The Last Thing He Told Me, the new Apple TV+ thriller series about a woman and her moody teenage stepdaughter investigating a disappearance, finds the beleaguered pair in Austin, Texas, this week.
Revelations come fast and furious, and Bailey’s reluctant march toward the wrong conclusion keeps her on edge, while Hannah questions everything she thought she knew. The episode, entitled “Keep Austin Weird,” represents a major step up for this limited series. But there’s still a lot of ground to cover before it could hope to arrive at great.
The Last Thing He Told Me recap: ‘Keep Austin Weird’
Season 1, episode 3: Hannah Hall (played by Jennifer Garner) and her stepdaughter Bailey (Angourie Rice) are on the move. Ever since Owen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) — Hannah’s husband and Bailey’s dad — went missing after the police raid of the tech whiz’s offices, they’ve both been confused and shaken.
Where did Owen go? What was he doing that was so shady that he needed to flee? Where did he get the bag of money he left with them before his vanishing act?
Hannah has only one clue: Owen’s connection to the city of Austin. So she and Bailey hop a flight and start checking things out. First stop: the football stadium Owen took Bailey to when she was much, much younger. Bailey doesn’t like Hannah at all. And the teen resents being forced to act as a bloodhound sniffing out clues to locate her missing dad, who she loves (although she’s feeling a little betrayed at present).
Does the past hold answers?
In fact, Bailey doesn’t want to remember because she’s worried what it will mean if she uncovers something unsavory from her dad’s past and learns the truth. So she wants to leave right away, but on their way out she has a flashback. She remembers her dad carrying her into the stadium, but he was wearing a suit and she was in a dress. Strange attire for a football game.
Hannah surmises that they could have been coming from a wedding. She calls her journalist bestie, Jules (Aisha Tyler), to ask for some research help, trying to carbon date the game they would have been going to in 2011, and seeing if there are churches nearby the stadium. Jules’ assistant Max (Tyner Rushing) warns Hannah not to come back to the San Francisco Bay Area too soon, because the investigation into Owen’s company is ramping up.
Bad news and a bombshell
Photo: Apple TV+
Just then, Hannah gets a few bad news phone calls. Her ex, a lawyer named Jake (Geoff Stults), calls to say that leaving town is going to make her look like a hostile witness — and that they’re indicting the CEO of Owen’s company. Then, Owen’s old boss Avett Thompson (Todd Stashwick), currently under indictment and house arrest, calls and protests his innocence.
However, Avett also can’t get Owen on the phone. And he knows something Hannah doesn’t. Owen’s past is checkered … by what he won’t say, but Hannah is starting to feel like she knows her husband less and less.
She and Bailey finally track down the church where Owen took his daughter before the fateful football game. And though it takes a little sweet talking, they get access to the records of weddings that took place there. Unfortunately, this appears to be a dead end. The church was supposed to be closed for renovations during the period in question. Back to square one.
Didn’t see that coming
Back in the Bay Area, slightly mysterious U.S. Marshall Grady Bradford (Augusto Aguilera) has been following an even more mysterious bald man who keeps lurking near Hannah and Owen’s house and boat. Grady scares the man, who introduces himself as Eric Cousins (Frederick Lawrence), the head of security for The Shop, Owen’s company. Grady then lets himself into Hannah’s house and finds the bag of money Owen left.
The house gets a lot of traffic that night. Jules comes by because Hannah sends her over to check out a clue — a piggy bank she remembers Owen clutching after a fight. Hannah’s ex Jake comes over, too, because his private investigator dug up something very sketchy. Jules and Jake call Hannah to tell her. There is no record of Owen and Bailey ever existing anywhere. No birth certificates, no diplomas, no marriage license. They’re both ghosts. Shadows.
The mystery starts to get more mysterious
Photo: Apple TV+
After an uninspiring one-two whiff of an opener, it’s a relief to see The Last Thing He Told Me finally gaining a little momentum. The same directorial and editing trouble remains, naturally, but the quick clip of developments and the air of intrigue at least helps us move with confidence through the episode, which felt much shorter than it actually is.
The show in general is still entirely too lackadaisical about its procedural elements, and the characters remain one-note. Bailey’s frustration, despite Angourie Rice’s best efforts, comes up entirely too often to be all that interesting as a character trait. As a counterpoint, she played an angsty teen also dealing with tragedy in Mare of Easttown and managed to hold her own against peak Kate Winslet. Here she’s dealt a not-great hand by writing that relies on her being egregiously miserable at all times, but she’s doing her best with the part. And she does seem more human than Garner, who doesn’t give Rice much to work against.
The Last Thing He Told Me just kind of moseys from plot point to plot point, but there are enough of them — and they’re sufficiently intriguing — that it was easy to hang on this week. I am curious about the central mystery now, and I wasn’t last week. That ain’t hay.
★★★☆☆
Watch The Last Thing He Told Me on Apple TV+
New episodes of The Last Thing He Told Me 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 and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, 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.
