The Flight Attendant Season 1 Recap Before Season 2

The first season of The Flight Attendant has been a hit for HBO Max. With multiple award nominations, this series starring and produced by Kaley Cuoco is a fresh take on murder-mystery thrillers. It can be hard to remember the many twists and turns of The Flight Attendant, so here’s a recap of everything you need to know before Season 2.

RELATED: ‘The Flight Attendant’ Season 2 Trailer Reveals a New Double Life for Cassie

Full-Time Flight Attendant, Part-Time Detective?

Kaley Cuoco plays the titular flight attendant, Cassie Bowden. She lives in New York City, but her job as a first class flight attendant for Imperial Atlantic takes her all over the world. Cassie is a woman who appears to be little more than a party girl who loves to drown her problems in alcohol. She is messy and chaotic, and continuously finds herself in increasingly dangerous situations throughout the first season. However, we come to learn that a lot of Cassie’s behavior comes from deep-rooted childhood trauma that she is forced to finally unpack in tandem with the murder investigation she is thrown into.

The mystery at the heart of The Flight Attendant starts with the murder of American businessman Alex Sokolov (Michiel Huisman). Cassie meets Alex while working a flight from New York to Bangkok, Thailand. Alex flirts with Cassie on the plane and the two spend the evening together exploring the city, and each other. Everything is great, until Cassie wakes up hungover the next morning beside his dead, bloody body with a few scattered memories of the night before. She panics and tries to hide all evidence that she was there before heading back to New York with her flight crew, as though nothing happened. When they land, however, they are questioned by the FBI and Cassie spirals further.

Desperate to clear her name and to spark any memory of what happened that night, Cassie starts to investigate on her own. She first enlists the help of her lawyer friend, Ani (Zosia Mamet), who works for a prestigious law firm with a clientele of questionable morals. Ani wants to believe that Cassie had nothing to do with Alex’s murder, but starts to grow frustrated with Cassie’s erratic behavior. Cassie does chaotic things like go to Unisphere headquarters, where Alex used to work, asking questions and going to Alex’s memorial service to snoop around his parent’s house – all while the FBI still considers her a suspect. She gets a secretary drunk to find out information about Alex’s business associate Miranda (Michelle Gomez), and she convinces a pilot friend to let her work an empty flight to find out what the Unisphere shell company Lionfish has been smuggling. Ani draws the line when her boyfriend Max (Deniz Akdeniz) is hit by a car while running from a Lionfish warehouse after helping Cassie hack into their servers.

Cassie’s obsession with solving Alex’s murder puts a strain on her relationships. She starts drinking more and more to numb her trauma, past and present, causing her brother Davey (T.R. Knight) to finally confront her about their childhood and her alcoholism. Ani and Cassie fight after Max’s accident, with Ani only agreeing to help her again after discovering that Miranda is a real person and not a figment of Cassie’s drunken imagination. At one point, the only person Cassie has to lean on is Buckley (Colin Woodell), a struggling actor that she meets at a bar and grows close to. As Cassie uncovers the criminal conspiracy that got Alex killed, she becomes a target to both the FBI and Alex’s killer.

Crime and Punishment

Before Alex is killed in Bangkok, he discovers that his family’s company launders money and transports goods for criminal organizations. Furious at this discovery, he decides to steal money from one of Unisphere’s subsidiaries, Lionfish, and hide it in off-shore accounts. He knows that in order to confront his parents, and their clients, he needs leverage. He hides the codes in the pages of the book Crime and Punishment, which Cassie brings with her not knowing how valuable that book is.

Unfortunately for Alex, the criminals who run Lionfish aren’t willing to wait for negotiations to get their money back. Miranda goes to Bangkok to convince Alex to give her the codes before her boss Victor gets involved, not expecting Cassie to be there. Miranda is the reason that Alex found out about Lionfish, and she doesn’t want him to wind up dead. Unbeknownst to her, Victor had already sent his sadistic hitman, Feliks, after Alex and the codes. When news of Alex’s death breaks the next day, Miranda tracks Cassie back to New York thinking that she had something to do with it. Only after bailing Cassie out of jail and comparing their information does she realize that they both want the same thing – Alex’s killer taken out.

When Miranda and Cassie discover that Feliks and Buckley are the same person, their first instinct is to run. However, in a moment of clarity Cassie realizes that she is tired of running into chaos and away from her problems. She convinces Miranda to follow her on her next work flight to Rome and take care of Feliks once and for all. Their plan falls through when Miranda misses the flight to take out Victor and retrieve the account codes and arrives in Rome later than expected. Feliks has the upper hand and attacks her in the hotel elevator while Cassie is getting a gun from her Italian friend-with-benefits Enrico (Alberto Frezza). Together, Enrico and Cassie try to take out Feliks, but can’t do so without the help of Cassie’s co-worker, Shane (Griffin Matthews). The mystery seems to be wrapped up nicely with Cassie exonerated thanks to Ani and FBI Agent Kim Hammond (Merle Dandridge) connecting Feliks to Alex’s murder. That is, until Miranda mysteriously disappears from the crime scene and Shane reveals that he works as a double agent with the CIA.

Megan Briscoe is in Over Her Head

Megan Briscoe (Rosie Perez) is Cassie’s best-friend at work. They have a bond that transcends differences in age and lifestyle, even though Megan can come across as overbearing at times. While Megan is happy with her life as a mom, wife, and flight attendant, she wants something more. So, to inject a little mystery into her life, she agrees to download files from her husband’s work computer in exchange for a lot of money. At the time, she doesn’t know that the men she’s working with are from North Korea or that the files she’s stealing are from government contracts for weapons. She’s just caught up in the excitement of secret meetings and covert exchanges. But when she realizes how much trouble she has gotten her family into, she uses an Imperial Atlantic trip to Rome as cover to run away. Megan and Cassie have a heart-to-heart in Rome, and they each confess how they’ve contributed to the mess their lives have become. Megan tells Cassie what she did and Cassie comes clean about spending time with Alex before he died. Megan then leaves Rome that night by train.

Trauma Personified

The trauma caused by waking up next to her lover’s dead body triggers a mental break in Cassie. She is able to revisit the Bangkok hotel room and talk with Alex (or rather her subconscious’s representation of Alex). This not only helps her remember important details from the night of his murder, but it also forces her to process trauma from her childhood. With “Alex’s” help, Cassie realizes that her childhood wasn’t as fun and easy going as she remembers. Her alcoholic father was borderline abusive to her brother and their father-daughter bonding over beers wasn’t healthy. Despite how traumatic this whole situation has been for Cassie, it was the catalyst she needed to finally seek help and heal from her childhood. She’s getting involved with Alcoholics Anonymous, making amends with the people in her life, and trying to make the most of her new, sober life. Even though there is a moving sequence in the season finale that shows her turning off the lights, shutting doors, and leaving the hotel room behind, her interaction with a similar personification of her subconscious in the Season 2 trailer shows that it might not be so easy for Cassie to move on from her past. And with Shane’s CIA boss interested in Cassie joining the team, it’s only a matter of time before she’s thrown into another mystery.

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