Summary
The penultimate episode sees Broome and Erin make a grim discovery, but many questions remain unanswered.
This recap of Stay Close season 1, episode 7 contains spoilers.
After his last-minute recollection at the end of the previous episode, Ray is obviously feeling a bit off. He breaks into Megan’s house and almost gets caught by the police, who’re roping it off as a crime scene. When he gets back into Fester’s car, he’s adamant that he needs to talk to Cassie. The police are having the same idea since Broome and Erin are once again pushing Megan for everything she knows about Carlton and Stewart Green. There’s obviously a connection here, but thus far, it isn’t entirely clear what that connection is.
Stay Close season 1, episode 7 recap
We have some developments, though (beyond the bald man stood outside the station). The police caught Barbie and Ken’s car on CCTV and are tracking its rental details. Broome recognizes Kayleigh, though isn’t sure where from (she was on Priya’s wall). And with the police involved, Megan feels a lot safer — so safe, in fact, that she opens up to Dave about what has been going on.
When the police pull the identities of Barbie and Ken, among the crime scene photos is Kayleigh’s orange jacket, which causes the penny to drop for Broome, who remembers seeing her in the picture with Carlton Flynn. We also see, as Megan and her family move temporarily into a beach house, that Kayleigh still has his necklace. Broome and Erin arrive to interview her. She tells him the truth about everything, from using Carlton to get inside to Bea’s magic nail varnish detecting that their drinks had been spiked. She also recalls Carlton arguing with someone of East Asian descent at the bar, though she can’t recall any details. When Broome pushes her to share anything else she knows, she remembers her and Bea running through the woods with Carlton chasing them, but doesn’t say anything.
Given the timing of the deaths and various other incidents thus far, Broome and Erin realize that there is a leak within the police. Of course, we know that leak is now dead, which should keep Del protected for a while, but given Barbie and Ken are sunbathing in his back garden, he needs protection of a different sort.
Not that Broome is exactly putting the leak at the top of his list of priorities, since he’s trying to get Lorraine to try experimental cancer treatments overseas and serenading her on the piano in Vipers. Vipers is also where Ken and Barbie head on Del’s advice, while planning their honeymoon. Barbie floats the idea of taking early retirement and never returning from their honeymoon, but Ken believes that all couples have “a thing”, and murder is theirs. Together, they see Lorraine and Broome leaving Vipers.
Dave doesn’t take Megan’s revelations particularly well (it’s almost as if we’ve forgotten about the whole Subaru thing). He’s annoyed that she lied about who she used to be and never told him, but the way she frames it, she was simply starting over for her own protection. He’s not buying that either. He wants some time apart. She insists he knows her more than anyone, especially now that she has told him everything, though we know that’s not true since she hasn’t mentioned Ray. Dave hasn’t forgotten that encounter, though, so he asks Megan if she has been engaged before him and her lack of response is all the response Dave needs.
Speaking of Ray, he calls Megan to let her know that he knows what happened to Stewart Green. He tells her to meet him the next day. As Megan ambles back to the beach house, we see Rudy watching her from nearby. At first, I assumed this was Stewart, but it turns out “bald man in a sharp suit” applies to Rudy, too, meaning that every sighting of Stewart that we think we’ve seen thus far, such as him approaching Jordan, could have quite easily been Rudy. It doesn’t explain why Lorraine claims to have seen him, but remember, she’s on my suspect list anyway.
With Broome and Erin now aware of a leak, the latter spends a lot of time cautiously surveying the station and taking on tasks herself, which is understandable but does little for the audience given we already know who the rat is. And before long, thanks to CCTV footage from the crime scene outside Harry’s place, so does Erin, since she sees Goldberg there pocketing evidence. In the meantime, Broome tries to track down the East Asian man in a pink jacket who Carlton was supposedly arguing with. He’s able to thanks to a tattoo of a butterfly on his calf, but it doesn’t amount to anything as of yet, and the kid seems relatively unimportant and disconnected from everything else.
Erin gets a warrant for Goldberg’s place, and she and Broome go there together. They find the missing evidence bag in a door, along with a burner phone revealing he was passing information about the case to Del. Broome also brings the East Asian kid in for questioning, and he has his entire night accounted for. He and Carlton were arguing about drugs. He also saw Guy there and saw him fighting with Ray, who he describes. Naturally, the next we see, Ray’s place is being raided by the police. Under the driver’s seat of his car, Broome finds Carlton Flynn’s credit card.
With the police snooping around, Fester tips Ray off. He’s waiting to meet Cassie at their usual spot. On her way there, Megan is interrupted by Rudy, who has been watching her and has assumed that she kept the money that Stewart apparently absconded with. She explains how she took some money from his safe and left the rest of it with his wife, explaining who dropped off the briefcase. She didn’t know any of it was Rudy’s. She figures out it was him who gave Jordan the flyer, but a passing policeman fortuitously interrupts them and Rudy is forced to leave.
Broome is able to get to Ray’s meeting spot before Megan, and when he arrives, Ray attacks him. Broome is able to restrain him. Ray confesses to killing Stewart and says Megan had nothing to do with it, but he’s perplexed by the other things Broome reels off, including him having Carlton’s credit card and supposedly killing multiple men over the last 17 years. Realizing there’s more to all this, Ray is able to escape just as Broome is about to arrest him. His confusion about the credit card doesn’t go unnoticed. Erin arrives after with the photos printed from Ray’s memory stick, which include photos of the woods he has taken on April 16th every year since Stewart’s disappearance. In those photos, Broome spots something, and he and Erin head out into the woods to see what it is. They find hand truck tracks leading away from the ruins and deeper into the woods, eventually to a hidden trapdoor that Broome discovers quite by accident. When they pull it open, the smell is overwhelming. You know what that means.
Broome and Erin head down and discover a network of tunnels — and it doesn’t seem like they’re alone in them. Elsewhere, as the episode ends, we see Ken arrive at Vipers and watch Lorraine outside, and Megan throw Carlton’s necklace into the sea, flashing back to her conversation with Kayleigh, imploring her to tell the whole truth. What else is there to be learned here? In the very final scene, Erin and Broome find a grim pile of skeletons, left to rot.
You can stream Stay Close season 1, episode 7 exclusively on Netflix.
