Flight Attendant

A murder mystery full of turbulence but did it stick the landing?

Flight attendant Cassie Bowden plays an alcoholic party lover who wakes up in a hotel room in Bangkok to discover the dead body of a gentleman who she just met on her flight. With no memory of the night before and afraid of being arrested in a foreign land she cleans up the crime scene and takes off. But did she commit this deed or was someone else involved?

One of our reviewers for the audio podcast, Scottie Gash, did a quick look at this for episode 105 on Dec 5th. After watching a couple episodes he was less then impressed and I understand his thought process there. The first few episodes can be hard to watch. Not because they are shot poorly or the acting suffered, but because it's difficult to watch Cassie continue to keep making the worst decisions in the history of decision making. Without context, it gets close to what looks like poor writing for the sake of plot.

But as the layers begin to peel back to reveal her character, you begin to understand the trauma she has endured as a child by the hands of a manipulative father who treats her like his best drinking buddy instead of his daughter. We find the lessons she unknowingly learned drive her character's actions throughout the events.

This show did something a bit different with the formula. We get to see inside Cassie's confused head as she tries desperately to piece together the events of that night using the dead gentleman as a buffer to try and talk her through it. I thought this would get nonsensical and old by the end of it, but the show knew when to pull it back. It would switch up the pace by giving us glimpses into her past family troubles such as exploring her relationship with her brother who in his own right has a very interesting place in Cassie's life and development. Watching their roller coaster of a relationship was every bit as satisfying to me as the mystery of who really killed Alex Sokolov.

When it comes to pacing this show does fantastic work. It's a rollercoaster ride of sleuthing, action, and drunken nonsense. It all pulls together in a very satisfying character arc for Kelly's character and the others surrounding her.

Kelly's has to carry the burden of the work in the acting department for this show as we will spend almost all our time with her. She knocks it right out of the park. In one particular scene she has a break down (For spoiler reasons I'll be vague). She's at her lowest point and just sobs while talking to her friend. The emotion in her eyes and the facial expressions she uses to convey this moment are brilliant and show she's ready for deeper roles. I've seen criticism that she doesn't play it "drunk" enough when she drinks the entire series. But see that's the idea. She is an alcoholic and is showing us that drinking has been such a crutch her entire life that she's conditioned to it. It's only in the worst moments she appears intoxicated, showing the helplessness the character is feeling.

Rosie Perez and Zosia Mamet play her friends throughout the series and both have their own little arcs they go through all while dealing with the craziness that their friend Cassie brings to their lives. They both play the roles expertly. The one misstep I see with the script is Perez's story. It has very little to do with the overall themes and plot of this show. It feels shoved in here to just give us some breathing room from Cassie. This series has been green lit for season 2 so I can see that paying off and connecting to Cassie there. But only time will tell.

It's not the destination but the journey. That's this show. The whodunit aspect, though interesting enough, became secondary to the development of not just Cassie but her friends and brother.

POP