We recap the Peacock series The Calling season 1, which contains spoilers. What cases did Detective Avraham solve? Let’s dive in.
The Calling’s first season introduces Detective Avraham ”Avi” Avraham (Jeff Wilbusch) and his NYPD team consisting of new-hire Janine (Juliana Canfield), long-term colleague Earl (Michael Mosley), and precinct Captain Kathleen (Karen Robinson). During eight episodes, a deeply religious Avi solves three cases with help from his colleagues and some assistance from his innate ability to approach the grueling work with compassion. Despite his love for humanity, Avi prefers to work alone, so there’s some resistance from him at first when Janine asks to be his partner. As the series progresses, the friendship between the two grows, as does her interest in learning more about Avi’s Orthodox Jewish faith.
The Calling season 1 recap – what cases did Detective Avraham solve?
Avi’s methods are interesting, to say the least, which leads to constant friction with his Captain. The detective prays in Hebrew over the victim’s bodies, relies strongly on his intuition, draws fish, and often puts himself in harm’s way. In the first episode, he confronts an armed robber and single-handedly subdues him without waiting for backup. He also has a tendency to get too emotionally invested in each case, which sometimes leads to dangerous consequences. We also learn that Avi’s main reason for joining the police force was because his dad was murdered years before, with the killer still at large.
In the first half of the series, the narrative centers on the abrupt disappearance of a teen boy named Vincent Conte (Charlie Besso). According to his mom, Nora (Nora Conte), on a Tuesday morning, the boy left for school and never came home. At first, Avi dismisses the case as a potential runaway but soon realizes there’s more to the story.
In the course of the investigation, Avi and Janine learn that Vincent’s dad, Leonard (Steven Pasquale), was verbally abusive. The boy had a close relationship with his writing tutor, Zack Miller (Noel Fisher), who’s also a wannabe novelist. Zack and his wife, Dania also happen to live in the same building as the Conte family (Annabelle Dexter-Jones).
As they dug deeper into Vincent’s life and disappearance, Avi slowly learns that everyone involved was holding back information. A homeless former university professor, John Wentworth (Tony Curran) would often lend books to Vincent, yet he claimed he never spoke to the boy. Zack used the teen’s disappearance as a way of furthering his dying writing career and wrote disturbing letters from Vincent’s perspective. Dania believed her husband capable of having hurt the teen, especially as he knew she shared a clandestine kiss with him days before he went missing.
Both of Vincent’s parents acted strange throughout the investigation. Nora appeared to be grieving and hopeless, while Leonard was hostile. So hostile that he accused Detective Avraham of inappropriate behavior with his wife. But in the end, the man’s hostility proved to be a mask for something sinister. Vincent wasn’t missing, he was dead. And the murderer was his father. At first, Leonard tried claiming he killed his son in a fit of rage after finding the boy molesting his sister. As it turned out, Leonard was the one hurting his daughter and committed murder to hide the truth.
After learning what really happened to poor Vincent, Avi, Janine, and Earl spent the second half of the series trying to uncover who planted a bomb outside a daycare operated by Anna Harvey (Constance Zimmer). While the bomb turns out to be a fake, two suspects emerge from the crime scene: Brad Holt (Rafael Cebrián) man who ran from Janine when she tried speaking to him, and Paul Serra (Chris Sullivan), a man who raised the detective’s suspicion when he claimed knowledge of the bomb is a fake.
As their investigation progresses, the team of detectives learns that Brad’s wife, Marcie pulled out their daughter from the daycare due to her jealousy. And she was right to be jealous because her husband was indeed having an affair with Miss Harvey. However, when the daycare owner tried ending the relationship, Brad started stalking her. In a fit of rage, Brad planted the fake bomb to scare his ex-lover.
Paul, however, had little to do with the bomb, and it was only by chance that he caught Janine’s attention. But when Avi and his partner started looking into him, they found that his wife, Elisabeth had been missing for over a week, with the man claiming she had gone to Mexico to be with her family. At first, Avi thought Elisabeth was the one who placed the bomb because there was no other reason for a loving mother to abandon her children. But the truth turned out to be more gruesome than that.
Seemingly a lovely father and adoring husband, Paul was the one who murdered his wife. The man had recently lost a substantial amount of money in bad crypto investment, and she was about to leave him for a billionaire she met at the private members club she worked at. Unable to cope with his insecurities, Paul strangled Elisabeth and hid her body in cement at the house where he was installing underfloor heating. At the police station, Avi’s harsh words led Paul to turn Violent and grab a gun. Luckily, Captain Kathleen shot the man before he was able to pull the trigger.
The Calling season 1 ending
The Calling season 1 ended with Avi and Janine having to leave a celebration to go to a new crime scene. This time, the victim was John Wentworth. As Avi had developed a friendly rapport with the man over the years, he was saddened by the loss. In an intriguing twist, the deceased had “Father” written on his forehead in Hebrew. Could this new murder be connected to the death of Avi’s dad from decades ago?
And there’s our recap of The Calling season 1! What did you think of the first series? Comment below.
