The Last Thing He Told Me digs up clues in an Austin bar [Apple TV+ recap]

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Angourie Rice in ★★★
Bailey (played by Angourie Rice) is looking for clues to her father's disappearance in all the right places.
Photo: Apple TV+

TV+ Review The Last Thing He Told Me,  the Apple TV+ limited series about a shady software developer with a checkered past who vanishes from his wife and daughter’s life, heads to a bar for a fateful drink and a little interrogation this week.

Hannah and Bailey find themselves dancing ever closer to the truth about their missing husband/father, and danger looms around every corner. The episode, entitled “The Never Dry,” makes for a pretty tense outing of the sometimes-too-casual mystery series.

The Last Thing He Told Me recap: ‘The Never Dry’

Season 1, episode 5: Bailey (played by Angourie Rice) has just found her mother in a photograph. She knew for years that her mom was dead, but she never knew much about her. Her name was Katherine Smith (Tate Moore), and her family owned a bar in Austin, Texas, called The Never Dry. Bailey rushes off to investigate.

She and her stepmother, Hannah Hall (played by Jennifer Garner), had been looking for the identity of Bailey’s missing father, Owen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). Owen fled from the San Francisco Bay Area when the FBI raided his software company, The Shop. Turns out Owen was working on software designed to erase digital footprints. And when the feds came for him, he clearly already used it on himself.

Hannah and Bailey thus have no idea where Owen is — or really who he is. His name isn’t Owen Michaels, not really, and that revelation has thrown Bailey into even deeper confusion. Hannah is reluctant to let Bailey go into the bar, worrying that something unsavory could be identified there and a 16-year-old girl isn’t ready for whatever it might be.

A woman and her stepdaughter walk into a bar …

Hannah makes small talk with the bartender, Charlie (Josh Hamilton), trying not to give up the ghost and draw him out at the same time. She notices the pictures of Bailey’s mom on the wall, and knows she’s getting close. Katherine was Charlie’s sister and she’s dead. Car accident.

Grady Bradford (Augusto Aguilera), the U.S. Marshal working the Owen Michaels case, is also closing in on the truth. A photo of Bailey in Austin surfaced, sending the office into a panic. The marshals know something about Owen that Hannah and Bailey clearly don’t, and they also know that Bailey and Hannah don’t know that they know. The question is, can the two women be tracked down and protected before some other element — criminal, from the sound of it — gets to them?

Just then, Bradford gets a package containing what appears to be Owen’s cellphone. He opens it and finds a timeline of emails between Owen and Shop official Avett Thompson (Todd Stashwick). Turns out Owen was trying to stop the software from going public due to a bug, but Thompson wanted to push. That’s why Owen fled — he wanted to find a way to blow the whistle without going to jail.

The bartender knows something

Josh Hamilton in "The Last Thing He Told Me," now streaming on Apple TV+.
Bartender Charlie (played by Josh Hamilton) reveals details about Owen’s former life.
Photo: Apple TV+

In Austin, Hannah feels like she’s made decent enough progress with Charlie to chance a riskier proposition. She shows him a picture of Owen, claiming he was a guy she met a few years back on a day trip. Charlie freaks out and says, “This is my family you’re talking about!”

Charlie grabs Hannah’s wrist and demands to know who sent her, but Bailey intervenes just in time and they flee. Hannah and Bailey hide out with a crowd of people watching Austin’s famous bats fly out from under the Congress Avenue Bridge. They do remember one thing, though: Charlie called Bailey “Kristie” before they left.

It occurs to Hannah that they’ve been acting too carelessly. They hurry back to their hotel, with every stern-looking stranger seeming nefarious now. Hannah wants to leave Austin, but Bailey doesn’t want to go until she knows more. She’s got an address for Charlie’s wife, Andrea Reyes (America Olivo), and she wants to check it out.

Meanwhile, Hannah’s best friend, journalist Jules (Aisha Tyler), and Hannah’s lawyer, Jake (Geoff Stults), have located a safe among Owen’s possessions. And they found out that Owen’s real name is Ethan Young. His father was a mob lawyer, and the family went into the witness protection program after they turned on the family they worked for. Hence the new names and identities. Hannah destroys her phone so she can’t be tracked. But then she discovers that Bailey has left without a word.

Curveballs

Jennifer Garner in "The Last Thing He Told Me," now streaming on Apple TV+.
This episode of The Last Thing He Told Me brings the tension.
Photo: Apple TV+

This is a brisk and involving episode of The Last Thing He Told Me, although the show’s pacing problems persist. There’s a foot chase — the one true set piece the show has offered us — and it just kind of … happens. There’s no particular urgency or excitement, which is par for the course on this show.

None of the show’s shortcomings prove fatal, but they do keep it from reaching its potential.

The barroom interrogation, however, was much more effectively paced and staged. Hannah’s nervousness is palpable. She feels out of her depth, but she’s an OK liar, so she’s confident enough to not blow it. The heat of the bar and the dim light (it’s about 10 minutes before opening, which is a very specific atmosphere that director Daisy von Scherler Mayer captures beautifully) are oppressive enough to keep her and us on edge because we don’t know exactly what threat Charlie poses.

That part’s very well done. As we close in on the concluding evidence, it’s becoming much easier to just keep hitting play on the next episode of The Last Thing He Told Me.

★★★

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.

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