Summary
A cascade of terrible decisions leads to all-out chaos as the hunt for a cannibal and a blackmail attempt both go catastrophically wrong.
This Avenue 5 season 2, episode 4 recap for the episode titled “How It Ends: As a Starter and a Main”, contains spoilers.
In case you missed it, Avenue 5 season 2, episode 3 ended with a dangerous cannibal being locked aboard the ship, so “How It Ends: As a Starter and a Main” begins with Billie locking the entire vessel down. Every door is locked. Every passenger is confined to whatever room they were in when the lockdown began. You can see the utility of this as a typical safety measure, but it overlooks an important detail. Somewhere, a currently unknown number of people have been locked in with the cannibal.
Avenue 5 season 2, episode 4 recap
Naturally, Rav’s general ineptitude means she accidentally announces to the entire ship that there’s a cannibal among them, though nobody knows what he looks like, leading to even more paranoia and chaos than usual. Since Ryan has a master key, it falls to him and Billie to move around through the ship and use the on-board security system to try and isolate the killer, while Iris and Judd attempt to blackmail Lucas back on Earth into helping get them home by threatening to expose Earth’s imminent lithium shortage.
It becomes obvious pretty quickly that The Flesh Prince is trapped with Matt, Mia, Elena, and Elena’s daughter Paloma, though none of them actually know that. We also get several fun predicaments with certain characters who’re trapped in certain rooms, such as Frank in the spa, who is suspected of being the cannibal because nobody recognizes him from his own show, and Karen, who thinks she has finally found a way to be useful and in charge again but quickly realizes she isn’t up to the task.
How does the cannibal get caught?
There are various attempts to capture Nathan in several of the locked-down areas of the ship, but the whole matter is complicated since nobody knows what he looks like. Well, some people do — Frank does since they worked on his cooking show together, and Karen does, since she was there at the time. But when Frank is saved from the spa the only description he can offer is “average” in all areas, and Karen doesn’t reveal that she knows what he looks like because she instead wants to take the opportunity to organize everyone in her room.
Finally, though, Frank is able to identify Nathan on the security monitors, and when he points him out with Matt and Elena, of all people, Ryan rushes there to apprehend him and throw him in the brig.
Somehow, a lot of this becomes Ryan’s fault, and Hugh Laurie takes the chance to be flustered and runs with it. Matt is furious with him because he breaks up their soul-searching session in order to “rescue” Elena and Paloma from Nathan the cannibal. Billie is annoyed with him because he keeps losing the master key fob. And when he, Billie, and Rav argue about the state of things, including the dwindling food supply and the eight-year journey, the whole ship hears it because Rav never shut off the communicator. Ryan gets the blame for that because he’s ostensibly the captain.
The result is, predictably, absolute chaos. The episode ends with alarms blaring and people screaming as the frenzy gets underway. And the ship’s only lifeline back on Earth has suddenly become a no-go since Judd tried to threaten him by live-feeding his face into the Avenue 5 TV show and accidentally gave away the lithium shortage problem. With that leverage gone and the ship’s passengers running amok, things look even bleaker than they usually do.
