Summary
Kaley Cuoco really impresses in “Hitchcock Double” as she and an unexpected ally cook up a plan to catch a killer.
This recap of The Flight Attendant Season 1 Episode 7, “Hitchcock Double”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.
The mystery of why Miranda would bail out Cassie is solved almost immediately in “Hitchcock Double” — she wants the missing money, and she thinks Cassie, being a lot more than she pretends to be, can get it for her. But, of course, Cassie isn’t more than she pretends to be; she really is just a flight attendant, which Miranda realizes when she brings up finding her under the name of Elena in the Lionfish servers. “We’re f*cked,” Miranda declares, after also claiming not to have killed Sabrina, Cassie’s FBI tail, or indeed Alex.
This is major news for Cassie — for the audience, not so much. We’ve seen Miranda do some questionable things throughout the season but the key murders mentioned above all occurred with the killer off-screen; that’s always a deliberate stylistic choice to obscure the identity of the killer. Miranda explains to Cassie how Alex, thanks to her getting drunk and giving too much away, found out that his parents were dirty and he was working with criminals without his knowledge. In response, he stashed a load of cash and fled. Miranda thinks her boss, Victor, is behind all of the deaths, and that he’s using his “pet psychopath”, Felix, to carry them out. They both might be next.
Despite current goings-on, Cassie turns to Annie for help, and as she predicts, her friend is willing to meet them however annoyed she might be. The two women even share a nice moment in “Hitchcock Double” until Miranda interrupts, offering to trade information for immunity. It’s a difficult deal to make, though, since Miranda has pretty flagrantly committed a lot of crimes, and Annie, you’ll recall, has quit her job. But she thinks she can come up with a plan regardless. In the meantime, she sends Cassie and Miranda to wait in a hotel while she makes some calls.
Miranda, understandably, doesn’t think this is safe and convinces Cassie to lie to Annie once again and flee the country with her. Their first destination is a church, where Cassie gets a call from Davey, who offers to come over and be there for her — she has to lie to him, too, which has a visible effect on her, as does the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting she and Miranda are forced to attend while waiting. Since Cassie is absolutely adamant that she isn’t an alcoholic, the meeting sends her haywire by forcing her to confront the fact that she definitely is, prompting more visions of giant rabbits and another series of childhood reminiscences, these ones reframing the car accident that killed her father and, as we see, the two occupants of the other vehicle involved. She was not only present in the crash but might have helped to cause it, something she never told anyone. She blames herself for being her dad’s “drinking buddy” since he only ever drank like that when he was with her. Cuoco is absolutely brilliant here, as she works through all this with Alex’s ghost.
Elsewhere in “Hitchcock Double”, Max wakes up to a confession of Annie’s love, and also immediately figures out that Cassie has fled to try and protect her, which makes Annie determined to help. She visits the exact spot where Max was knocked down and finds the elusive Hello Kitty flash drive in a drain.
Cassie and Miranda also make a discovery after the latter explains that Alex wouldn’t have left the money lying around in big piles in a hotel room — it’d be coded and hidden somewhere, such as among the literary notes in his copy of Crime and Punishment, which Cassie still has. They head to Annie’s place to retrieve it and are successful until they’re interrupted by Victor’s menacing assassin, Felix.
Fleeing to the roof, Miranda regales Cassie with tales of Felix’s psychotic deadliness, which includes a story about cats that very much rings a bell. When Cassie peeps around the corner, she sees what the audience has already deciphered — Felix is Buckley! With that information, Cassie and Miranda are able to devise the bones of a plan to lure him to Rome using Cassie as bait so Miranda can kill him.
Thanks for reading our recap of The Flight Attendant episode 7, “Hitchcock Double.”
