As with all Harlan Coben thrillers, Just One Look is built on a nested series of twists and turns that gradually reveal the truth of a wide-ranging mystery, spanning multiple characters and several years. It’s slavishly devoted to that formula, and that means the ending is what everyone is waiting for; that’s where the truth finally comes out. Like everything else in this show, Episode 6 performs precisely as advertised, delivering all the key revelations that pay off the audience’s investment.
It’s worth noting, though, that you can’t break down the ending of one of these shows without recounting pretty much the entire thing, since everything is important and loops back around snake-like to eventually swallow the narrative’s own tail. That’s more true here than it usually is, as we’ll see. So let’s start from the beginning.
The Gist of It
Like the novel on which it’s based, Just One Look concerns a seemingly normal, happy wife, mother, and jewelry designer whose entire world collapses after she discovers a mysterious photograph. The woman is Greta, and the photograph is an old one of her husband with a gang of people she doesn’t recognize, including a woman whose face has been crossed out with a red X. When Greta confronts her husband, Jacek, about the picture, he leaves the house and disappears.
The audience quickly learns that Jacek has been kidnapped. It eventually becomes apparent that a traumatic event from Greta’s past, a fire at an old steel plant hosting a concert that left her physically and mentally scarred, is integral to everything.
Greta is also contacted by Borys Gajewicz, a prosecutor whose daughter, Alex, was murdered 15 years prior – she’s the woman in the photograph who has been marked by an X. We learn at the very beginning of Just One Look that she was killed by a contract killer named Marek who took on the job without realizing that “Alex” was a woman’s name; this, you see, was a hitman with principles, one of them being to never kill women.
Connections Emerge
The photograph that Greta receives in Just One Look forms a sort of template for the entire show. Everyone in it is connected, past and present, and several of them are dead or are at risk of becoming so soon. More than even most Harlan Coben shows, this one is about gradually unveiling the connections between these individuals and the band, LAAD, that they were all a part of.
Borys knows that Jacek and his daughter were in this band. He also knows that Alex was dating another remember, Szymon Adamiuk, who seemed to disappear mysteriously and totally after the fire. To prompt Greta into uncovering how more of this fits together, he concocts a story that Alex was pregnant with Jacek’s baby, collapsing Greta’s idea of her happy family life and pushing her to dig ever deeper into her past and Jacek’s.
Greta’s worries about Jacek’s secrets are compounded when she’s informed by Jimmy, a former singer from back in the day, that Jacek has been dead for 15 years. More so than that, apparently, she was there. These are two of Coben’s favorite narrative devices – a character’s incorrect recollection of prior events, and the idea that someone isn’t really who they say they are. Greta gets the pleasure of being in the middle of both these things.
Maria Debska in Just One Look | Image via Netflix
Never Trust a Sandra
Another figure from the past who emerges in a more obvious villain role is Sandra, a lawyer whom Jacek had been in contact with shortly before his disappearance. It’s gradually revealed that Sandra is also connected to LAAD, the fire, and the events that have followed, including the deaths of Alex and later Jimmy. It’s also revealed that Jacek’s kidnapper is working for her.
Why is Sandra manipulating events in this way? Well, of course, it’s to obscure her own part in the affair. Sandra is the sister of Jacek, but not Greta’s husband – the one who died 15 years before. The “Jacek” Greta knows is really Szymon. The real Jacek died after being manipulated by Sandra into a fight with Jimmy over the titular song, “Just One Look” (like Missing You, this is a show that has a musical throughline.)
After Jacek’s death, Sandra encouraged Szymon to assume his identity in exchange for a cut of the “Just One Look” royalties. Sandra had manipulated Jimmy into transferring the rights to the song to her and had started the fire to obscure the truth of what really happened, keeping Szymon/Jacek in on the ruse so that the royalties would stay with her and not default to her father.
The Final Revelations
The ending of Just One Look is about tying up the remaining loose ends more than anything, but it does offer up a few more reveals for good measure. One is that Borys had known at least part of this all along. He knew, for instance, that the real Jacek was dead, but he didn’t know who had hired Marek to kill Alex, so he needed to manipulate Greta into helping him discover the truth. Hence, he had sent the photo to her in the first place.
Greta is aggrieved by this revelation since Borys’s subterfuge resulted in more unnecessary deaths and trauma. But Borys’s counterpoint is that Greta has always been involved in this scandal – she just couldn’t remember her involvement following the fire. Her amnesia is what allowed Szymon to realize his fantasy life with her under the guise of Jacek; it also allowed her to forget that it was she who had taken the photo all those years ago.
