Rabbit Hole (Season 1), Episodes 1 & 2 Recap & Ending Explained: Kiefer Sutherland is widely known for his role as Jack Bauer from the Fox series 24. Through that character, he has cemented a place in my mind as a man who can get away with anything until he is doing it for the greater good.
In his new Paramount+ series, ‘Rabbit Hole,’ he enters the world of a corporate espionage thriller, where he is, yet again, on the run. Created by Glenn Ficarra & John Requa, the series tells the story of John Weir, a corporate criminal who goes through a whirlwind of changes within a single day of his life. He is the kind of person whose decisions can bring down the entire capital of a person or their company.
The show investigates his chaotic journey through its two-episode premiere. Before reading about its fast-paced narrative, be aware that there are spoilers ahead.
Rabbit Hole (Season 1), Episodes 1 & 2 Recap
John Weir (played by Kiefer Sutherland) sits in a bar, having a drink all by himself. He pays the bartender to change the TV channel, and a soccer match starts playing. An attractive woman eyes him from some distance. However, he decides not to indulge in any interaction. Later, a middle-aged banker – Barry Merrill (played by Dean Armstrong) from the bar, walks up to the bartender, asking him to change the channel to a trade broadcast one. John wants to keep the match on, saying that his team is playing.
But due to this banker’s insistence, he orders the bartender to do as he wants. The channel is then changed to a news report stating high cancer rates in a leading erectile dysfunction drug. Merrill calls someone on the phone and directs them to sell the entirety of Esper-Ethika stock right then. Then the attractive woman named Hailey (played by Meta Golding) walks up to John. He introduces himself as Weir, and they hit it off right away. She hints at wanting to have sex, and he goes ahead with it.
The next morning, she awakens in her bed, fully clothed. A piece of news plays on the TV about how the sudden free-fall of Esper-Ethika has triggered a brief shutdown in Trading in Tokyo. Meanwhile, John is in panic mode, suspicious that someone named Madi sent Hailey there to snoop on him, and decides to take apart a watch to find a bug. He still believes this woman has an ulterior motive for sleeping with him and promptly exits her room.
He then travels back to his building to meet Josephine Madi, aka Jo (played by Enid Graham), an agent of the FBI’s Financial Crimes Unit. She denies trying to get any woman to follow him and, however, accuses him of purposefully tanking Esper-Ethika stock so that his client KOT Capital’s stock can soar. He denies any such intention. However, through a flashback, we learn that he used his associates to put a bug in Merrill’s ear so that he would sell his entire stock in panic.
Then he goes back to his office to meet his employees who were a part of that operation. Jo keeps calling his espionage act illegal. He calls his job to be merely consulting for his clients. Later, he attends his son’s school concert and enthusiastically cheers for him. He leaves after meeting his ex-wife. The next day, he meets Valence (Jason Butler Harner) in his lofty data-mining operations office to talk out a new gig. Valence prides himself on being able to predict the tiniest details of human behavior, as Amazon does.
Then he explains to John his old-school, flesh-and-blood gig where the client would choose to be nameless. John goes back to his office to instruct his associates accordingly. They will need to get the Treasury department investigator – Edward Homm (played by Rob Yang), and Banomar group CEO – Dana Heinrich together on camera to prove that they are associated. John tells them that they are doing it for Banomar’s competitor, Luxbrant, who wants an ongoing investigation on them to go away.
Later, John and his associates go out in disguises and create just the right circumstances so that Homm and Dana stand next to each other. Homm gets an envelope handed over and asks Dana if it belongs to her. While she looks at it due to her company logo on the top, John’s team manages to click several photos of them that look like the two are making some deal together. The next day, John hands them over to Valence, who is happy to see those results. He assures to get the promised amount delivered to him by Xander (Jonas Chernick)
John gets out of the building and, while walking, notices Hailey getting into a car across the street. Since he is still suspicious about her, he gets intel that she is just a lawyer, living in Pittsburgh and working for a non-profit organization. However, her general spending pattern does not reflect these details. Due to a bad feeling about her, he follows her outside the same building (where Valence works). He is still confused about why she chose to hit on him. She reveals that she saw him on a dating app profile.
But he hasn’t made one? Then who made it? While he wonders about it, his face suddenly pops up on the giant Times Square news board. It says that he is a suspect in the murder of Homm. Hailey attacks him and runs away. While an officer follows John on a horse, John gets into a cab and starts driving away. He calls his coworker, who pins the blame on Valence. However, the moment John reaches his office building, the floor suddenly gets on fire. Meanwhile, the news reveals that Homm’s dead body is found in the city.
