Summary
A serviceable penultimate episode puts some more pieces into place and sets up a big finale with a last-minute twist.
This recap of The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 9, “Isabel”, contains spoilers.
A very drunk Isabel relays the penultimate episode of The Afterparty Season 2, slotting a few final pieces into place and throwing a last-minute curveball that very much leaves things up in the air for the finale.
It’s a mixed-bag outing that doesn’t feel especially striking in its formal gimmick or its developments, though it does have its fair share of funny lines and sets things up for an interesting ending, even if you could ask one or two awkward questions if you were that way inclined about how certain characters and details are being overlooked for drama’s sake.
The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 9 Recap
Isabel’s testimony takes the form of those classic psychological thrillers in which a character — usually, it must be said, a woman — is forced to reckon with whether she might be losing her mind, or if everyone around her is conspiring against her.
Isabel has been struggling with the death of her husband, who either died in his sleep or in a plane crash, depending on who you ask. As it turns out, it’s both — he fell asleep while piloting his plane.
Why does Isabel think Edgar is gaslighting her?
Either way, the loss of her husband forced Isabel to turn to booze and medication, primarily very bright blue sleeping pills that don’t actually help her sleep. With a fuzzy mystery filter and Isabel’s inconsistent perspective, this is classic “woman going mad” stuff.
The central tension of the story comes from Isabel’s assumption that Edgar and Hannah, though especially Edgar, are gaslighting her into thinking she’s losing it. She distinctly remembers Edgar claiming Grace’s name was Gail during a game of Scrabble, but when she returns to the board, the tiles spell out Grace. Various items, like a sword and an ornamental suit of armor, are ordered to the vineyard in Isabel’s name, though she has no recollection of purchasing them.
Why does Edgar want to put Isabel in a conservatorship?
Edgar proposes putting Isabel in a conservatorship like she’s Britney Spears, which would give him control of all her substantial assets. But such a thing is only granted when someone is incapable of making their own legal and financial decisions, so it stands to reason that if this was Edgar’s intention he’d need credible evidence that Isabel was losing it.
Most of this episode revolves around Isabel noticing one thing after another that gives her reason to suspect Edgar. When Sebastian tries to seduce her, trying to learn the name of her late husband’s horse, she assumes Edgar sent him (we know he didn’t from Sebastian’s testimony.) The wedding place settings read “Edgar and Gail”, even though she distinctly remembers ordering the correct ones (and finds them later).
She also notices that Grace takes the exact same pills as she does. When she asks, though, Grace reveals that they’re not sleeping pills at all, but Adderall, an ADHD medication. Isabel surmises that Edgar was trying to keep her awake, and thus increasingly delirious.
To try and catch Edgar in the act of manipulating her, she annotates her wedding speech with a star, so she’ll know it has been switched with one of his authorship. Lo and behold, when she gets up to give the speech, the star is missing. Since she can’t start ranting that Edgar is gaslighting her, but she also can’t read out whatever he has written on her behalf, she instead bizarrely recites the lyrics of MMMBop by Hanson.
What is Sebastian doing?
Elsewhere, we see Travis confronting Sebastian out on the grounds.
This is a little weird since nobody else even notices that Sebastian isn’t present for Isabel’s story, which at the very least would qualify as weird. Travis accuses Sebastian of trying to sell off Edgar’s cryptocurrency, since once news of his death gets out and the fact he was artificially inflating its value through shell companies is revealed, the currency will tank. Sebastian more or less admits this, but it’s not exactly a surprise to anyone — least of all the audience — that this is what he’d be doing.
The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 9 Ending Explained
Who does Isabel accuse?
Isabel accuses two people of killing Edgar in this episode. The first is herself.
The cake scene takes on some new context when we understand that Isabel figured Edgar was trying to poison her. Thus, when she switched the plates around when Edgar was distracted by Feng trying to force-feed him shaved ice, as we saw in Episode 8, she assumed that she was responsible for poisoning Edgar.
However, Aniq pokes some holes in the timeline and also raises the obvious problem of how Roxana was killed since the lizard didn’t like cake.
When Sebastian comes back inside, he’s told that Isabel apparently murdered Edgar and seems totally unsurprised and unconcerned by this — almost as if he knows it isn’t true.
After his business calls, it turns out Sebastian also called the police, who arrive en masse at the very end of the episode. As soon as they get there, Isabel immediately changes her tune and accuses Grace of killing Edgar.
You can stream The Afterparty Season 2 Episode 9, “Isabel”, exclusively on Apple TV+.
