Summary
Fool Me Once continues to deliver huge twists and swerves at an impressive pace, unveiling more and more of a surprisingly layered narrative.
To say Fool Me Once is getting interesting would be an understatement. Episode 3 — there are still, incredibly, another five left — ups the stakes considerably by throwing curveballs left and right, including a huge one at the end completely out of nowhere. Rarely for a whodunit like this, it’s almost impossible to tell who might be guilty, or why, or who they might have been working (or sleeping) with. Everyone seems to have something to hide, anyone could be guilty of anything, and trying to figure out what’s coming next is a fool’s errand (unless you’ve read the book, I guess.) It’s much easier just to hit play on the next episode.
Nobody likes their mother-in-law, but even by the usual standards, Judith is a nightmare. Two of her kids are supposedly dead, the others don’t know quite how they died or indeed if they’re dead at all, and for some reason she’s been paying off the lead detective investigating her favorite’s murder. Just what is going on here?
Maya’s family isn’t much better, to be fair. Abby and Daniel continue to look through the photographs they had developed in Episode 2 and discover another clue calling back to the montage at the end of Episode 1. The sunflowers with the note may have been left by her 2003 baby-daddy, who may also have been the person she was communicating with on a secret burner phone. Daniel uses an app to look up a photo of the guy and identify him in the present day. His name is Alexander Dosman, he’s the CEO of Bimbal, a huge tech company, and he transferred to the local office eight months prior.
Eddie remains a suspect
Kierce and McGregor once again pore over their ever-expanding evidence board and decide to hone in on Eddie as a potential suspect in Joe’s murder, even though he had an alibi for Claire’s. Kierce has finally pursued medical testing for his frequent blackouts, but he’s keeping the matter close to his chest otherwise, getting other people to drive and maintaining his story about the cat being the cause of his crash.
But Kierce’s condition seems to be worsening. When they go to visit Eddie, he almost collapses when getting out of the car and then when leaving the house, and the second time McGregor notices. The trip isn’t wasted, though, since Eddie acts shiftily enough to qualify as a suspect in Joe’s murder, and his alibi that he was at the gym on the night Joe was killed doesn’t hold much water.
Who has been following Maya?
Maya tells Eva about the calls from Claire’s burner phone to the arcade. She realizes that all the calls were made in the morning, before opening time, so decides to go back then and see who’s hanging around. When she gets there, she immediately spots the red VW that has been following her around. She manages to plant a tracker on it before the employee she spoke with on her previous visit, who didn’t seem suspicious before but does now, shoos her away.
Maya sticks around until someone gets in the VW and drives off. She follows, which is dumb on a couple of levels since she’s doing it in her own car, which the driver would recognize, and it invalidates the point of planting anything on the vehicle in the first place. The VW gives her the slip fairly easily, but she tells Shane to keep an eye on the tracker she planted. She also tells him about Kierce being bribed, and he agrees to look into him.
Shane tracks the car’s location while Maya is giving a helicopter piloting lesson, and the VW is less than a mile away. So, in front of her rather confused client, she takes control of the chopper and follows the car from the air, When she loses sight of it, she lands the helicopter in a forest clearing and hilariously leaves the learner — who has a dentist appointment in an hour — sitting inside it.
In the woods, Maya is ambushed by a couple of dudes working for the driver of the VW, who turns out to be Corey the Whistle. He’s operating out of a secret woodland hideout and has been communicating with Claire for a while since she contacted him asking him not to release the audio of the tape implicating Maya. He agreed, but in exchange, he used her to leak insider information from Burkett Global. Corey thinks that both Claire and Joe stumbled on the same big secret, and it got them both killed.
After Dark
The big secret involves someone named Tommy Dark, who the Burketts have been paying off for twenty-six years. Dark runs a security firm for a shipping company but he’s shifty and Claire had no luck getting information about him. Joe had reached out to Corey and arranged to meet him in person, but he was killed before he was able to. Corey, who claims he wants to avenge Claire’s death because he grew close to her in the brief time they knew each other, gives the information to Maya in the hopes she’ll have more luck investigating Dark than he has. He also tells her that if she gets a missed call from the arcade he needs to meet with her urgently.
Maya goes to the shipyard where Dark is operating, but all she finds is a very bitter assistant who tells her that Dark has taken some time off, owes her two months’ pay, and that neither Maya nor Claire, whom she recognizes from the photo Maya shows her, had a scheduled appointment. Luckily she has decided to quit and gives Maya his home address anyway.
Maya goes to Dark’s home address, but he isn’t home. His wife is, though, and while she’s polite enough, she’s hiding things about her husband’s work, current location, and the reason why the Burketts have been paying him nine grand a month for 26 years. Maya gives her a card so she can call her if she suddenly remembers anything, and then goes to work through the clues at the shooting range with Shane. Dark doesn’t seem to be rich, and his car had a sticker on it reading non terra sed aquis, a sailing motto translating to “Not by land, but by sea.” Maya suspects that there might be a connection to Andrew’s death, which happened at sea, so she asks Shane to look into Dark and investigate.
Bimbal Family
After football training — yes, the coach is still blatantly psychotic — Abby and Daniel go to infiltrate Bimbal, which they manage with hilarious ease by manipulating the virtual assistant that asks for the purpose of their visit and their preferred pronouns. Posing as the children of an employee, they head deeper into the building, where Alexander Dosman spots them. He knows who they are, but says he can’t speak to them there, so he airdrops them a location to visit later and promises to answer any of their questions then.
How does Fool Me Once Season 1 Episode 3 end?
McGregor, suspicious of Kierce, starts looking into the circumstances of his accident, but they’re interrupted when Kierce suddenly arrives with CCTV footage of the bikes Maya described on the night of Joe’s death. They’re able to track the license plate of one of them to an address. They go there and are surprised to find it’s a relatively nice crib in a nice area. When they knock on the door it’s revealed that the owner of the Ducati is Phillip Dawson, otherwise known as Abby’s football coach.
Speaking of Abby, she goes to the address that Dosman gave her but persuades Daniel to stay outside while she goes in alone. At Farnwood, Caroline is snooping around and finds the green shirt that Joe was wearing in the nanny cam footage. And at Maya’s house, she’s woken in the night to Lily’s crying. However, she sees she’s not in bed, so she heads down to her locker full of guns, where she pulls on a pair of black gloves and reveals a hidden pistol — a 9mm Glock 17, much like the one used to kill her sister and husband.
What did you think of Fool Me Once Season 1 Episode 3? Let us know in the comments.
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