FBI agent or an assassin, and while she’s doing that Megan is able to steal her phone and delete the offending voicemail message. When Buckley proposes that he and Cassie run away together, she’s forced to grapple with the fact that she’s clearly using him to avoid having to work through her feelings, particularly the thought of losing Annie, which seems a likelier possibility now than it ever has.
Cassie decides, then, to go to Annie’s house and make amends, and drags Buckley along with her. In the meantime, Cassie’s FBI “stalker” gets his throat cut by parties unseen, but we’re to assume the perpetrator is Miranda.
“After Dark” lets Kaley Cuoco play a really good drunk. At Annie’s apartment, where she and Buckley are quickly discovered by Annie herself, she cycles through an impressive range of emotions as the two unload a great deal of baggage. This conversation, like the previous one, doesn’t go well. Now completely out of ideas, Cassie and Buckley, even more wasted, attempt to steal a plastic horse from a children’s ride outside a store, and both get arrested.
Elsewhere, Annie begins to realize, much to her annoyance, that there was some truth in what Cassie said during their argument, which prompts her to hand in her resignation and unburden herself to Jessica/Jennifer about some of the moral compromises she has made.
As Miranda narrowly avoids an assassination attempt, Cassie, still in police custody, is forced to sober up, which unlocks more of her ever-changing childhood memories. These ones expose a harsh reality of her complicity in her father’s alcoholism and his abuse of Davey. She uses her one phone call to call her brother and Cuoco impresses once again with a touching confession. She has finally understood not just what her dad did but her own part in it; that Davey’s radically different interpretation of their childhood was actually the correct one all along. “It’s not okay how dad treated you,” she says. “I know,” he replies, “but it’s not okay how he treated you either.”
With this powerful moment of candor over with, Cassie finds herself suddenly free — someone has posted her bail. And that someone turns out to be, rather predictably, Miranda. Whatever could she want?
Thanks for reading our recap of The Flight Attendant episode 6, “After Dark”.
