Class of '09 Episodes 1, 2 & 3: Recap & Ending Explained

Class of ’09 Episodes 1, 2 & 3 Recap & Ending Explained: Class of ’09 is the new Hulu Miniseries created by Tom Rob Smith. Starring Brian Tyree Henry, Kate Mara, Sepideh Moafi, Brian J. Smith, Isaiah Stratton, and Jake McDorman in crucial roles, it follows a group of FBI agents who graduated in the same year, reuniting due to some troubling developments in their lives.

It frequently shifts between three different timelines to clue us in on the past, present, and future of these characters with respect to the effect of Artificial Intelligence on the FBI investigations. The crime thriller consists of eight episodes and will release one episode per week.

*Spoilers ahead*

Class of ’09 (Hulu Miniseries) Episodes 1, 2 & 3 Recap:

Episode 1: Part of Something

The episode begins with an event from 2034, referred to as The Future. Tayo Michaels (Brian Tyree Henry) walks into his office to monitor a system assessment. His batchmates from Quantico, Ashley Poet (Kate Mara), Murphy (Jake McDorman), and two others reach a desolate building to get hold of a potential extremist named Amos Garcia (Raul Castillo). They look through the interior to reach a room filled with LCD screens.

Suddenly, they all start showing footage of Tayo saying that the US is the safest country in the world. It plays on repeat. Tayo soon attends a judiciary committee to make a case for himself so that he can get another term as the director of the FBI. He shares how the system has seen a radical change in the way the bureau operates by using ground-breaking technology that treats everything as equal. He wants to protect this progress and thus wants an extended term.

After the court session, Poet meets Tayo to ask him why he ordered her and Murphy to arrest Amos. He says that he is posed to be a threat. Back at her place, Amos suddenly shows up with a mask on. He removes it and shares his discontent over how people are being arrested just for their thoughts. The feds soon arrive at the place, shoot Amos, and ask Poet to stay on the ground. Before getting shot, he throws some kind of card toward her.

Back in 2009, referred to as The Past, Poet reaches Quantico and interacts with Murphy right outside. He was a cop in salt lake city, and she was a nurse. After a playful exchange, she goes to her room to meet her ‘suitemate’ Hour Nazari (Sepideh Moafi), sitting in the bathtub. She is low on cash, and so Poet offers to help. Hour rejects it and says she shouldn’t be there. Poet says she needs her to stay.

Later, the batch of aspirants meets their counselors, Drew (Brooke Smith) and Gabriel (Jon John Briones). He hopes the new class will fulfill his expectations. The potential agents are asked to give their introduction. Daniel Lennix (Brian J Smith) shares that he was a lawyer and believed he could break the family tradition of this profession. Gabriel objects that he is trying to find a statement for his identity by joining the FBI. Lennix falters in responding to it.

Hour shares that her parents were born in Tehran, Iran. Her father was an academic who was arrested and heavily interrogated for only carrying books about the Soviet Union. The father wanted to read as a part of academia. But the American authorities did not see it that way. Tayo says that he was an insurance agent and wanted to use his data-driven knowledge to good use – for fixing injustice instead.

Poet was a nurse at a prison. FBI agents wanted her to find details about a man from her arrested brother. While speaking with him, she realized how traumatized he was due to the ordeal. The agent later offered her an opportunity to join the FBI to stop people from being harmed.

After their discussion, a batchmate – Nathan, notices a dead bird and goes out to bury it. Tayo sees it as a sign of vulnerability that the FBI wouldn’t want in their department. He believed Nathan would get sent back home. Poet thinks otherwise. But Tayo’s assumption becomes true. Turns out, Nathan was trying to process grief about his brother’s death.

Lennix meets Poet asking if he should make a dinner reservation. Hour quickly realizes he’s hitting on her. During the dinner, Lennix says that he wants to join the FBI for his political ambitions. Poet shares an emotional story about her relationship with her grandmother. It made her choose the vocation of a nurse.

Hour and Tayo join them at the bar and have different thoughts about the couple’s future. Hour thinks they will marry within five years. Tayo thinks Poet’s caring nature will come in the way of seeking personal joy. Anyhow, Poet and Lennix drive to a motel and have sex.

In 2023, referred to as The Present, Poet knocks on a black man’s house with another officer. She looks throughout the apartment and notices the man’s kid in the bedroom. By that time, the officer shoots the man dead. The officer then wipes his own fingerprints from his gun and places it next to the man. She realizes he implicated the black man in a crime on his own death.

Poet is soon taken to meet a department of rebel officers. The men grill her and ask why she wants to join them. She says she wanted to be a ‘Part of Something.’ Soon, she gains their confidence in her and gets welcomed into their family. She was working undercover for the FBI to get hold of these men. Later, speaking with the agents, she shares how she earned their faith by not trying to fit in. A misogynist says that she tried to play hard to get.

