Twice Upon A Time – Netflix Season 1 Episode 3 Recap & Review

Living Two Lives

Twice Upon A Time is really trying my patience. Although the third episode does move things along a little and introduces some urgency late on, this French series has really taken its time to reach this point. This is certainly not a widespread series I can recommend to the mass public and depending on how this one finishes, will determine whether it’ll even be worth taking the plunge in the first place.

It’s not the worst show on the platform but the lack of tension, suspense, action or anything remotely exciting make this a real sleep-inducing, but visually pretty, noir.

With Louise back from London, episode 3 of Twice Upon A Time begins with Vincent surprising her in the past timeline and telling her it’s possible to love two people at once. He goes on to express it’s okay if she still loves James. After sleeping together, she mentions his son Stanley and he leaves.

In the present, Vincent heads out and sees Andre after packing up the cube under robes. When he heads to work, his boss berates him for not telling the truth and presses on why he’s been lying. He tells him not to be late again or he may end up fired.

As it turns out, the portal only works in Vincent’s basement, making his trip to Thibault pointless. When Vincent heads home, the delivery driver comes over and they discuss the package together. Soon after, Vincent hurries over to pick up Stanley, who happens to still be annoyed with him. While there, Louise speaks to James and tells him she made a mistake, going on to kick him out the apartment before buying ibuprofen in a bid to dispel her headache but it doesn’t work.

Vincent takes Stanley out and leaves him while he’s on the merry go round, heading to Louise’s and finding Gwen in his living room. With Louise nowhere to be found, she breaks the bad news to him – Louise is dead having collapsed in the street. She died of a brain haemorrhage; a side effect to being hit in the street previously. As they comfort each other, Vincent heads back and finds Stanley missing.

Frantically he searches for his son before a lady brings him back to his house, where the delivery driver continues to hound him. As Vincent weeps for Louise, Thibault arrives as scheduled and discusses the cube. Reluctantly, he invites them in and while Stanley is asleep, heads back into the cube alone and out the other side, where he finds Louise again. He embraces her and as he does, we skip forward 5 months.

We then receive a real back-and-forth segment as Vincent jumps back and forth, trying to have his cake and eat it at the same time. Gwen introduces Vincent to Jordan, the man who happens to be the knife-wielder from the previous episode and he appears to recognize him too.

While a fire breaks out in his basement during the present-timeline, prompting Vincent to rush in and try and save the cube but to no avail, in a past flashback we see Vincent and Louise first meeting together at a party. They hit it off immediately and as the episode ends, they discuss their love-making and how it will never be this strong again.

There’s no denying that Twice Upon A Twice is a really artistic series and some of the themes discussed are pretty thought provoking. Unfortunately the show fails to instill any sort of drama or excitement in the meantime, even with a fire and Stanley going missing. I hope Twice Upon A Time pulls it out the bag for an interesting and exciting finale but right now I’m struggling to see where that spark will arise from.