Summary
Episode 5 really ups the human stakes, with some tremendous supporting performances lending real emotional contours to the mystery.
It takes an effort to remember this now, but the inciting incident of Fool Me Once was Maya seeing her dead husband on the nanny cam. I’m not going to claim this detail has been forgotten about since then, as it has come up a fair bit, but it perhaps hasn’t been treated as quite the mystery it should be. Episode 5 at least opens with some unexpected developments in this regard that raise some interesting possibilities for what Maya saw — or was tricked into believing she saw.
It’s Eva, of all people, who inadvertently provides this clue. She turns up at Maya’s place in hysterics because her ex-husband Robby has sent her pictures of her and a Tinder date taken by the same kind of nanny cam she gave Maya. He has hacked into the WiFi and the camera, which makes Maya wonder if someone could have done the same thing and uploaded footage of Joe into her camera to torment her. After what we saw at the end of Episode 4, Shane is the likeliest suspect.
Of course, it’s Shane who Maya calls to come and investigate her WiFi, so it’s no surprise that he finds nothing suspicious. He could have easily covered his tracks if it was him, so this proves nothing, though it does set Maya’s mind at ease a little. Kierce turns up to run through some of the things he has uncovered, but Maya doesn’t recognize PJ, though she does reveal that the Burketts sponsored the Winherst Pumas through Joe, being the supportive uncle to Abby. As Kierce is leaving, Maya spots his hand shaking.
Shane takes Maya and Lily out for the day, which is classic stuff to make the eventual betrayal sting all the more.
Why did Eddie lie about his alibi?
Kierce and McGregor go to see Eddie again to confront about him his false alibi. He claims the lie was just an accident. He had gone to the gym that night, but in the car park outside he’d met a woman named Sasha. They met by chance, she started flirting with him, and Eddie volunteered to give her a ride home. She invited him inside, but he bottled it as soon as he entered and went to the pub. It was a moment of temptation that he almost succumbed to, and he kept it quiet because he didn’t want the kids to find out and get the wrong idea.
Obviously, it needs looking into and verifying, but there’s something quite pathetic about the story that rings true.
Who is Abby and Daniel’s half-brother?
Also continuing on from the end of Episode 4, we learn that Abby is messaging her mysterious half-brother through the DNA website, though she hasn’t told Daniel about it. She organizes a clandestine meeting, and when she’s about to back out at the last minute, her half-brother arrives — it’s Louis, one of the assistant coaches on her football team.
Creepily, Louis got the job so he could be closer to her, although when he explains himself it doesn’t sound quite so bad. He reveals that he had already been in contact with Claire and they had been getting to know each other. She had told him about Abby and Daniel, and he was excited to meet them. But she was killed before he could, which is why he took it upon himself to get the job and try to introduce himself another way.
However, Louis also reveals that just before she died, Claire had him accompany her to a posh private school and pretend to be a student interested in enrolling there so they could take a full tour. He describes it as being like “a secret mission”, which is very odd, and I’m going to go out on a limb and assume it might have something to do with the cold open in Episode 1. How many posh schools can one show have?
Franklin Biddle Academy
Abby calls Maya — who has finally taken Lily to see Judith, albeit reluctantly — and tells her all this, and it does seem like the mention of a posh school beginning with the letter F means something to Maya, but she doesn’t give anything away. Maya tells Abby to tell Eddie what’s going on and she says she will, though I’m not convinced. Nevertheless, Maya is immediately distracted when she spots Caroline at Farnwood. Since Judith said she had been shipped off to a psychiatric facility, it’s a bit of a shock to see her floating around the place, so Maya pursues her when she flees. She doesn’t find Caroline, but she pokes around upstairs and discovers a crest from Franklin Biddle Academy — a posh school beginning with the letter F, just as Louis had described.
Maya goes to Franklin Biddle Academy to see the headmaster, Mr Neville Lockwood. Maya introduces herself and Neville quickly reveals that Judith is one of the school’s most generous benefactors. All of the Burkett children seem to have been educated there. But Maya wants to know specifically what Lockwood spoke about with Claire, and after some light threatening to have Judith cease her funding — if only he knew what their relationship was really like — he reveals that she was interested in a former student named Theo Mora. Theo died while he was still a student at the school, and Neville implies that he was friends with Joe. I think we know where this is going.
How did Theo Mora die?
Neville reveals in Fool Me Once Episode 5 that Theo died from alcohol poisoning. The football team was celebrating a big win and the celebrations got out of hand. It’s difficult to tell whether Neville is privy to the other boys being complicit in tying Theo to a chair and perhaps force-feeding him more alcohol — I have no proof of this, I’m just assuming — but it’s easy to assume he isn’t. However, he does believe that Andrew Burkett, Theo’s best friend, committed suicide because of what happened to Theo.
When Maya’s leaving, Eddie calls looking for Abby, who is missing. Maya is forced to let on that she has tracked down her half-brother, and while she denies having told her about him in the first place, Eddie angrily hangs up regardless. But Maya has more pressing concerns, like tracking down Theo Mora’s father, Javier, through the online advertisement for his gardening business.
Javier died a couple of years ago, but he left behind a wife. Neville was one of his clients. It was his idea to accept Theo to Franklin Biddle on a scholarship to create a more diverse student body. His mother felt like an outsider and thought he would feel the same, but he seemed to flourish. At the funeral, though, she got the sense that the rich kids were protecting each other. Theo didn’t drink. There was something else to the story. And while she said she liked Andrew, who was one of the few kids who cried at the funeral, when she heard about his death on the yacht she thought that grief doesn’t cause a young boy to throw himself to his death — guilt does.
When Maya leaves she gets a missed call from Corey and goes to meet him at his forest lair. He reveals that Tommy Dark has fallen completely off the grid but recently failed to make a payment on a storage space.
Is Kierce dying?
Meanwhile in Fool Me Once Episode 5, Kierce is told he has a degenerative brain condition that is only going to get worse, and his first thought is an understandable one — that he brought this on himself with his alcoholism. There isn’t enough evidence to prove that, but it’s probably likely. There also isn’t enough evidence to say quite how quickly the disease will progress or in what ways he will be affected by it, though one can’t imagine it’d be anything especially good for a police officer and expectant father.
Kierce heads straight to the church to meet Molly and the florist, but he has a minor panic attack. He wants to tell Molly what’s going on but can’t bring himself to do so, and flees from the church. McGregor calls him later to tell him that PJ never showed up for the interview, making him an official suspect. McGregor is also concerned about Kierce’s whereabouts, which he might well be since he’s contemplating throwing himself off a bridge. Nicole tries to talk him down, but Kierce can’t see another way forward. He doesn’t want to put Molly and the baby through it.
How does Fool Me Once Season 1 Episode 5 end?
Maya meets up with Corey to investigate Dark’s storage space, but she’s adamant that he tells her the full story before they go any further. He reveals that Claire exposed criminality throughout Burkett’s entire pharmaceutical department. The entire board, including Joe, must have known about it and been complicit in it. A three-year-old child in India died after being treated by ineffectual Burkett antibiotics, but there were many more deaths. However, the Burketts have had no problem covering that kind of thing up. Whatever big secret Claire discovered that got her killed must somehow be even worse, even more damning than this.
In the obligatory closing montage to cap off Fool Me Once Episode 5, Phil tries to get in touch with PJ, who is on the run, Eddie stares at the photograph of Claire pregnant in 2003. And finally, Maya and Corey enter Dark’s storage locker and find his corpse stuffed in a freezer.
What did you think of Fool Me Once Season 1 Episode 5? Let us know in the comments.
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