The Stranger – Season 1 Episode 8 (The Finale) Recap & Review

The Truth

The Season 1 finale of The Stranger sees Olivia’s Mum return home as the police hurry to her house. As she walks round to the back, she spots her husband with a gun up to Johanna’s head. As he becomes momentarily distracted by her appearance, Johanna slips away down the street and hides as Katz scrambles in his car and drives away.

Adam speaks to the private investigator who manages to find details surrounding Christine Killane. As he rings Johanna’s phone to reveal this, Katz picks up and persuades him to text the information surrounding the stranger and where she is. Katz races to the location while Adam arrives but winds up blindsided by Gabrielle who knocks him out.

Chained to the table in their apartment, Adam awakens and pleads with the girls to tell him where Corinne is. Christine asks Gabrielle to leave them alone and here they talk one on one. Christine wants to expose secrets and does this for cash as her sole mission in life. It turns out Ed is actually her Father, which makes them siblings. Katz suddenly bursts into the room with a gun though and holds them both up at gunpoint after shooting Gabrielle.

Adam breaks free from his restraints and wrestles with Katz but the officer overpowers him. Just before he fires the gun, Christine jumps in and takes the bullet before Adam takes advantage of the chaos and chokes Katz out, asking where Corinne is. The police burst into the room and break up the commotion, arresting Katz for Heidi’s murder.

At the hospital, Christine apologises for what she’s done and admits she was looking into Corinne originally and had no idea it would lead back to Adam. It turns out the man who actually hired her to look into Corinne was Bob. With no gun at the crime scene, the detectives remain puzzled while Adam learns that him being told about the fake pregnancy wasn’t part of the original deal made and simply Christine looking out for her brother.

Adam rushes to the football ground and confronts Bob, who admits that he did hire the agency but learned that Corinne wasn’t the one who stole the money… Tripp was. Adam races over to his house and demands answers. Tripp was the one who text him that day asking for time away and he knows where Corinne is.

He leads Adam out into the middle of the woods where he reveals to his friend that he was up to his eyeballs in debt. Unfortunately Corinne got in the way and she’s actually dead. Buried beneath his feet in the woods. He tells Adam they have to go on as if nothing has happened but Johanna arrives at the scene tracking our protagonist down. Tripp continues, telling Adam if he goes to the police then they’ll frame him as the killer given Tripp has no ties to Corinne beyond the football club. Adam hears enough and shoots him three times in the chest.

We then skip forward six months to find Adam with the boys and out at one of their football matches. Johanna arrives and here we learn she’s now retired from the force. Chrissy Killane has gone missing and it turns out Johanna helped cover up the murder and instead framed all of this on Katz. Ironically Chrissy trying to expose secrets has caused more to circle the group and as the episode and series closes out, we see her watching the family from afar, a slight hint of regret on her face.

The Stranger is a bit of a mixed bag as we conclude this story. On the one hand, the twists along the way have been magnificent and certainly allowed for some really unexpected turns in the story. The Stranger’s true identity is definitely one of the stand-outs while the big twist at the end involving Tripp is another that was clearly foreshadowed but difficult to predict. At the same time, Katz killing Heidi seems a tad far fetched for someone hired to do a job and with no emotional investment in the strangers. It makes his cold attitude toward her all the more questionable given how torn up he is over the situation he finds himself in late on.

It also doesn’t help that the entire sub-plot involving the alpaca head and Dante essentially resulted in a party gone a little too crazy and the big reveals around this were a bit underwhelming. Having said that though, the series itself has been a fun ride and a very binge-able series to get through. It’s not perfect but much like Safe, if you can look past the flaws there’s a really enjoyable thrill-ride here well worth checking out. While it’s unlikely to be named the best thriller of the year, it’s hard to think of another that’ll be as unpredictable as this one. And as an added bonus, we even get a conclusive ending too rather than a cliffhanger which is reason enough to feel pretty satisfied when the final credits roll.

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