Poet is told to be present at the time of the corrupt officer’s arrest. Because of this betrayal, he spits on her before getting taken away by the FBI. When she applied to join the FBI, her partner supported her decision. However, when asked about it during the spousal interview, he denied being comfortable with relocating, depending on where she gets stationed. He understood its consequences but still failed her application. Poet thinks the reason is that he didn’t believe in her.

That ex-partner was the ex-lawyer, Lennix. Upon meeting Poet, he congratulates her for her recent big bust of the corrupt cops. Lennix now works as the associate executive assistant director. After their playful banter, he reveals that he gave the order for Poet to make the earlier arrests as a cover for another assignment – to snoop into the details about a project.

Poet meets her old roommate, Hour, for dinner. That’s when she learns that Hour was told – Poet will join her in her ambitious project – that involves creating a widespread criminal database. Poet wasn’t aware that her work involved spying on an insider. As a result, she later gets angry at Lennix for assigning her to this mission. He says the FBI considers Hour a potential threat due to their concerns about her past. They think she bases her work on a personal tragedy.

Kate Mara in Class of ’09, Episode 1. (Hulu)

Episode 2: The Fitness Test

In the past, Tayo struggled with fulfilling the fitness test. He and other prospective agents were supposed to run one and a half miles in a certain time. Unfortunately, he could not pass that test. Gabriel questions whether he lied about his competency. Tayo says his weight keeps fluctuating because he could not keep it in control because of the pressure of working in the corporate field. He says he passed the test the last time he tried.

Gabriel does not want to let Tayo be a part of the FBI. Poet tries to make Tayo not lose hope because of it. Another batchmate named Simons (Nicholas Logan) puts Tayo down by making him feel bad for failing it. Tayo understands his blatant racism and confronts him about it. Later, in the locker room, Hour points out how caring for others makes Poet feel good about herself. Poet objects to it. Anyhow, she keeps worrying about Tayo and helps him practice.

Simons apparently has a record in a sprint. He broke someone else’s record from the past. However, his racism becomes even more apparent when he calls himself the ‘fastest white trainee.’ Tayo overhears Simon’s remark and says how there aren’t separate records for people from different races – to confront Simon’s racist agenda. It turns into a fight, and Gabriel interrupts them. He shares that either all of them will enter the FBI or no one. So, the two have to get over their differences even if Simon is clearly being racist.

Later, Poet has a word with Tayo in his room. Tayo shares an experience from his past when he went to watch Crimson Tide as a 15-year-old. He took a book on nuclear submarines with him to read before – to check if the movie was accurate. An officer stopped their car, saw a group of black folks inside, and slapped Tayo right across his face for no reason. Tayo’s parents never hit him, but the racist officer did. This is why he did not want to look the other way when injustice transpired. It also made him see how he needed to rise up the rank to seek justice.

In their later physical test, Simon apologizes to Tayo. He sees through Simon’s feigned sympathy. Unfortunately, even this time, Tayo fails to reach the endpoint in time. He also struggles to breathe when he reaches there. He says he can give this test a few months later as per the procedures at Quantico to be eligible. Gabriel and Drew offer him this chance. Later at night, while speaking with his mother, he tries to hide his emotions about the racist treatment he faced, even in Quantico.

In the present, the FBI sends Tayo and Agent Nunez to visit a cult’s base headed by a man named Mike Tupirik (Mark Pellegrino). They are told to figure out details about Tupirik’s questionable work. Despite not having a warrant or a crime, Tayo believes he can make it work. They get an entry into Mark’s snow-filled mansion. He takes the agents through the interior and introduces them to his wife, Jessa May (Sage Kim Gray).

Benjamin (Benjamin Keepers) serves them some tea with a scarred hand. Mike justifies it, saying that their part of the country is called the ‘Suicide Belt.’ He proclaims himself to be a messiah to the troubled people in the area. Agent Nunez asks for directions to the washroom. Mark tells Jessa to guide her. Instead, Jessa takes Nunez to a basement filled with the cult’s potential targets. It includes Tayo and his wife’s photos.

While the agents try to get out, the cult members get suspicious about what the two learned. Jessa follows them outside and gets shot dead. Nunez also gets shot. Tayo brings her back to their car and tries to evade the shooting. After driving away, he stops the car to shoot the people who followed them. He manages to shoot everyone.

Tayo walks back to the mansion to find it is on fire. He still walks inside and notices all the proof is getting destroyed. He walks out from the back door and manages to save himself. But he can’t get hold of incriminating evidence against the cult. Later in the hospital, his wife Vivienne (Rosalind Eleazar) meets him and says that it wasn’t his fault. Tayo meets Nunez on the hospital bed. She asks him whether they stopped something or started it. Unfortunately, they can’t figure out that the cult members were planning to attack.

In the future, Poet goes to meet Lennix, who is now in a senior position in Washington, DC. They speak about his recent divorce and how he is getting into politics. Lennix rejected the offer to teach the new Quantico aspirants since he thinks the new recruitment process is a sham. He laments in a nostalgic manner about how the bureau that he knew is no longer the same. He thinks their class would not make it through the current process. Besides, he does not like Tayo’s new approach to handling things.

