Thursday, December 3, 2020

What I’m Watching: The Flight Attendant

The Flight Attendant: Season 1, Episode 5 “Other People’s Houses” (B+)

I’m not sure it’s quite accurate as a comparison, but the way that Cassie has started to revisit moments from her past that she either misremembered or blocked out reminds me of “The Butterfly Effect,” an underrated and undeservedly bashed film, in how Evan travels back to times that he can’t acknowledge happened the way that they did. Though the device at first seemed kitschy, I like that Cassie continues to go back into her head and talk to Alex as if he’s alive and accountable for what she’s only now learning about him, and I was particularly impressed that this projection of him fought back when she judged him and presented her with evidence of the bad choices she was evidently making in her life. He also helped her to realize that the great inspiration she remembers feeling when she ran towards the crashed plane may have been an impulse to run to danger rather than a desire to help others as a flight attendant. Whatever her motivation may be, she’s now doing a great job of getting people in her orbit killed or seriously hurt, with Max as the latest casualty after he accompanied her into Alex’s apartment and then got struck by a car after they made it out of there with only a few helpful answers. Megan’s duplicitous actions are catching up with her, and it’s possible that she’ll soon become more connected to the rest of the story. The most devastating development in this hour was actually related to Annie, who got to see firsthand the implications of being in debt to criminals when she was forced to tell a man to kill himself with pills she gave him. She won’t soon get over that, and finding out that her not-boyfriend died trying to help Cassie will only make things much worse.

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