Explaining the End of Netflix's Annoying Harlan Coben Series, 'Fool Me Once'

By Dustin Rowles | TV | January 5, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | January 5, 2024 |

Fool Me Once is the latest Harlan Coben series adapted for Netflix. I’ve seen them all, and they’re all watchably mediocre, which is not an insult, exactly. They’re the Netflix equivalent of an airplane page-turner, propelled almost entirely by plot and a few unexpected twists along the way.

I watch them all (including the YA Harlan Coben series on Amazon) for a reason, and it’s not just because it’s my job. However, Fool Me Once is probably my least favorite of the bunch, notwithstanding a decent performance from Michelle Keegan and the always-welcome presence of Adeel Akhtar. The twist ending here, however, was more galling than surprising and rendered moot much of the previous seven episodes. Allow me to explain.

Here’s the plot (Spoilers to come), and you’ll see what I mean. Keegan (above, center) plays Maya, whose husband Joe (above, far right) is shot and murdered — the husband is played by Richard Armitage, who was AI-generated for Harlan Coben series. Here he’s mostly seen in flashbacks. However, after his death, Maya mysteriously sees her husband on her nanny cam, and she’s like, WTF?! Is Joe still alive? So, she begins investigating his death, which occurred only a few months after the mysterious death of her sister, Claire (Natalie Anderson).

Meanwhile, Adeel Akhtar plays Detective Sergeant Sami Kierce (above, left). He’s investigating Joe’s death, too. Joe and Claire, separated my hundreds of miles, worked together. Kierce and Maya discover that both Joe and Claire were shot with the same gun and rightfully deduce that their murders are connected. Kierce, meanwhile, keeps blacking out and having weird hallucinations on the job, which doctors attribute to a neurological issue.

At this point, I am intrigued: Maya’s sister, Claire, and husband, Joe, who worked together, were killed by the same gun hundreds of miles apart, and the investigating detective keeps blacking out. Hmmm. Joe and Claire actually worked for the pharmaceutical company operated by Joe’s family, the Burketts, specifically Joe’s mother, Judith Burkett (Joanna Lumley, above, center right). It’s also important to know that, during her time as a helicopter pilot in the military, Maya fired a missile on a civilian van, killed a bunch of innocent people, and felt really bad about it.

That’s the setup. We know most of this in the first episode and a half. The series spends the next five or six episodes spinning its wheels and following dead ends (including two men on motorcycles who witnessed the murder of Joe) while Kierce continues to black out and experience hallucinations while investigating the case with his partner, a glorified redshirt.

Things begin to come together in the seventh (of eight) episodes. I would not recommend watching any of this series, but if you watched the first couple and got bored and are just here to see how it ends, here we go: Maya discovers that when he was younger, Joe and some friends killed a kid during a hazing incident and vowed to cover it up. When the guilt got to be too much for Joe’s brother, Andrew, Joe pushed him off a yacht and framed it as a suicide. However, the yacht captain knew the truth and was blackmailing Joe’s family, so Joe had to kill him, too.

Kierce also discovers that he is not suffering from a neurological problem; he is suffering side effects from the drugs produced by the Burkett family. What a coincidence! Maya’s sister Claire also knew about these side effects and that the Burketts had falsified drug studies. Claire fed that information to a techno-muckraker type by the name of Corey (Laurie Kynaston) in exchange for Corey’s promise not to rat out Maya for launching a missing into that civilian van that she felt really bad about doing. Joe found out that Claire had betrayed the family business, and he was the one who murdered her. Oh, snap!

But who killed Joe with the same gun that he used to kill Claire? This is where it gets annoying because after spending the better part of seven episodes investigating the murders of both her sister and her husband, we learn that Maya actually killed her husband because she found out that Joe had killed her sister. In other words, she was investigating one murder (Joe) that she committed and another murder (Claire) she already knew about. Dumb.

In the meantime, Kierce’s investigation also leads to the truth: That Maya killed her husband. But Kierce lets Maya go so that she can confront Joe’s family about what they knew. Maya also discovers that Joe’s mom, Judith, had been fucking with her by making her believe that Joe was still alive. Judith was doing so because she knew that Maya had killed her son, and she was trying to drive Maya insane out of spite, revenge, or because it gave the Coben an excuse to insinuate that Joe was still alive (the video of Joe on Maya’s nanny cam after he had died was deepfaked).

During a confrontation with Joe’s family, they confess to falsifying the drug studies and to the murders Joe committed. When Maya threatens to rat them out, Joe’s other brother shoots and kills Maya. But double twist: A nanny cam had been set up in the room to capture everything and send it out to the entire Internet. The confession of Judith and the murder of Maya goes viral, and the Burkett family goes down. Maya’s daughter is raised by her brother-in-law, and eighteen years later, Maya’s daughter has a kid and names it Maya. Awwww.

The end.