Summary
Fool Me Once gets off to a rip-roaring start with many interlocking mysteries developing at pace.
Fool Me Once has a faintly horrifying cold open, which is impressive since it has little to do with anything that follows, and even by the end lacks any real context. There’s just something about a bunch of school kids in masks, especially when their blazers have a crest. Who knows what posh kids get up to in their downtime? Could it be that they ritualistically immolate people? That’s certainly the implication that Episode 1 of this new Harlan Coben series makes.
Anyway, as mentioned, most of this premiere has nothing to do with the above. Instead, it settles in on Maya Stern, an ex-Army combat pilot whose sister Claire and husband Joe have both been shot to death within months of each other. At Joe’s funeral, we’re treated to functional flashbacks fast-forwarding us through their meeting, their marriage, and Joe’s eventual untimely demise, seemingly at the hands of teenage muggers.
Joe comes from a rich family and his mother, Judith, doesn’t like Maya, who is still smarting from her trauma and, to make matters worse, left the Army amid an ongoing scandal. She thinks she’s a “bit of rough”, but that’s what a Mancunian accent gets you.
Is that Joe on the nanny cam?
The plot gets kick-started when Maya’s friend Eva gifts her a digital photo frame that not only cycles through family pictures but also contains a hidden camera that can be used to spy on Izabella, the nanny of Maya’s daughter Lily whose family has been in the employ of Joe’s family for years. On literally day one of this thing sitting in Lily’s playroom, it records a man who looks very much like Joe come into the room, hug Lily, and leave, seemingly with the complicity of Izabella. He’s wearing a green shirt and shoes that are missing from the closet upstairs.
But nobody believes Maya about this since she’s still struggling with her grief and combat flashbacks and can’t sleep. When she confronts Izabella about it she plays dumb, implying she can’t even see a man in the footage and thus that Maya must be imagining it. But when Maya turns her back for a second, Izabella pepper sprays her and flees, which is at least a little bit suspicious.
DS Sami Kierce, who is investigating Joe’s murder, doesn’t believe Maya either — less so when the SD card containing the footage seems to be missing, presumably taken by Izabella. He thinks Maya is losing it. When she recounts the details of Joe’s murder, during which two youths on bikes tried to mug them and eventually shot Joe dead with a pistol Maya recognized as a 9mm Glock 17, Kierce rather strongly implies that Maya’s own gun might have been the murder weapon. To be fair, Maya keeps an eclectic arsenal of firearms in a thumbprint-locked cabinet and an old, deactivated Glock 17 in a glass case, so it is a justifiable line of inquiry. Besides, what kind of teenager has access to military-grade handguns?
What’s going on with Kierce?
Kierce, for what it’s worth, has his share of problems. He’s dealing with an unspecified health issue that causes him to black out, which happens on his way back to the station, causing him to crash his car through a fence. But that’s the least of it. Kierce’s superior implies that his pending marriage to his fiance Molly might bring back “unhappy memories of what happened last time.” We don’t know what happened last time, of course, but we do know that Kierce is in regular contact with someone named Nicole about his illness and that he’s three and a half years sober — implying that, at one time, he was drunk.
To keep an eye on Kierce, his boss partners him up with a young and enthusiastic health-conscious officer named Marty McGregor. Kierce reluctantly takes him to the scene of Joe’s supposed murder and explains that Maya left the Army after a whistleblower revealed she had been responsible for the deaths of civilians. Many people think she should be in prison. The implication that follows, I think, is that Maya might be deliberately trying to suggest she’s nuts to absolve her of responsibility for this, but it’s a little unclear. Either way, Kierce sends McGregor off to get the ballistic report from Maya’s Glock 17 and see if the gun used to kill Joe was connected to any other open cases.
Aunt Maya to the rescue
Maya’s sister left behind a husband, Eddie, who is dealing with his grief by drinking and not shaving, and a couple of teenage kids. Maya goes to watch the older girl play football and intervenes when her cartoonishly awful coach keeps insulting her about her performance and her weight. Maya pulls his shorts down in front of everyone, which must constitute some kind of crime given the setting, but Eddie isn’t happy about this and bans Maya from seeing the kids again. She’s a liability and “death follows her”. Fair enough.
I thought this was a throwaway scene to show that Maya doesn’t deal with her anger very well, but the ending of Episode 1 suggests Fool Me Once has more plans for this coach character. More on this in a moment.
Car Chase
Maya’s support network is her former army buddies, particularly Shane, and while she has them all over for a barbecue at her ridiculous palatial home, she confesses to him that she has been seeing Joe everywhere and that she thinks someone in a red Volkswagen is following her. Luckily, Shane can illegally track down the owner, which he agrees to do, but Maya has to rush off when Judith calls to tell her that Izabella is there insisting she’ll never work for Maya again.
Maya rushes over to Farnwood and catches Izabella fleeing with Luka. She gives chase, first in the car and then on foot, but Izabella gets away. Maya returns to Judith and tells her about what she saw on the nanny cam but, predictably, Judith doesn’t believe her either.
How does Fool Me Once Season 1 Episode 1 end?
When Maya gets home, Kierce and McGregor are waiting for her. They have the ballistic report, which confirms that the same gun used to kill her husband was also used to kill her sister.
In a flurry of scenes, we see a man leaving flowers on Claire’s grave with a note for her, the football coach covering up a bloodstain in the back of his van, Eva setting up her own nanny cam, and Izabella looking through the footage on the SD card and deleting it, suggesting she could see Joe in the footage after all.
The episode ends with Judith standing at Joe’s grave, though her attention quickly turns to another headstone — that of Joe’s brother, Andrew, who died in 1996 when the cold open took place. We flashback to that eerie scene, implying that Andrew was perhaps killed by the masked schoolboys, or was potentially one of them.
What did you think of Fool Me Once Season 1 Episode 1? Let us know in the comments below.
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