Summary
Ken Jeong delivers a surprisingly tender performance in an episode that presents the most compelling suspect yet — although there’s clearly still a fair amount of the mystery left to unravel.
This recap of The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 8, “Feng”, contains spoilers.
“Feng” has one of the more novel framing concepts that The Afterparty Season 2 has employed thus far. After reaching out to Feng’s social media videographer Kyler in Episode 7, Aniq, Danner, Zoe, and Travis are able to distract him from taint-related injuries long enough to fire over all of the raw footage he captured from Grace and Edgar’s wedding. So, that footage, in a TikTok-ready 9:16 aspect ratio, forms the bulk of the stuff we see.
However, since Feng hired Kyler and is the focus of the footage, he wants to sit in on Aniq and Danner watching it, so that he can provide context and, ideally, explain himself when he looks too suspicious (it doesn’t help that the first thing he says when he sits down is, “Everything I did this weekend, I did for my family.”)
With Zoe out of the way, since Aniq has persuaded Vivian to tell her and Grace about her affair with Ulysses before it comes out some other way, Aniq, Danner, and Feng sit down to watch Kyler’s footage.
The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 8 Recap
What becomes apparent immediately is that Feng was essentially using Grace’s wedding as a promo for his Taiwanese shaved ice business, the King of Bing. He’s reduced to tears by the excitement of his new catering truck — before Aniq “destroyed it”, obviously — and enlists Kyler to film a whole bunch of social media advertising for the business. We also learn he’s in what seems like a fairly substantial amount of debt so that probably goes some way towards explaining why.
Why was the King of Bing truck towed?
Kyler’s footage includes the pre-rehearsal meet-and-greets and the rehearsal itself, where we see Feng storming out when Ulysses arrives on horseback. However, Feng claims that despite not wanting to see his brother, he didn’t leave because of him — he left because his King of Bing catering truck was being towed due to his debts.
After transferring the ice to the freezer and planning to cater the entire reception using a single homemade ice shaver, Feng tells Vivian, who’s covered in camel milk, that the truck had to be towed because Aniq wrote it off, so that’s where that particular lie came from. Feng hasn’t told his family about his financial difficulties and plans to convince Edgar to invest in the company so that he doesn’t have to reveal the truth.
As a side note, this is Ken Jeong‘s first real opportunity for the spotlight this season, and while he’s doing some of the usual Ken Jeong stuff, what’s most surprising is the little notes of emotion he shows when watching Vivian interact with Ulysses, or seeing himself lying to his family to protect his image.
What does Ulysses give Edgar as a wedding gift?
We also see Feng’s initial pitch to Edgar. He wants an investment of $400,000 dollars and wants to use the wedding as a case study, but the pitch is interrupted by Ulysses, who delivers Edgar a hard-carved Malian stringed instrument as a wedding gift. It’s not totally clear if Ulysses is sabotaging his brother intentionally here, but that’s certainly the implication.
We also see that Feng was just about to go to Grace’s rescue after Edgar abandoned her during the first dance rehearsal, and was once again upstaged by Ulysses. Again, we know Ulysses’s real motivations for doing this, but his habit of upstaging his brother is obviously longstanding enough to cause Feng visible emotional pain.
Did Feng kill Edgar?
After being unable to foist any baobing on Edgar during the wedding, Feng implies with a worrying amount of adamancy that he’s going to get the money to save his business, and Danner takes it as a threat. She chooses that time to tell him that since Grace never signed Edgar’s prenup, she’ll inherit his entire fortune. The implication is clear — Feng is a prime suspect. And a later video taken at the afterparty, during which Edgar and Roxanna finally try the shaved ice and hate it, and Feng instructs Kyler to dispose of the bowl in a manner quite like a killer getting rid of a murder weapon, only makes Feng look even more guilty.
Ken Jeong really delivers here, when explaining to Aniq that his entire business was built around trying to please Vivian, and trying, for once in his life, to seem more adventurous, more Ulysses-like to her. It’s a vulnerable performance, and the fact it’s deliberately paired with Vivian tearfully explaining to Zoe and Grace how much she loves their father, it seems Zoe’s parents are in the clear.
The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 8 Ending Explained
Now seems as good a time as any to bring up Isabel. At the top of the episode, she tried to sell Aniq Edgar’s suit of armor, and when reminded that it really isn’t very long at all since Edgar died, she implied that Aniq doesn’t know the half of it. Later, when Vivian told Zoe and Grace about her affair with Ulysses, she said, “We all have our secrets,” and we smash cut straight to Isabel dumping pills down the toilet. And in Kyler’s last bit of footage from the wedding reception, when Feng sends him to try and force some of the baobing on Edgar, he recorded a conversation between Edgar and Isabel with very threatening undertones.
It’s this footage that Danner stumbles on at the end of the episode — having already watched it once and not noticed — and that compels her to confront Isabel, who claims outright to know who killed Edgar. And no, it wasn’t Grace.
You can stream The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 8, “Feng” exclusively on Apple TV+.
