Prodigal Son – Season 1 Episode 4 Recap & Review

Sins Of A Mother

Interwoven around the stand-alone case of the week, Prodigal Son dives deeper into Malcolm’s troubled past as he struggles to piece together exactly what happened to him as a child. With all eyes pointing to his Mother Jessica, Prodigal Son continues to weave its mystery at a decent pace.

We begin with more flashbacks as Malcolm relives his painful memories. Snapping back to present day, he asks the therapist to tell her more about his Mother. He’s erratic and uncontrollable but a call from the police to a crime scene snaps him out of his trance and into the house of a social media influencer.

Lying in a bath covered in sequins and with a blue hue over her skin, Malcolm realizes the crime scene is a staged attempt at getting attention. This paints her boyfriend Axel as the number one suspect. As he tells him what happened to the body outside, Axel tries in vain to hide his fear, prompting Malcolm to go in hard on him. In the aftermath of his questions, he asks Gil for security footage from the night he keeps dreaming about. Gil refuses, of course, but when Malcolm heads home Jessica admits to visiting Martin in prison. As he continues to hound her, she slaps him across the face before leaving.

Malcolm rushes in to the prison soon after and asks Martin whether Jessica knew he was a murderer before being arrested. He asks him for the truth but instead, he antagonises Malcolm and tells him he needs to sort his issues out first.

Struggling with his demons, Malcolm begins asking around for clues until stopping a loner photographer, Roger, and interviewing him about Tatiana. With multiple restraining orders, he tells them they need to speak to Axel. Let go, in the middle of the night Malcolm asks Roger again who killed Tatiana before phoning through to the station. Whoever the killer is, they know that Roger is talking and the killer runs Roger down in the middle of the street. Malcolm phones an ambulance but at the hospital, he tells him he’s going to die as an extreme way of getting information from him.

As the officers continue searching, Malcolm realizes the killer isn’t after Tatiana, they’re after Axel. This would also explain why he was so terrified when he found out about his girlfriend. Gil rejects Malcolm’s plea to go it alone but he heads to the club anyway. There, he tells Axel the killer is after him and confronts him out in the street. The killer happens to be Joey and holding a gun up to Malcolm’s head, admits everything. Our troubled protagonist simply smiles before revealing the police were in on the gig the whole time.

With Joey and Axel both imprisoned and arrested for their involved with Tatiana’s murder, Malcolm sits down with Gil and sees the video footage of his mother. She thought Martin was having an affair and according to the video, was none the wiser to what he was actually doing. Seemingly armed with the truth, Malcolm heads off and apologises to Jessica for his behaviour. As the episode closes out, Ainsley visits Martin in prison.

What does Aisnley want with Martin in prison? Is Jessica really telling the truth? There’s a lot of questions still to be answered in Prodigal Son but so far Fox’s crime drama is doing a pretty good job keeping things interesting and engaging across the weeks. While I still think Fox will cancel this at the end of the season, there’s enough here to make for an enjoyable watch nonetheless. Quite what will happen next week remains to be seen but for now, Prodigal Son has enough intrigue to keep you coming back for more.