Apple TV+’s Suspicion has gathered its suspects together and now they have to decide who’s who — and more to the point, who’s guilty.
It’s a Ten Little Indians riff this week as everyone accuses everyone of being more guilty than they are. The suspects are going to have to come as clean as they can if they want to make it out of this bottle episode alive.
Rob Williams and his writers have crafted a nifty detour for these characters as they work together to figure out who’s put them in the spotlight and why. The nation is starting to think they’re heroes, but they might kill each other before any new evidence comes to light and they can prove their innocence.
Suspicion recap: ‘What Does a Kidnapper Look Like?’
In this week’s episode, titled “What Does a Kidnapper Look Like?,” suspects Tara (played by Elizabeth Henstridge), Aadesh (Kunal Nayyar), Natalie (Georgina Campbell), Sean Tilson (Elyes Gabel) and Eddie (Tom Rhys-Harries) finally come together in one place.
If agents Anderson (Noah Emmerich) and Okoye (Angel Coulby) could see them now, they’d have a field day, having finally connected all the suspects, but everyone is off the map now. Sean has brought them to a countryside safe house to deliberate on their next move. They get to talking and realize a few things about each other.
Sean wasn’t specifically out to hurt Natalie — he was just squeezing her on behalf of the people she stole from. He was a bagman, and she just happened to be the person his client wanted money from at the exact same time those same people kidnapped Leo Newman (Gerran Howell) to punish his mother Katherine (Uma Thurman). Natalie isn’t much in the mood to forgive Sean, because he’s the reason that Monique (Lydia West) is dead, directly or indirectly.
The interrogation is put on hold when Eddie faints from the pain of his gunshot wound — and then again when a neighbor stops by. Tara and Sean must pretend to be lovers to get him to leave.
So many mysteries and missteps
In the commotion, Natalie sneaks away with Sean’s pistol and tries to kill herself, but they stop her before she can succeed. Tara confesses that when she attacked the Newmans at the university, someone kidnapped her daughter, Daisy (Anya Mckenna Bruce). They get a look at one of the kidnapper’s laptops (after Sean killed him last week) and discover communiques between the network and Martin Copland, Katherine’s friend and confidant — and the CEO of her company.
Aadesh knew this, because he had hacked into Martin’s emails and found out the company was going to fire him. So now, the kidnapping looks like revenge.
That’s all Sean needs to hear. He’s off to America to find Martin. Natalie wants in, too. In fact, after the neighbor calls the cops, they all decide to get in on the trip.
Everyone’s reluctant, sure, especially Eddie, but that might have more to do with the secret cellphone he has in his shoe. (Who’s that he’s texting as they drive away?) However, they don’t see that they have any other choice.
I can’t go back and he’s my only way forward
This week’s episode of Suspicion was a blast. It takes the form of an Agatha Christie-style locked room mystery, with each character’s motivations coming under scrutiny and their relationship to each other and the crime at the heart of the story growing more tangled by the minute.
It has all the beats, the disappearances, red herrings, and misdirections of a great mystery riff. I do like a good bottle episode, when done well, and this is.
I like Sean more and more as the show carries on, though I’m wary that they’re making him a hair too competent and sexy and everything else. Tara’s falling for him (she didn’t balk quite as much when he groped her in character when they were distracting the neighbor), which is kinda wild considering how many people we’ve seen him kill in the last few hours.
But, hey, TV — what can do you do but fall for the hunky murderer?
A dead end for Natalie?
Natalie’s arc has become a little less interesting, what with the suicidal desperation that has emerged. But my guess is that the writers couldn’t quite think of a better reason to get her to stay with the group as events progress. Fair enough, but I liked it better when she was still learning and developing. This seems like a dead end.
Eddie being a narc of some kind isn’t unexpected, but it does again slightly blinker the progress Suspicion’s writers made making him seem like a gung-ho jackass when he first appeared in the lives of the other suspects. I get it. It’s just slightly less satisfying.
Regardless, none of my quibbles have dampened my enthusiasm to see what happens next. More so than the likes of Apple TV+ series Invasion or even Tehran, I’m dying to know what happens next.
Watch Suspicion on Apple TV+
New episodes of Suspicion arrive Fridays on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
