Summary
I Will Find You is let down by some sloppy editing during its biggest suspense sequence yet, and the structuring of the plot overall is beginning to feel a bit characteristically overwhelming.
Oh, boy, a lot is going on in Episode 3 of I Will Find You. The breakneck pace that continues to define Season 1 does this outing no favours, really, since it’s denser with details and competing perspectives, creating an overall ping-ponging effect that can feel disorientating at best and — dare I say it — a little aggravating at worst. There’s still tons of intriguing mystery left to be solved, but the flurry of new characters and names we’re supposed to care about here is too much of a good thing, in my book, and what would be the best straight-up suspense sequence is undercut by jarringly bad editing to make matters worse.
This being a contemporary streaming show, we begin, of course, with a flashback. I’m surprised we’ve had to wait until the third episode to see more of David’s pre-prison life, but here we’re treated to a brief jaunt back to the sunnier days of 2021, when David was free, Matthew was alive, and Rachel was “just friends” with her ex, Hayden. This sequence exists to clarify that relationship between Rachel and Hayden, but it also exists to introduce a potential bad guy, a dude with a terrible haircut named Kyle Bergin, or “The Skunk” on account of that haircut, who apparently works for someone named Nicky Fisher.
Back in the present day, David and Rachel are still on the trail of Hilde. Jim keeps badgering Rachel about the potential scale of the story, but she really does seem to be into this for personal reasons and not a career resurgence. She and David make a good team, too. He’s able to use her own PO box key to create a ruse to access Hilde’s, and then, after speaking to Cheryl and realising the FBI are on to them, they devise a plan to evade the stakeout around Hilde’s place by Rachel allowing herself to be arrested so David can slip in unnoticed. It pays off, and he’s able to get to Hilde for long enough that she can explain she was forced to lie by Skunk, the guy introduced in the opening flashback. Her daughter, Elle, had a gambling problem, and she was told that her debt would be cleared if she committed perjury to get David, who was definitely guilty but likely to get away with it, convicted.
Meanwhile, Williams and Greer — who we also learn in this episode are father and daughter — lean on Rachel, who explains that Hilde lied on the stand and then changed her name. Her efforts to buy time don’t last forever, though, and the FBI storms the building while David is still inside. Hilde helps David escape, but Greer pursues him across the rooftop in a sequence rendered almost incomprehensible by the editing. Ultimately, David is able to escape by jumping off the roof into the back of a moving garbage truck. After he’s gone, he returns to Hayden’s apartment sans Rachel, who has been officially arrested, while Hilde calls Skunk to tip him off.
Cheryl gets a bit more to do in I Will Find You Episode 3. She lies to Simmons about Rachel calling, and then again to her husband when Rachel tells her that she and David believe that Matthew is alive. While Cheryl is processing this news, she’s consoled by a woman who is later introduced as Gertrude Payne, of the Payne Foundation, an ostensibly charitable endeavour which seems keen to donate a hefty amount of money to Cheryl’s fundraiser. But Gertrude, of course, is the bad guy, or at least one of them. When she leaves, we see she is being driven around by the snoop who was revealed to be a cop in the previous episode. He also gives her a brief update on what’s going on in New York, including, most notably, that Rachel has been detained by the FBI with the photo that started all of this in her possession.
Elsewhere, we have Philip, who tells Lenny that Hilde Winslow lied on the stand about David burying the baseball bat, which they know for a fact since it was them who buried the bat in an effort to protect David. Knowing he would never have knowingly hurt Matthew, they buried the bat in the hopes he’d get off without a murder weapon. Now, maybe I’m going crazy here, but one of these two must be a bad guy, since if it was only the pair of them who knew about the bat being buried, how did Hilde know to say she saw David doing it?
Philip and Lenny are informed by the police that someone has dug up Matthew’s body, and when the officer describes a vehicle that was spotted in the area, Philip immediately recognises it as Adam’s. When they go to confront him, though, he admits to digging up the coffin, but only to do a DNA test on the body in there, to exonerate David. He was too late, though, since someone had already dug up the coffin with the same idea, opened it with a crowbar, and taken the body. Luckily, Adam swiped all the case evidence when he was suspended, so the three of them need to look through it all again.
At the very end of the episode, we see a kid on a beach who responds to the name “Theo”. But he’s clearly Matthew, with the same birthmark on his cheek. Wherever he is, at least he seems pretty safe.
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