How Does 'Truth Be Told' on Apple TV+ End? (Spoilers)

By Dustin Rowles | TV | January 17, 2020 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | January 17, 2020 |

Spoilers

First off, Truth Be Told is not a very good series, and despite the excellent cast, that’s a charitable assessment. It’s twisty and meandering, but it’s mostly boring, and the ways in which it was changed from the novel Are You Sleeping by Kathleen Barber, did not suit the series particularly well. I am assuming, in fact, that most of the people who read this will be people who gave up a few episodes into the series but wanted to find out how it ends. Here’s how it concluded:

Twenty years after Warren Cave (Aaron Paul) was wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for the murder of Chuck Buhrman, he was released and able to be with his mother (Elizabeth Perkins) before she died of cancer. (Warren’s father, Owen (Brett Cullen), who helped to put his own son away, died by suicide several episodes prior).

As it turns out, Josie (Lizzy Caplan) — the “good” twin with the blonde hair — had actually killed her own father, Chuck, although she had completely repressed the memory of it until Poppy (Octavia Spencer) helped her to resurrect the memory in the course of her investigation. Josie, it turns out, killed Chuck to protect her sister, Lanie, whom their father Chuck was sexually abusing.

Meanwhile, Josie and Lanie’s mother, Erin (Annabella Sciorra), knew who the real murderer was and why, and after all these years, the guilt had finally gotten to her and she was about to confess to Poppy that Josie killed her husband. However, Lanie — the “bad” twin with the brunette hair — killed her mother before she could confess and framed it as a suicide to protect Josie.

In the end, after Erin’s death, Josie and Lanie — with Poppy’s tacit approval — blamed their dead mother, Erin, for Chuck’s murder, and Lanie recanted her witness testimony concerning Warren. Warren was released, and Josie — the good twin — escaped responsibility for Chuck’s murder. However, because Lanie was clearly mentally ill, Josie — for her sister’s own good(?) — turned Lanie in for the murder of their mother, even though Lanie did it to protect Josie.

Not that anyone cared about the superfluous relationship drama between Poppy, her husband, and Markus (Mekhi Phifer), but Markus did own up to still being in love with Poppy. It’s implied, however, that after she completed the podcast, she moved back to New York with her husband. Meanwhile, Warren — who had tattooed over his Nazi tattoos and renounced his ties to the white supremacists — asked for protection from the Black gang in the prison. They did not offer it, but Warren was released before the white supremacists could kill him.