Poet feels bad for spending most of her life working for the FBI only to be surveilled. She shares the incident from her apartment with Garcia and how they could not look at the computer records at his place since the agents reached there before. She also says that Garcia gave her a keycard. Lennix suggests she meet Hour to learn about it. She had not spoken with this old roommate of hers for over nine years.

Senator meets Tayo and questions him about the recent, inexplicable arrests. Tayo explains how they were arrested for things that they could have done, not for any crimes they committed. He shares a folklore to justify his process as the fair one. It becomes clear that he does not trust people but trusts the system he built.

Episode 3: Thank You for Not Driving

In the past, Poet attempts a driving exercise as part of their selection process. She struggles a bit to perfect it but soon manages to ace it. In the present, Tayo goes for an FBI raid on a house with a team. While they hold fire, he walks toward a room. A crew member breaks open the door to find Benjamin from the cult inside. Tayo asks where Tupirik is. Benjamin says Tayo has no idea of the danger that awaits them. They bring the man to the office and get no substantial help.

Meanwhile, Tupirik is sneaked through a truck container that goes past the radar of the feds. He seems intent on using the database technology to get to the bottom of it. On the other hand, Hour took Poet to see their new system that she referred to as ‘better tomorrow.’ It’s an always-accessible database of case files for every agent to eliminate subjectivity, i.e., biases and errors, and meant to bring in rationality.

Poet meets Lennix, convinced that Hour’s technology is revolutionary. Lennix believes that Hour’s motivations are rooted in her past, which makes her idea of a fair world tricky for the FBI to endorse. He and the bureau does not want the secrets to get out. During a later meeting, the board of agents says the same thing to Hour, dismissing its importance. As a result, the branch needed to shut down within a matter of weeks. She gets emotional since she is proud of the work they did together.

Back at home, Tayo seems worried about his and his wife’s safety. Once he drives away, a vehicle pulls down the street and stops Vivienne from driving away from the house. The men also shoot her car. To defend herself, she hits the van repeatedly and then holds their gun in her hands. Tayo returns home and gets emotional seeing her in this state. He confronts Benjamin about it, who still does not respond to his questions. So, he decides to get in touch with Hour for assistance.

Poet visits Hour’s house for a cozy gathering. She later meets Drew and learns that it is her last year. Hour takes her away to dance together. She says she knows that Poet was sent to spy on her. She says she was happy that it was Poet since she wanted to see what she created. While she starts thinking of quitting, Tayo calls her, asking for details about her programme.

Later, Tayo stays in the room with Benjamin for over six hours while Hour and her team observe it from her branch office. Poet tries to stop her and warns that the seniors have already sent a team to resist her efforts. Meanwhile, Tayo gets hold of the paper that Benjamin kept sketching with his pencil upon. Tayo scratches it with a pencil to find the interior plan of a place. Hour finds several matches and finds a positive match with a construction company.

In the future, Poet drives up to Hour’s place. Hour gets a bit emotional seeing her old batchmate meet her after almost a decade. She takes Poet back to meet her family – her wife Ana (Rebecca Lines) and her daughter (Aria Jennai Pulliam). Later at night, Poet asks for Hour’s help. Poet says that the FBI started using her system and turned it into something terrible. Hour does not care much that Amos is dead since he stole her system. Since Poet did not side with her in the past, they grew apart. Hour says she was in love with Poet back then.

Class of ’09 (Hulu Miniseries) Episode 3 Ending, Explained:

In the future, Poet drives away with Hour late at night. While they have some casual chat, Hour notices that the feds are surveilling them. Suddenly, the authorities get hold of their car system and make them stop on the side of the road. Poet is asked to keep her gun in the glove compartment. Since the officer discerns nothing suspicious about them, he lets them leave. They eventually reach Amos’ place to look at what the keycard means.

Hour says that she only created a database, like a library, where humans did the thinking. The current system does not need people. It decides what is and isn’t fair on its own. In a recording, Amos objects to the same way of handling matters. Poet takes Hour back to her place. Seeing Poet get emotional, Hour stays back with her for the time being.

In the present, the FBI agents working for Tayo enter a construction company office that matches the interior plan drawn by Benjamin on the paper. Meanwhile, Hour learns that the truck of that construction company was used for travel.

The agents soon reach the truck’s location and shoot the men driving it. They reach the back and throw a bomb inside. Tupirik lights a fire in the interior before leaving. Tayo returns home to Vivienne with a triumphant face.

Later at the bureau, he comes face to face with Tupirik. The cult leader says that he is where he wanted to be since he wants to see Tayo’s face when he shares a piece of news. Let’s wait for the next episode to learn what Tupirik meant by it.

Class of ’09 (Hulu Miniseries) Episodes 1, 2 & 3: Recap & Ending Explained