Summary
The Bayview Four find themselves in the same boat in “One Of Us Is Grieving”, but nobody is quite being honest with each other yet.
This recap of One Of Us Is Lying season 1, episode 2, “One Of Us Is Grieving”, contains spoilers.
Insecurity is a funny old thing. You can’t see it, but it often takes root in the most outgoing, seemingly confident people. People who’re popular, beautiful, well-off. People like Adelaide Prentiss. That’s why she begins One Of Us Is Lying episode 2 dreaming about Jake being on holiday with a group of girls. It’s how she justifies being with TJ; him telling her, and her telling herself, that Jake doesn’t deserve her anyway. But she wakes up horrified and finds Jake outside, seemingly more worried about her than anyone else is. That’s how insecurity works. It pushes you to make bad decisions, even if you don’t necessarily need to.
One Of Us Is Lying season 1, episode 2 recap
Everyone is certainly making decisions in the wake of Simon’s murder and the posted confession for it, good and bad. Cooper is carrying on a secretive relationship with Kris; Bronwyn accuses — though indirectly — Nate of taking Simon’s bag and laptop. The kids are trying to jokingly discuss the matter at school, but what seems like offhanded gags quickly begin to feel like outright accusations for some. Addy denies her own involvement so vehemently that she has flashbacks contradicting her own alibi. When Detective Wheeler (Jacque Drew) asks to see inside all the kids’ lockers, she panics and starts asking what might happen if someone planted something in there. Lo and behold, there’s peanut oil in there, and Addy’s ready-made excuse for how refined peanut oil needs to be in order to trigger someone’s allergies only makes her look more guilty.
The next thing on the agenda is Simon’s laptop. Wheeler pushes all the Bayview Four to admit it if they know anything, but Bronwyn, panicking, tries to redirect the attention back to Addy’s moisturizing peanut oil. And it is important since the peanut oil found its way into Simon’s cup via a capsule, which means someone in the room must have put it in there. One of them is indeed lying. Perhaps they all are.
With this being the case, it’s time to double down and get serious. Addy reiterates her life plans with Jake when her mother mentions her fling with TJ. Bronwyn is advised by her legal counsel to stay well away from the other suspects, especially Nate, whose home life “One Of Us Is Grieving” cracks a window into (he lives with his alcoholic father). In some instances we see lies catching up to people. Cooper lying about his age to Kris backfires on him when he gets so relaxed he starts venting about his high school classes (he told Kris he was in college), and Addy starts to pick apart his relationship with Keely, intimating that maybe Simon had discussed that she cheated on him. Every mistruth catches up to us eventually.
Simon’s wake also looms on the horizon. Jake has a longstanding childhood connection to him, so he’s on the guest list, and he mentions offhandedly to Addy that he might stumble on the diary he kept when they were kids — only now, it’d have everyone’s secrets in it. He doesn’t realize that includes Addy.
The tide begins to turn a little, though, when the kids piece together that they’ve been set up. They all ended up in detention for weird reasons that were clearly the work of someone else; an alarm on Addy’s phone that she didn’t set, Cooper’s phone being missing, Nate’s locker being jammed. The next post on About That reveals that Addy had the peanut oil in her locker, but that information was likely to spread through the whole school like wildfire anyway since Addy’s friend Vanessa (Sara Thompson) got hold of it. That’s the same way the possibility of Keely having cheated on Cooper is spreading, too. At Simon’s wake, the gossip is everywhere, and so are the kids — so, too, is Detective Wheeler. She almost catches Addy snooping around Simon’s belongings while she discusses Simon’s death with his influential mother. Addy is hiding under the bed when she hears Wheeler explain that the police are working on a theory that all four students colluded in Simon’s murder together, so when Bronwyn assembles them all in Simon’s room to discuss what’s happening, Addy is the first to leave. They can’t be seen together, and since they don’t know each other particularly well, they’re all beginning to see each other as suspects.
But this is too important to not be discussed, so Bronwyn arranges a more private meeting and proposes they all work together. Bronwyn confesses that one of Simon’s posts was going to be about her, but won’t say which, and Addy confesses to having cheated on Jake. Their first suspect has to be someone who hated not only Simon but all of them — Miss Avery, a particularly snooty teacher, fits the bill. Whoever is responsible wastes no time in posting the next message on About That, which outs Addy for cheating on Jake while he was in Greece for the summer. In the closing shot of the episode, we see Bronwyn’s younger sister, Maeve (Melissa Collazo), using Simon’s laptop.
