The ending of Fool Me Once can’t help but feel a little disappointing. After all, the biggest reveals have already happened, and Episode 8, which clocks in with the shortest runtime of Season 1, is just about connecting the final few dots and providing some closure around the Burkett family’s corruption. It does manage to surprise with a sudden death that it actually commits to, though, and boldly shifts to an 18-years-later epilogue to provide something resembling a happy ending. But there’s a shade of predictability to the whole thing that the previous seven episodes haven’t suffered from, and that’s a shame.
Why did Maya kill Joe?
Picking right up where we left things in Episode 7 — let’s not waste any time here, there’s a lot to go over — Maya explains to Shane that she killed Joe because he killed Claire.
Claire, in working with Corey, had uncovered information that threatened Joe. So, he killed her, using Maya’s Glock 17 that he took from the gun safe. She suspected him but couldn’t prove it, so she enlisted Shane’s help to pull the bullet from police evidence and prove it came from her gun. When the bullet matched, she switched the active Glock 17 with the deactivated one, told Joe she knew what he did, and arranged to meet him at the park.
Joe thought he had the working pistol, so he drew it and pulled the trigger, trying to kill his wife. Nothing. Maya shot him three times, twice to wound him and once to finish him off, creating the impression of a robbery gone wrong. She covered herself in Joe’s blood and pretended to have held him while he died, implicating the bikers to divert attention away from herself. Then she went home and hid the working Glock 17 and replaced the deactivated one.
With the confession out of the way, Shane drives Luka and Izabella out to the middle of nowhere and leaves them there, unharmed but very lost.
Who killed Tommy Dark?
Rambo saw Maya shoot Joe. He tells Kierce, who tells McGregor, asking him to track Joe’s car, which Maya has been using since the police impounded hers. Kierce and McGregor both head after the vehicle at pace. Kierce gets to the nursery where the Range Rover was last spotted and boxes in Eddie while he’s trying to pick up Lily. Eddie, as confused as ever, tracks his own car and realizes that Maya is at home.
While Maya is there, preparing to disappear, dropping her car keys into a bowl gives her a flashback to Joe doing the same thing. He had used her car for something. The implication is that he’d used it to transport Tommy Dark’s corpse, which would explain how his rare blood type got in Maya’s car.
Kierce arrives and arrests Maya. She says she’ll tell him everything.
Why did Joe kill Claire?
Whatever happened immediately following this is left mysterious, since the next we see of Kierce he’s asking for Corey’s help, and the next we see of Maya she’s confronting Judith, Neil, and Caroline at Farnwood. Maya lays out everything — how Judith suspected her of killing Joe and used Izabella and Luka to deep fake the nanny cam footage to force Maya into believing she was going mad. And how Caroline fed her red herrings, like Kierce being on the Burkett payroll. Judith didn’t suspect that Maya killed Joe out of motherly intuition — she knew because Maya had a motive.
Neil and Caroline, it seems, didn’t know that Joe had killed Claire. But Judith did. She frames it as him panicking when Claire wouldn’t hand over stolen documents revealing the trial data falsification, but it isn’t like Joe didn’t have a record of killing people — Theo Mora, Tommy Dark, and of course, Andrew.
It’s not entirely clear whether Judith knew that Joe murdered Andrew. Neil and Caroline certainly didn’t. Judith acts like she didn’t, but she’s acting like none of what Maya said was true, which she knows it is, so it’s hard to gauge how dishonest she’s being. Either way, Claire knew that Joe killed Andrew, which is why Joe made sure he killed her.
What happens to Maya and the Burketts?
If Maya goes down for Joe’s murder, the Burkett’s will be tarnished by the pharmaceutical scandal, so Judith proposes an arrangement. The Burketts pin the blame for the trial data on Joe, and imply he was murdered for it. Maya gets a clean slate, and everyone lives happily ever after. While Maya pretends to mull it over, Neil picks up Maya’s gun and turns it on her. She baits him into shooting her, and he does. And, at Judith’s behest, he shoots her another two times to finish her off.
But then Judith notices the nanny cam on the mantelpiece. The whole thing is being live-streamed on Corey the Whistle’s website. Maya is dead, but the world now knows the truth, and Judith, Neil, and Caroline are all taken into custody. Kierce is distraught at Maya’s fate, but Corey suggests she had the whole thing planned. She knew she had killed Joe, and those civilians overseas. This was the end of the road for her, the only way everything could play out.
How does Fool Me Once Season 1 end?
The finale cuts to 18 years later. Kierce, now with a bigger beard but otherwise looking healthier than he has for the majority of the season, arrives at Winherst General Hospital. Eddie is also there. Their kids are all grown up. Abby even has two of her own.
In flashback, we see Maya also wrote Eddie a letter, like the one she left for Lily. We also see the conversation that took place between Maya and Kierce after he arrested her outside the house. Maya told him she wanted to expose the Burketts, and he told her about what their pills did to him. He offered to help her take them down. And we saw what happened next.
Kierce and Eddie are in the hospital to meet a grown-up Lily’s baby. Shane is also there. Fool Me Once ends with Lily revealing that they’re calling the baby Maya.
What did you think of Fool Me Once Season 1 Episode 8 and the ending? Let us know in the comments.
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