Summary
The Last Thing He Told Me is really trying to make Season 2 interesting, and “Isia Moriendo Renascor” almost gets there, but it’s just consistently held back by wonky decision-making.
I don’t typically do this, but allow me to share with you Apple TV+’s official logline for Episode 7 of The Last Thing He Told Me Season 2. Don’t worry, this is building to a point. But check this out: All roads lead to Paris for a long-awaited confrontation with the crime family patriarch.
Nothing about that is technically incorrect, but it tries to capture a tone that this show, an adaptation of a very slight and risk-averse novel, doesn’t have. And that need for the tension that’d ordinarily be expected of a story about crime families and decades-long rivalries between aging gangsters is felt really strongly in “Isia Moriendo Renascor”, since it’s a penultimate episode and is trying to set up a big finale. It just doesn’t come together, though. I’ll grant you that this hour gets a little closer than most have, but it’s held back by the usual problems and crackpot decision-making.
The broad sweep of the episode is a tale of two men in two equally swanky French hotels. Yes, we’re doing a lot of flashbacks this week, which isn’t a problem in and of itself, but becomes one because the hazy transitions that occur every time Nicholas looks at something that reminds him of the past are really cliched and silly. And there isn’t much to point to them, either. The idea is to reframe Nicholas getting into bed with Frank — legally speaking, I mean — as a decision motivated less by inherent selfishness and more by genuine trust and affection for a friend. It’s to clarify why Nicholas is totally adamant that Frank was never guilty of Kate’s death, and isn’t a threat now, despite him being the obvious suspect.
But we already know all this. A secondary function is to depict Frank’s relationship with his son, Teddy, and draw obvious attention to all the ways in which Nicholas was really the son he never had, despite them being much more similar in age. But, again, we already knew this, and Teddy’s general uselessness has never been a secret. The entirety of the previous episode revolved around it.
Given the revelations and developments in that episode — namely that Quinn is unsurprisingly involved in Teddy’s efforts to launder a drug syndicate’s fortune, and Kate might have been killed to stop her from ratting out the Campanos to the U.S. Attorney’s office — everyone’s heading to Paris. This includes Hannah and Owen, who are carrying $5,000,000 stolen from Teddy’s container, and Bailey and Nicholas, who are flying private. Thanks to Teddy’s goons being useless and Hannah and Owen being fully-fledged secret agents at this point, they’re able to evade a tail and rendezvous at Nicholas’s posh hotel of choice, which is just down the street from Frank’s equally posh but slightly more ostentatious hotel of choice.
There are two branching paths here. Hannah and Owen think their best bet is to lure Teddy and Quinn into a meeting and pitch some kind of deal, where Nicholas believes that appealing to Frank is the safer option. The decision is eventually made to entrap Teddy, but Nicholas ignores it anyway and goes to meet with Frank. Needless to say, these two storylines converge in largely uninteresting ways.
Notably, it’s Quinn at the centre of The Last Thing He Told Me Season 2, Episode 7. She’s in Paris to take control of Teddy’s ill-advised operation, since Frank is a few steps ahead and knows she needs to get a grip on things. This kind of kills some potential tension, since it isn’t supposed to be clear how much Frank knows about what’s going on, and there’s a whole arc about Teddy trying to pluck up the courage to tell him while also trying to find the missing money quickly enough that he doesn’t have to. But the upside is we get to see a much more appropriately sinister side to Quinn, especially in a scene where she catches Hannah trying to stake Teddy out, which gives Judy Greer, who has been sadly underused thus far, an opportunity to be properly menacing.
The final scenes are a bit contrived. Bailey turns up at the hotel where Frank and Nicholas are having a discussion and starts getting into it with Teddy, drawing attention and forcing Nicholas to reveal that he’s still alive. Frank talks Teddy down, as well as making him call off his goons who are pursuing Owen and Hannah in what is the slowest chase sequence in television history, but then a random French lady turns up and tries to kill Teddy. Frank jumps in the way and gets plugged full of holes, dying on the floor of his favourite hotel. Quinn is furious, but the editing isn’t very good, so it isn’t totally clear whether she’s blaming Teddy or Nicholas. I guess we’ll find out in the finale.
And Another Thing…
Just a couple of notes and observations that didn’t fit into the recap proper:
- The flashbacks are hampered a bit by Joseph Cross, who plays Young Frank, doing one of the broadest and silliest John Noble impressions ever thought possible.
- Why does Teddy chew pills like that?
- You can see how amateur The Last Thing He Told Me is by how many lingering shots it includes of Frank and Nicholas’s text exchanges to build “tension” around their meet-up.
- I will concede that the Parisian location shooting is pretty nice.
- Frank calling Nicholas out for his idealistic framing of their mutually beneficial relationship was really welcome. I wish the show had dug into Nicholas’s hypocrisy more.
