The kidnapping suspects under Suspicion land in New York for their next rendezvous this week on Apple TV+’s thriller series.
As the noose tightens around them from the lead-hungry FBI and British police service, the group starts to look at each other askance more frequently than usual. Can they really trust each other? This week, there’s enough breathing room to soak up the tension. And Katherine Newman (played by Uma Thurman) finds herself in an uncomfortable situation.
Suspicion recap: ‘Questions of Trust’
In this week’s episode, titled “Questions of Trust,” the five suspects — Tara (Elizabeth Henstridge), Aadesh (Kunal Nayyar), Natalie (Georgina Campbell), Eddie (Tom Rhys-Harries) and Sean (Elyes Gabel) — finally arrive in New York.
Aadesh happens to find Eddie while he’s on a call to Agent Anderson (Noah Emmerich) and Inspector Okoye (Angel Coulby), but he lies his way out of it. Aadesh still doesn’t trust him and takes his burner phone, which Sean finds when he frisks them before they all head to Brooklyn in an unmarked van. Sean dumps it, and Okoye gets nervous.
She has reason to be. Sean takes them to an old contact, who works for Martin Copland (Robert Glenister) and double-crosses them in a warehouse. By the time the police move in, the five are gone and only the bodies of Copland’s men remain.
The police finally tell Katherine Newman (Uma Thurman) that her business partner Copland had dealings with some of the kidnappers. Katherine slyly confronts him and he lies, so she knows she can’t trust him anymore. Turns out Copland wanted to talk to each of them about Leo Newman (Gerran Howell), but they all maintain their innocence.
Anderson and Okoye are stumped. If the suspects don’t have Leo … why are they all here, meeting up for an exchange in a warehouse a few boroughs away from the moneyman? And why, when the five flee the warehouse, have they parked their van right in front of FBI headquarters?
It’s because the suspects aren’t in there. They’re at the hotel where Leo was snatched, hacking into the CCTV, waiting for Copland to show himself so they can grab him instead.
All clear
Uma Thurman gets a great little solo this week. Katherine agrees to appear on the maudlin talk show of journalist Nancy Harper (Nancy Crane) to discuss her kidnapped son.
The journalist hits her with a gotcha: The reason the kidnappers kept bringing up one man’s name is that Katherine buried his climate research report in the 1990s. The man’s report predicted every bad thing that’s happened to the planet in the last 20 years.
Katherine has no answers. She’s flummoxed after what she thought was going to be a softball interview about her son and her feelings. Instead, she gets railroaded. As it happens, the climate scientist (Karl Johnson) she ignored just turned himself into the police in England. This story’s going to break a hundred different ways.
This episode of Suspicion has a “dramatic” ending, which is to say something big and definitive happens, but it’s funny that the show can’t make much seem all that shocking anymore after seven episodes of pure plot. It just felt like one more thing instead of a showstopper.
This is how it should be, honestly. You shouldn’t question the big dramatic beats, you should be able to roll with them because they’ve been baking inside the characters for many hours of TV by now. Well done, I say.
I doubt Suspicion will end on anything but a cliffhanger next week, but consider me gripping the edge of that cliff.
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.
