Summary
The Afterparty delivers a better episode with more one-liners and revelations, and a more enjoyable framing gimmick.
This recap of The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 3, “Travis”, contains spoilers.
Say what you will about The Afterparty Season 2, and most of it will still be accurate, but the third episode, “Travis”, is at least better than the first two. There are more – and better – one-liners. The film-noir gimmick is more entertaining than the period piece in Episode 2. It’s enough that one does wonder why Apple TV+ decided to premiere just the first two instead of, as it usually does, the first three.
Nevertheless, we’re here now, and as the title makes obvious, this week’s outing is from the perspective of Grace’s ex-boyfriend and proud conspiracy – sorry, “truth” – nut, Travis. And it’s a fairly simple unfolding of pretty obviously suspicious details surrounding Edgar, though the fact they’re coming from his new bride’s former lover is, naturally, cause for a degree of concern.
The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 3 Recap
The beginning of the shady stuff is as follows – Travis, tipped off by a hidden “Tech Scam” missive in the wedding RSVP, digs into Edgar’s cryptocurrency and discovers that its biggest investors are all shell companies owned by Edgar himself. In other words, he’s inflating the value of his crypto using his own money, which is dodgy even by crypto standards, and Aniq and Danner – the latter of whom not only doesn’t know anything about the blockchain but is so uninterested that she’s happy to have Aniq do the deductions if it spares her the explanation – agree.
Why did Travis attend the wedding?
Travis’s motivation for attending the wedding, then, was to sabotage the whole thing so that Grace – who he insists he no longer has feelings for, somewhat unconvincingly – didn’t get hitched to someone who’d inevitably rip her off. He’s also still smarting about losing his own money in a crypto scam, which is another thing he insists isn’t that big of a motivating factor but quite clearly is.
I like the film noir hook here, in part because the script is smart enough to use it to recontextualize previous exchanges – what was snidey dialogue before becomes covert message-exchanging now, and so on – but also because it builds character development into the premise by ensuring that even in his own gumshoe detective fantasy Travis is still a loser.
But he’s also dogged enough to find genuine evidence, such as the shell company business, and a load of codes in Edgar’s study desk drawer that Travis thinks proves he planned to fake his own death, profit from the crypto scam, and use Grace as a patsy.
Aniq and Danner aren’t entirely convinced by the theory, but a sheet of codes is a sheet of codes, and nobody without something to hide would require such a thing.
And this is the point. Travis isn’t a smart PI with a magic pinboard, he’s a jealous conspiracist who is prone to embellishment and obsession because he’s insecure, and he knows this about himself to the degree that his own failings and insecurities are literally baked into his fantasies. But he’s also – or at least seems to be, unless he’s much cleverer than he’s letting on – well-intentioned, and his efforts at the very least prove that Edgar was up to no good.
The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 3 Ending Explained
What was the cause of Edgar’s death?
Elsewhere, Zoe and Grace make amends – the latter is highly suspicious in her questioning of how Danner and Aniq solved “the last murder” – and start snooping on Hannah, since she collects typewriters and the cufflink they’re looking for is a G key from an old one. They poke around in her yurt and, lo and behold, there’s a typewriter with the G key missing.
But the bigger revelation is that Hannah’s garden is also filled with poisonous plants of three different types, and one of them, Devil’s Trumpet, causes a) hallucinations and b) death, and was c) in the wedding centrepieces that Hannah made. Dun, dun, dun!
Since this matches up with Edgar’s seemingly drunken rant at the after-party and his time of death, it seems we’ve found our murder weapon.
You can stream The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 3, “Travis” exclusively on Apple TV+.
