Mythomaniac – Netflix Season 1 Episode 2 Recap & Review

Stand By Me

Episode 2 of Mythomaniac starts with Carole’s teachers speaking to her parents about her terrible behaviour and results at school, which involves her turning up drunk. As they tell her they’re planning to expel her, Patrick reveals that Elvira has been diagnosed with cancer, prompting the teachers to give them more time.

After  the school runs, the family head to Elvira’s Dad’s food truck for some pizza. Patrick berates Carole for how she has been behaving and grounds her. Returning home, Virginie asks her mum if she could get the same disease as her grandmother. Knowing her daughter worries about everything, she lies and tells her everyone is healthy.

While shopping with Elvira, Patrick receives a call from his mistress wondering why he hasn’t been answering his calls. He tells her things are complicated and promises to see her soon. After his call, Patrick decides to use the supermarket’s microphone to declare his love for his wife and proposes to her, without knowing that his mistress is also in the same shop, listening to his proposal.

Back home, Patrick tells Elvira he wants to be there when she gets the results back from hospital. We then receive a musical montage of all the characters as they sing the lyrics of Stand By Me and as we cut to Patrick and Elvira, they receive a call that Carole is at the police station. It turns out Carole and her friends got drunk and Kevin fell off the roof. Driving back home, Patrick accidentally runs Carole over on her scooter. They then decide to tell Carole the truth about her mother’s tumour, in a bid to scare her into stopping her antics. As they talk to Sam and Carol about her cancer, she’s quick to reassure them that it could be a false alarm and she’s still waiting for more results.

The next day, Patrick takes Elvira to the hospital but she manages to convince him not to come with her, while we see Brigitte looking for Patrick in his shop but only finding Carole there instead. The lie seems to work as we see Carole now caring about her parents and her school work. She then decides to tell her mother’s father, Nonno, who arrives at the hospital just as Elvira leaves.

Patrick heads to the chemist and as soon as Brigitte sees him, she tells him to go away. Taking her aside, he explains that his wife has just been diagnosed with cancer. While she tries to be sympathetic to his situation, she tells him she’s not sure how to deal with this and convinces him to leave.

Elvira. whose job is in the insurance sector, finds a file from a previous client called Jane who had breast cancer and decides to use it to falsify a letter showing the results of her tests. After catching someone committing insurance fraud, Elvira posts the letter while she sees a vision of the elderly woman who killed her husband, prompting her to do it where we leave the episode hanging in the balance.

The second episodes continues with the same slow pace and dark tone as before. Here we see that the lie is indeed working as Patrick and Carole seem to now be taking care of Elvira a lot more. While the latter seems to have some doubts about telling everyone about her disease, Patrick seems to have no issues using it to get his way and making things easier in his life.

There was an interesting scene here too where we see it cut from one character to the next as they all sing “Stand by Me”, all seemingly relating to the lyrics.

Mythomaniac is quite the controversial series though as we see everyone’s reaction to a loved one’s disease. It shows that people often take their family for granted and it’s only when faced with tragedy that they realize how much they care. However, in some cases it might be too late so it definitely sends a powerful message and should create some interesting debates with those watching along.