‘The Last Thing He Told Me’ Season 2, Episode 3 Recap – Reunions and Reconciliations

I might be wrong, but I’m not sure what Season 2 of The Last Thing He Told Me needed was a much narrower focus. Episode 3, “Reunion”, does away with the vast majority of scenes involving characters other than Hannah and Bailey, and indeed, as per the title, brings Owen himself back into their physical orbit. The effect is supposed to be therapeutic; he and his wife and daughter trying to work out their issues, and there is, granted, a little bit of that. But the context is all wrong, since most of the bonding is being filtered through Hannah’s relationship with her estranged mother, Carol, at whose house in Arizona Hannah and Bailey are taking shelter.

It’s worth mentioning at the top that this doesn’t happen in the book; it’s all an invention for the adaptation. I’m not typically a stickler for accuracy, and this is the kind of thing I’d ordinarily let go. But I find its inclusion here very curious, especially in the context of Hannah and Bailey trying to tiptoe around their reunion with Owen. Carol has no idea about any of the events of the previous season, so she’s trying to put the pieces together as though Hannah is smarting from a typical marital dispute. Her perspective doesn’t add anything meaningful, nor does it inform Hannah and Bailey’s viewpoints. She’s just here because someone thought it’d be a cool idea for Hannah to suddenly reunite with her mother.

Hannah’s reluctance to immediately reconcile with Owen, and Bailey’s passive-aggressive reminders of his abandonment, even if it was necessary, work just fine. This is a pretty logical way for these characters to behave. Owen is, alongside Grady, trying to build a concrete case against the Campanos to take the family down for their shift into drug trafficking with a big-time international syndicate. The inspiration was Nicholas’s first heart attack, one he ostensibly recovered from, since his brush with mortality made it clear to Owen that he wouldn’t outlive the Campanos’ desire for vengeance. As soon as he was out of the way, Hannah and Bailey would be vulnerable again, since they’d be used to lure out Owen.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with this. It is, in fact, the same justification used in the book. But it’s a relatively slight part of an episode that, for some reason, chooses to focus much more on Hannah’s lingering resentment for Carol, who basically chose to abandon her daughter so she could pursue her unfaithful husband. There are flashbacks to a prior attempt at reconciliation that Hannah rebuffed, understandably, making her decision to choose Carol as her current port in a storm even more perplexing.

Carol’s justification for choosing her husband over Hannah doesn’t work especially well for me. As she explains, she was a photographer, but on account of her being a woman, her art was never taken especially seriously. When her husband sold her work with his name attached to it, though, it was lauded. By following him, Carol was following her own art, finding a way to release it in the world, even if she never received due credit for it. I’m not sure there’s a great deal of difference in abandoning your daughter for a man and abandoning your daughter for a few photos, but Carol seems to think there is, and so, curiously, does Hannah. This doesn’t quite lead to a reconciliation, but it leads to something close to it, at the very least an abandonment of the hatred that has kept Hannah ticking all these years.

In terms of actual present-day plot development, The Last Thing He Told Me Season 2, Episode 3 is quite light in this area, too. The big development is that Hannah, Bailey, and Owen are forced to leave Arizona at pace, because Bailey does that classic teen idiot thing of calling her boyfriend while on the run, which, on account of Shep’s phone being bugged, gave away their location. The trope isn’t quite as annoying here as it usually is, since Bailey was using a burner and assumed it would cover her tracks, but it’s still a nuisance. Even though Owen wanted to keep his family out of the firing line he would inevitably be walking into by trying to solidify his case, it looks like the rest of the season is going to be a family affair.

And then there’s Grady. Owen’s trust in the U.S. Marshal is enough to paper over any cracks in his loyalty that might have been teased by the previous episode, but he might end up switching sides anyway purely out of survival instinct, since Teddy’s men catch and torture him to give up Owen’s location. “Reunion” ends with Owen, Hannah, and Bailey still on the run, heading to Austin, with a man and a woman on their trail. It isn’t totally clear who that couple is – whether they were sent by the Campanos, Grady, or someone else – but given how few allies our “heroes” really have, it’s not a good sign either way. Not that this show has very many of those at the best of times.