Summary
The second episode is just as frantic as the first, as even more questions are raised and secrets are revealed.
This recap of Stay Close season 1, episode 2 contains spoilers.
Kids! They’re a pain, aren’t they? One minute they’re babies in need of nothing but bottles of milk and cuddles, and the next they’re putting hidden cameras in their wardrobes and following their mother to strip clubs. That’s how Stay Close episode 2 opens, with a little flashback detailing how Kayleigh and her friend Bea followed a bewigged Megan to Vipers and then, quite by chance, ran into Carlton Flynn. When Carlton tried to spike Kayleigh’s drink, her savvy friend dip-tested it with her fingernail polish and swapped the cups around. Thus, Carlton spiked himself, while Kayleigh and Bea stole his car and fled. Him staggering outside Vipers, you’ll recall, was the cold open of the previous episode.
Stay Close season 1, episode 2 recap
Kayleigh doesn’t exactly make a secret of the fact that she’s onto Megan’s double life. Megan, to her credit, goes to see Lorraine, since she wants to know who, exactly, claims to have seen Stewart Green. As it turns out, it was Lorraine herself, and he was looking for Cassie because she had been spotted in Vipers on the night that Kayleigh followed her. For Megan, it was supposed to be a goodbye. She was getting married, and since she had left her old life behind quite suddenly, she felt a pull towards it for a final farewell. Obviously, that seems to have been a mistake. But Lorraine says that Harry, despite being smacked up all the time, is still working, and is still there for the girls when they need him, so Megan plans to visit him again.
Meanwhile, it seems like there’s another missing person. Ray is visited by his heavily pregnant old Army sergeant, Simona, who’s looking for her baby father, Guy. We get a little background on Ray here — he was a war photographer, as I suggested, and put together a now out-of-print album of photographs from the front. He was embedded with Simona and her unit. The last he saw Guy was the other night and judging by the voicemail message he leaves Guy after their conversation, they got a little messy on Carnival night — in Vipers. All roads must lead somewhere, after all.
Anyway, Megan does indeed visit with Harry again, who looks much smoother when he doesn’t have a needle hanging out of his arm. He thought Megan ran off with Stewart Green, and she has to clarify that she ran away from him. Since they both left at the same time, he put two and two together. But apparently, Stewart was a psychopath, and the only way Megan could get away was by disappearing on the spot. She tells Harry that when she visited Stewart’s wife’s house, she heard something in the basement and got a feeling that Stewart was there. The theory is that he absconded 17 years ago with a “boatload” of money supposedly acquired via fraudulent means. A quick glimpse in the basement ought to solve the matter, so Harry poses as a conveyancer to lure Stewart’s wife outside the property while Megan sneaks inside. In the basement, she finds a duffel bag full of Vipers promotional flyers advertising her as Cassie and a heavy door leading to a bunker, but little else before she’s forced to flee the property.
Harry checks the property listing since it’s for sale, but there’s nothing about an air raid shelter or anything of that sort, so the door remains a mystery. He wants Megan to meet with a policeman he knows, one of the good ones — Mike Broome. Megan isn’t interested in meeting with the police, though. When it comes to preserving your own secrets while still protecting your family, there’s a delicate balance to be achieved. The cops might tip it too far one way or the other.
Speaking of Broome, though, he has stolen the CCTV recordings from Vipers but discovers that all the footage from the 16th has been suspiciously wiped. Rudy, the bald doorman, calls to not-so-politely request the equipment back, and also informs Broome that one of his dancers, Tawny Allure, was seeing Carlton Flynn and wants to meet with him. He and Erin head out there, and he’s quick to point out the similarities between Carlton’s disappearance and Stewart’s. Both were seeing dancers from Vipers and disappeared on the same day, 17 years apart. Broome is forced to conduct the interview alone, however, since Erin is having some childcare issues and has her son in the back of the car.
According to Tawny, Carlton picked her up the day before Carnival and offered her a lot of cash for a private show. Since she was saving money to train as a nurse, she agreed, but Carlton quickly tried to break the no-touching rule, and when Tawny tried to stop him, he broke two of her fingers. Given what we saw of him in the opening scene, he doesn’t seem like a particularly nice guy. Broome also has a flirty relationship with Lorraine — is there any woman of a certain age in this show that he hasn’t slept with?
Meeting with Broome, by the way, doesn’t do Tawny any favors. She’s immediately accosted in her home by an eccentric young man and woman, the latter of whom smacks her right in the kisser. They want to know where Carlton is, and they’re quite happy to use various methods of torture to find out.
Meanwhile, Kayleigh and her friend Bea go looking for Carlton, since Bea has seen the missing person flyers and is terrified she might have killed him by swapping the spiked drink around. She lies to Megan about where she is, obviously, but that’s the least of Megan’s problems, since her son, Jordan, doesn’t come home from school and was last seen talking to a man at the skateboard park. When Megan goes there, some kids tell her that they last saw Jordan talking to a sort of rich-looking man with a shaved head — sounds a lot like Stewart Green, doesn’t it?
Elsewhere, Broome begins to put the pieces together, since Erin has now told him about Guy Tatum disappearing. Thus far, there are three missing men who were all last reported seen on the same date, April 16, though one of them 17 years prior. Going through the missing person reports, there are many others who were last seen very close to that specific date, and Broome suspects instantly that there’s a serial killer at work. Erin thinks it’s a leap, but he has a hunch and puts several of the faces up on his board. He also receives Ray’s photos, deposited in the back of a police car by him anonymously earlier in the episode, which depict Carlton in the woods with a sword, shots of the ruins, and a big splash of blood on a nearby rock. He and Erin go there just as Kayleigh and Bea are arriving to look for Carlton.
But there are two shocker developments right at the end of the episode. In the first, Ray calls Guy again and hears his phone ringing upstairs. His stuff has been left under Ray’s bed, and Ray promptly deposits it in a public bin. What does he know that he’s not sharing? But the other revelation is more of a stunner. Earlier, while watching football with his mother, who clearly has early-onset dementia or something similar, we clearly saw that Megan’s fiance Dave recognized Carlton’s garish orange Subaru Impreza. As the episode ends, we see him dump the vehicle in a lake. Looks like Megan isn’t the only one with a secret life.
You can stream Stay Close season 1, episode 2 exclusively on Netflix.
