Summary
The Last Thing He Told Me shifts Season 2’s action to Marseille in “The Prosecutor”, but it remains just as dull on the other side of the Atlantic.
With The Last Thing He Told Me Season 2 transferring a chunk of its action to Marseille in Episode 6, that gives it the rare distinction of being rubbish across two continents. I know that sounds a bit harsh, but it’s hard to sit through “The Prosecutor” and feel any other way. Separating Hannah from Bailey robs the show of its most essential relationship, and pairing her up with Owen isn’t an adequate replacement. The entire point of the story is that they don’t really have a present-day relationship. Now, their attempts to navigate one — to pretend it’s there; to try and build it where it isn’t — feel awkward and fumbling, like watching two neighborhood cats figure each other out.
Either way, Hannah and Owen are in Marseille, a few hours ahead of Teddy, since he’s delayed in London (I hope you have a high degree of tolerance for watching him make calls). We’re still doing that thing where Hannah has essentially morphed into a special agent, bluffing all the locals with perfect French while she and Owen surveil a shipyard under the guise of a tourist boat trip. They have a lot of quiet conversations while wearing hats. At one point, Hannah creates a distraction so Owen can sneak off separately. Classic.
It’s just surprising to me how little chemistry these two have, even under duress. Hannah’s latest bright idea is to impersonate Teddy Campano and his translator so they can gain access to the container, which involves Owen doing his broadest pampered money-man impression, and it just rings so false that you never get a sense of the danger they’re supposed to be in. It’s timed so that Teddy is arriving just as Owen is messing around inside the container, but it never felt urgent enough to qualify as a suspense sequence, and naturally, Owen and Hannah get away just in time, with a device safely planted that answers phone calls. He also switched out the RFID tag so that Teddy can’t find the tens of millions of dollars locked up in the container.
This one scene is the only reason Owen and Hannah are in Marseille, which means we have to put up with all the downtime on either side. It’s impossible to overstate how dull and unconvincing their intimate scenes in a hotel room are. We’re just biding time and waiting for Teddy to make a call, which he eventually does when he finds himself standing in an empty container having lost all his drug money. But, curiously, he calls Quinn, who evidently knew more about what he was up to than she has been letting on.
The port authority realizes that the RFID tag has been switched and tells a distraught Teddy, which kind of makes you wonder what the point of switching it in the first place was, but Owen seems to have anticipated this development and stolen a whole bunch of the money, too.
Meanwhile in The Last Thing He Told Me Season 2, Episode 6, Bailey refuses to keep her nose clean. In her late mother’s planner, she finds a name mentioned twice — Ivan Escarra. She asks Charlie about him, and he says they went to law school together. He also reluctantly reveals that when Kate moved out temporarily, it was because she was bickering with Owen about working for the Campanos. The subject had caused a lot of friction between her and Nicholas at the time, too.
Intrigued and being stonewalled by Nicholas, Bailey looks up Ivan and discovers that he’s now the head of the U.S. Attorney’s Organized Crime Task Force, so she goes to the courthouse to see him. There, she briefly runs into Maris, Frank’s spy in the U.S. Marshals office, which is just her luck. Ivan’s tight-lipped, initially, but he calls Bailey later to arrange a clandestine meeting. Not that he has much to offer. At the time, Kate was worried about Owen getting caught up in a RICO case. Nicholas had become the focus of the investigation, and the plan was to prove he was sending encrypted messages — via Owen — on behalf of the Campanos, then use that proof to flip him into testifying. Kate’s job was to help acquire the proof. Needless to say, this may well have been enough involvement with the authorities to justify bumping her off, even though her death was officially ruled an accident.
Bailey takes this news to Quinn, of all people, but she also predictably downplays the possibility that the Campanos were responsible for Kate’s death. Bailey isn’t buying it, though. Nicholas is utterly adamant that Frank would never have ordered his daughter to be killed, but you can tell that he’s more resistant to the idea of his own culpability than anything else. Charlie even calls him out about being in denial in a private scene later, so he calls Frank to fill him in about the prosecutor and clearly doesn’t like what he hears, since he tells Bailey to pack a bag. Everyone keeps talking about going to Paris, after all. Might as well make it a family affair.
If you’re interested, there’s a bit of a clue here. After Maris runs into Bailey, she calls Teddy to ask him what should be done about her, and he reiterates that she’s off-limits. So, if Frank is completely in the dark, and Teddy isn’t willing to harm Bailey, who has really been pulling the strings within the Campanos? I told you that you don’t just cast Judy Greer for nothing.
