The Last Thing He Told Me nears its endgame this week as Bailey goes AWOL and Hannah must make a tough choice.
The Apple TV+ thriller, about a software developer with a rap sheet who goes missing and leaves a trail of breadcrumbs for his wife and daughter, finally starts to spill its last bunch of secrets before a showdown or a retreat in next week’s finale. Hannah needs to decide which of those sounds more appealing, and which will keep her stepdaughter the safest.
The Last Thing He Told Me recap: ‘When We Were Young’
Season 1, episode 6: In the episode, entitled “When We Were Young,” Hannah Hall (played by Jennifer Garner) has lost track of her stepdaughter Bailey (Angourie Rice) at precisely the wrong moment. She and Bailey went to Austin, Texas, to look for clues about their missing father/husband, Owen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), only to discover that his name is actually Ethan Young. He’s also in the witness protection program because he turned state’s evidence against a wealthy and powerful mob family. Oh, and Bailey’s mother is really a woman named Katherine Smith (Tate Moore) who died in a car accident.
Now U.S. Marshal Grady Bradford (Augusto Aguilera) has found Hannah and explained that she is in desperate trouble. Owen/Ethan had to run, because if the mob found out he was still alive, they’d have killed him (and Hannah and Bailey, too, for good measure).
Bailey has gone to see Andrea Reyes (America Olivo), an old associate of her mom and dad, who was married to her estranged uncle Charlie (Josh Hamilton). She asks the same questions Hannah is asking Bradford. They learn that Owen’s father-in-law, Nicholas Bell (David Morse), used Owen to pass messages from his incarcerated clients to people on the outside.
When Nicholas refused a high-profile mob case, they had his daughter, Katherine, killed and made it look like a hit-and-run. Nicholas took every message he’d ever passed to the mob and turned it in to the FBI in retaliation. He did six years in prison, and Owen went into hiding.
Time for a tough call
Bradford gives Hannah the hard sell about witness protection but she can’t agree to it out of hand. What about Bailey? Can you start a 16-year-old’s life again after everything she’s been through? They finally figure out that Bailey’s at Andrea’s house. Bradford goes to get her, hoping to bring her to safety.
Faced with an impossible choice, Hannah calls Bailey and tells her she has to do something rash and to just trust that she knows what she’s doing. Bailey agrees, and Hannah gives her minders at the Marshals’ office the slip and gets in a cab. She has something she needs to do. She goes back to Charlie’s bar, The Never Dry, and asks to see Nicholas in person.
Flashbacks from hell
Photo: Apple TV+
Some flashback stuff in this week’s episode of The Last Thing He Told Me seems pretty comical. David Morse plays Katherine’s dad, and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau has to play his younger self, so you’ve got two guys over 50 slathered in soft focus and makeup and digital retouching so they look young enough to change a tire.
It is damned ludicrous. Why they couldn’t have just hired some younger dudes to play these parts for a 10-minute scene is beyond me, and proof that LA creatives can talk themselves into anything. These are just not decisions you make when you’re trying to whip up something that’s going to last in the cultural memory.
The episode also lost a little of the momentum gained in the previous three episodes, because it necessarily solves the mystery at the core of the limited series in a slow, methodical fashion. I liked the idea of the repeated device of seeing Nicholas and Owen meeting over and over again to change tires, but the execution didn’t deliver enough thematic resonance.
Also, the youngening of the actors is distracting, and it’s not like they’re actually changing the tire. They’re actors. Nobody’s going to make them do that. So a missed opportunity, ultimately.
… and a pivotal phone call
Hannah and Bradford talking over Nicholas’ crimes, and Owen’s place in all of them, proves reasonably gripping. I like Augusto Aguilera, too. I wish the actor found more work, though it beggars belief that his character, Bradford, has known Owen/Ethan for 10 years. A decade ago, Aguilera was 25. He wouldn’t have been a field agent working a high-profile mob investigation. Ultimately, though, the show is only going over a moral conundrum that by now we are all too aware of.
Bailey learning about her dad from Andrea also should have been weightier than it was, with too little time spent with Bailey during this period. Where are the close-ups allowing Angourie Rice to really get into what her character is experiencing in this moment?
The phone call she and Hannah share at the very end is probably the best thing in the episode, with these two actors finally able to ride the same wavelength of processing grief, and these two characters finally on each other’s sides, more so than either of them properly knows. A little more of that would have gone a long way.
★★★☆☆
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.
