Summary
I think Episode 4 is about as dramatic as The Last Thing He Told Me Season 2 is going to get, which is a little bit worrying.
And there it is, folks. The big twist! Or the nearest The Last Thing He Told Me Season 2 can get to one of those, anyway, which admittedly isn’t saying much. Considering how far away we’re veering from the source material, the Apple TV+ version may have something genuinely surprising up its sleeve, but it doesn’t give any indication of that in Episode 4, “Ghosts”, which instead reveals one of the book’s bigger turns — that Nicholas is really alive.
I’m sure you’re shocked and awed. In any TV show, an off-screen death simply can’t be trusted, and it should have been obvious that the whole thing was a red herring. Still, the needless deviation to Hannah’s mother’s house felt like it took so long that it was easy to forget about Nicholas entirely, so maybe it’ll be a surprise for some.
We’re also way off the reservation in terms of accuracy to the source material, with a huge chunk of this episode devoted to a completely new subplot, and even key features of the book story having been tweaked. This is why I have a theory that there’s another twist coming, especially with Teddy having been seemingly given the role of primary villain, but we’ll discuss that in a minute. It’s still wildly dramatically inert either way.
There’s a case to be made that the best part of “Ghosts” is a silly cold open in which Hannah has a nightmare, which is at the very least a bit of an effective shock. Her conflating Bailey calling her “Hannah” and “Mom” is pretty sweet, too, though it would have worked better with their book relationship, since Hannah was afforded a lot more interiority there. But whatever.
The rest of “Ghosts” is a tale of two halves, essentially. Owen can’t get in touch with Grady, so Hannah decides to visit the U.S. Marshals office and ask about him directly, despite there being risks of a mole in the office (and there is indeed a mole in the office, though we don’t know who it is yet). She’s greeted by Maris Anderson, Grady’s boss, who kindly reveals that basically everything he has said about looping in the U.S. Attorney and keeping the investigation above-board has been complete twaddle. He had a brief chat with the U.S. Attorney about his theory that the Campanos were in bed with an international drug-running syndicate, and she told him the kind of evidence she’d need to prosecute, but that was it. It was all theoretical.
This creates nothing but problems. Anderson suggests Hannah and Bailey enter witness protection, but she’s reluctant for understandable reasons. Anderson also orders Austin PD to carry out a wellness check on Grady, who has been on leave for a month and is now unreachable. But Owen needs the evidence he collected on the Campanos, so he has to race to Grady’s place to collect it before the authorities arrive. He almost gets caught snooping, but discovers Grady dead upstairs of a faked overdose. He later calls Anderson to tell her that he was definitely murdered, despite Austin PD pushing to rule his death an accident, but whether Anderson can be trusted or not is a matter for another time.
Elsewhere in The Last Thing He Told Me Season 2, Episode 4, Hannah and Bailey are accosted by a goon who claims to have been sent by Grady, but they’re saved by the man and woman who, it turns out, Charlie had instructed to tail them. They’re taken to Charlie and then — this is the twist part — to Nicholas, who turns out to be alive and well. He faked his own death after a close call to get to the bottom of who tried to kill him, and someone definitely did, since a toxicology screening proves he was poisoned.
The obvious suspect is Frank Campano, and he even has a potential motive, since Owen had reached out to Nicholas a couple of times. The working theory is that Frank might have assumed Nicholas was working with Owen and tried to off him just in case, but Nicholas doesn’t believe he’s capable of that. Since the only way to confirm it is to ask Frank directly, and Nicholas can’t do that without giving away he’s still alive, Hannah comes up with her second bright idea of the episode, suggesting luring Frank on the pretense of a memorial and speaking to him herself.
As far as anyone can tell, Frank had no idea about Nicholas being poisoned, so Nicholas welcomes him upstairs into the inner circle. The new theory becomes that Teddy, Frank’s son, has potentially gone a bit rogue. In the book, he and Quinn are both at fault together, and I suspect that’s going to end up being the case here, since why cast Judy Greer otherwise? But we’ll cross that bridge later. In the meantime, Owen bursts in, armed, and gets wrangled just as the episode ends.
