The Afterparty (Season 2) Episode 3: Everyone loves some hard-boiled noir. That is the motto of the latest episode of Apple TV’s “The Afterparty” as it goes all monochromatic for the most part of it. Adhering to the format of the show, this week’s main focus is the character of Travis who was in an extremely dubious position regarding the murder of Edgar after last week’s “period romance” episode. Thanks to Travis being a black-and-white noir aficionado, we are graced with a slew of hauntingly gorgeous frames – and a very interesting version of events where Travis is a no-nonsense, old-world detective.
The Afterparty (Season 2), Episode 3 Recap:
Down-on-his-luck but brilliant detective Travis receives a wedding invitation from his former belle Grace, aka the bride. Travis is happily in a relationship with Weronika, but back in the day, he and Grace were quite an item.
The Conspiracy
It is weird to get invited to your ex-girlfriend’s wedding, but Travis soon decodes a “cry for help” message in the invitation, and he decides to save Grace. By delving deeper into the internet, Travis finds out that Edgar Minnows is not the tech-billionaire the man claims to be, but rather a fraud who has basically raised the market value of his own crypto-currency by duping the world as investors, all faked by himself. Upon reaching the wedding venue, Travis gets introduced to Edgar by Grace. While Edgar appears to be completely civil, Travis realizes that it is only a facade.
His suspicion only becomes stronger when he tries to interrogate Isabel and gets vehemently slapped by the matriarch. As he is only invited to the wedding, Travis gate-crashes the rehearsal dinner and settles at the singles table where he meets Aniq, who lets him know that he intends to “change table,”; which Travis perceives as some sort of secret code, although we know for a fact that it was not and we see Aniq also telling Travis the same.
Travis keeps snooping around, and he eventually finds what he was looking for in Edgar’s study – a piece of paper with morse-coded information. While he is at it, he gets caught by Sebastian, but Travis escapes that by pretending to be oblivious to Edgar’s safe, to Sebastian’s surprise. He eventually decodes the messages from the piece of paper he has found and comes to the conclusion that Edgar is trying to fake his death and then escape into the win with all his money. And he is only marrying Grace because he needs someone to take the heat after his disappearance.
The Other Investigations By The Two Sisters
While Danner and Aniq are hearing Travis’ version of events, Zoé and Grace run an investigation on their own. While doing her bit of (dead)body tampering, Zoé finds a cufflink in Edgar’s pocket. But Grace recognizes this as a missing key of a typewriter. Considering Edgar and Grace had their meet cute when he came to her antique shop in order to buy a typewriter for Hannah, the arrow of suspicion automatically points at the strange adoptive sister of the groom. Naturally, the bride and her elder sister cum savior break into Hannah’s tent. Seeing Hannah’s typewriter, they find out that the ‘G’ key is indeed missing – the same one which Zoé retrieved from Edgar’s pocket. With Hannah approaching, the sisters quickly get out of the tent. While leaving in a hurry, Grace warns Zoé about being careful with Hannah’s plants around the tent, as some of those are actually poisonous. This is the true “Eureka” moment of the episode, which pretty much exonerates Travis, at least for the time being.
The Afterparty (Season 2), Episode 3 Ending Explained:
Did Hannah Kill Edgar?
Coming back to Travis, the former boyfriend cum detective makes it a point to stop the wedding at any cost. When he gets back to the rehearsal dinner, Hannah suddenly approaches Travis and casually flirts with him. She also hints at intending to stop the wedding. However, despite all of that, Travis fails to do anything at the wedding. That changes his agenda and now he plans to stop Edgar from leaving Grace as him leaving would put her in a sea of trouble.
At the post wedding after-party, Travis notices that Edgar is trying to bail. Realizing the groom is putting his escape plan in motion, Travis follows him to the house. But on his way, he suddenly gets attacked as someone hits Travis on his head with something heavy and the detective falls on the ground, shocked and senseless. When he wakes up, the night has already burnt deep. Thinking Edgar has already taken flight, Travis rushes inside the house but he is surprised to find out Edgar is still there.
The post wedding party is going on and Edgar, who previously tried to escape the party, is looking hyper-active. Travis has a breakdown, gets severely drunk and threatens Edgar that he is going to die, referring to Edgar’s plan. Uncharacteristically, Edgar gives it back to Travis by calling him a “devil”. He goes on to call everyone a “devil”, until Grace puts a halt on it and takes the drunk groom to their room. Travis still follows and once Edgar and Grace enter their room he takes refuge outside and carefully spreads pistachios in front of the room, so that he will get alerted if Edgar tries to escape. Unfortunately though, Travis falls asleep and when he wakes up, all he hears is a screaming Grace. And then he rushes to the room to find out that Edgar has died, for real.
After finishing his story, Travis sees that Danner and Aniq have not really bought his version of the events. Admitting some of his story is fabricated, Travis claims that his theories about Edgar still make sense. Aniq looks somewhat convinced, while Danner is still skeptical.
Right at this moment, Grace and Zoé arrive and they tell Aniq, Danner and Travis everything about what they have found out about Hannah. Zoé has in fact gone a step ahead and found out about a particular plant, whose name pretty much translates to “Devil”. The most interesting thing is, the said plant can actually give someone a hallucinating effect where someone might actually see a manifestation of the devil itself.
So, Edgar calling everything “devil” might just be a very literal thing after all. And that’s just not it. After the hallucination, there is a very real possibility of the person falling prey to death. With all this information, Hannah naturally becomes a person of interest; and while Grace and Travis were marked as suspects based on their behavior, in Hannah’s case, there is solid circumstantial evidence. However, we still cannot definitively say that Hannah actually killed Edgar, until we get something like a confession. Hannah is the prime suspect at the moment, but that does not prove that she is the killer.
Wild Killer Prediction: Even though it looks like it is Hannah as of now, we are still going with Sebastian.