Because of his suspicion of Valence, Homm enters his office building by stealing a security guard’s ID card. He covertly gets up to Valence’s office to confront him about the possible betrayal. Valence tries to defend himself. It gets interrupted by a call, and he starts walking toward the outside, throws himself down the railing, and commits suicide. By then, John notices an anon text on his phone saying, ‘DO IT NOW.’ He understands that someone ordered Valence to kill himself. But considering the emergency situation, he runs out, creates a distraction with a smoke bomb, and escapes without getting caught.
While following John’s run for his life, the narrative also shows a part of John’s childhood. We see his father getting paranoid over the noise of their landline phone that just does not stop ringing. He takes apart the phone and rips out its wires. So John’s paranoia about pretty much everything, including Hailey, seems to stem from his father’s behavior. Meanwhile, Jo reaches the scene of the fire to investigate what happened. The officer in charge, Rasche, does not want her snooping around in their work.
Soon after, two people approach Hailey and introduce themselves as detectives. They take her out to their car to question her relation to John. But she smells something wrong and starts to run away. That’s when John suddenly arrives at the scene and saves her by calling out the abuse of power. He snatches her back to his car and starts driving. While he saves her for the time being, she is still pissed about what he is hiding from her.
Meanwhile, Jo Madi manages to speak with John’s intern (Walt Klink), who says that John was in the office when it happened. While Rasche stops her from questioning, the intern texts someone that he ‘told them what you said to say.’ On the other hand, John travels to a house on the outskirts and keeps Hailey tied to ropes. He keeps asking her for her real identity and why she tried to get in touch with him.
Besides, John is still unsure how his dating profile came online. He allows her some time to go online and get the details about his profile. When he sees the username, he realizes that Larter, working for him, must have created it. But why would his co-workers create this profile? He cannot even ask them because they all are dead now. She believes that they felt pity for John because he was lonely and created it.
Meanwhile, Homm suddenly appears in the same house, trying to run away. John says that he saved Homm’s life by bringing him there and keeping him blindfolded. Once she sees Homm, John takes her out again in his car trunk, now deciding to let her go, but on one condition, she cannot share any details she saw with anyone. She refuses to go back without telling the authorities about him. As a result, she willingly chooses to be with John.
In the scenes from John’s childhood, we see his mother driving him away from their home. He gets emotional since he does not want to leave his father. He says that his father needs them. But his mother still drives him away. In another scene, he is at his father’s funeral, being told by a colleague that his father was a hero. Back to the present scenario, John drives Hailey back to the city and surveils Xander. He soon follows the man into the loo and gets him in the corner to learn about Valence’s and his entire team’s death.
Xander says that John should not have gotten caught on camera. Besides, he keeps saying that someone was making him and Valence do what they did. But no one has ever seen that someone or ever met him. Afterward, John learns that he can access Valence’s data only through his password and authenticator. Since it was in Valence’s pocket when he jumped, he decides to get into the evidence room to check on him.
Rabbit Hole (Season 1), Episode 2 Ending Explained
Does John manage to get hold of Valence’s authenticator?
Jo still has a suspicion about the intern she met before. While she keeps a tap on his movements, John drives to a police station with the intention of sneaking in. He manages to fake his entrance as an officer and gets inside the office. He calls the lead investigating Detective Singh and creates a distraction for her. While she gets away from her computer to meet certain Billy Jacks in the lobby, John gets the details he needs to get hold of the evidence.
Soon he obtains the box without getting caught and tries to sneak out. The intern is in contact with him throughout this time and helps him to make a safe exit. By the time Detective Singh smells something fishy, John and the intern already get out of the building with the box after locking their door from the outside so that no one can follow them. But suddenly, the intern attacks John to get hold of the evidence box himself. In their ugly street brawl, Hailey soon saves John and helps him escape. By then, John manages to get hold of the authenticator.
The narrative shifts to John’s childhood memory of when his father shot himself. The violent death sequence then switches to John’s present situation when he gets back in his house. Hailey notices Homm tied to a chair, restless. While she tries to comfort him with her words, a man (Charles Dance) says from the inside that he will start cutting Homm’s fingers off if he does not reveal the details he wants. When he walks out, John acknowledges him as his father.
Now it adds yet another twist to the narrative. It somehow does not seem too strange either since the fast-paced narrative has thrived on perplexing us even within its (approx) 2 hour-premiere. Who is this man that John calls his dad? Does that mean his father – Ben, staged his death? Even if we assume that the dead man in the chair was not Ben, whose dead body was in his casket? And did John learn about Ben being alive sometime in the future? Only the next episode can reveal the details behind this cliffhanger.
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