The second season of The Last Thing He Told Me, originally based on Laura Dave‘s novel of the same name, has arrived. Dave wrote a sequel, The First Time I Saw Him in conjunction with production of Season 2.
Many cast from Season 1 have returned, and some new faces have joined for Season 2, like John Noble, Luke Kirby and Judy Greer, who play members of the notorious Campano family mentioned last season.
For those looking to refresh on what happened in Season 1 of The Last Thing He Told Me, which came out in 2023, plot details and a summary of what to remember lie below.
Protect Her…
One of the central questions that drove Dave’s first novel, The Last Thing He Told Me was, “How well can you truly know the person you marry?” Hannah Hall (Jennifer Garner) married Owen Michaels (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a math wiz and coder whose daughter Bailey (Angourie Rice) didn’t warm up to Hannah immediately. In fact, it took some crazy turns of events for Bailey to realize Hannah had her best interests at heart the whole time.
One April morning, Owen’s boss Avett Thompson (Todd Stashwick) kept calling him before he left for work, and Hannah noticed, but he treated it like a normal morning and took Bailey to school. Hannah wanted to please Bailey by recreating a pasta dish she enjoyed at a nice restaurant.
She even drove into San Francisco to get nice bread for the meal, and she called her friend Jules (Aisha Tyler) to see what she was up to. Hannah, Owen and Bailey lived on a houseboat in Sausalito, California in Season 1. Jules is a journalist, and she was about to do a profile on a baseball player when her girlfriend Max (Tyner Rushing) called her stressed about something. That something turned out to be the big story about Owen’s company that was about to change Hannah and Bailey’s lives forever.
Owen was lead coder for a software company called The Shop, who were accused of fraud and ripping stockholders off half a billion dollars. Owen was key to the software they were selling, which was meant to help eliminate online paper trails. Avett had made it seem like Clean Slate, the software, had already gone public and that there was interest in it, but really he recorded interest as revenue and inflated the stock ahead of The Shop’s IPO, or Initial Public Offering. Dave was inspired by the Enron Corporation accounting scandal in October 2001. Owen disappeared into thin air. Hannah and Bailey couldn’t get a hold of him, but Jules had called him to warn him that Max got a tip from the SEC about an FBI raid of The Shop.
The FBI wanted to talk to Hannah, but she stalled and called her ex-boyfriend Jake Davis (Geoff Stults), a lawyer, for advice. All Hannah got from Owen was a note that said “Protect Her” referring to Bailey, who loved musical theater and was dating Bobby (John Kim). Bailey, meanwhile, had a duffle bag full of cash (half a billion dollars) stuffed into her locker by her dad with a note too. Then Deputy Grady Bradford (Augusto Aguilera) showed up on Hannah’s dock with coffee asking her to talk. He left her with his phone number on a napkin after showing off his badge.
One important thing to note about main character Hannah Hall is that Hannah grew up without her mother because her mother left her when she was very young. Hannah was raised by her grandfather, and it was he who taught her wood-turning, her very artistic occupation.
Bailey and Hannah Go to Austin
A few signs pointed Hannah to Austin, Texas, so she and Bailey took a flight there to see what they could find out about Owen’s past, which was hinted at multiple times as not what they though. One was Grady’s phone number area code, and the other was Bailey’s memory of being at a football game with her dad in a stadium cloaked in orange, which could have been the University of Texas at Austin. Hannah took Bailey to the football stadium to try and jog more of her memory.
Bailey recovered flashes of her and her father dressed in nice clothes, like they could have gone to the game after a party, or a wedding. Jules helped them narrow down a list of churches within’ a walkable radius from the stadium to go inquire about weddings and the parties that got married during home games. At one, Bailey fully flashed back to the wedding, but the secretary at the parish claimed they were closed for the football season in 2011 (this year was deduced because Bailey’s mother Olivia died in 2012). Turns out it was a scrimmage, but Hannah and Bailey were following a different lead when they learned whose wedding she and her father were attending.
Back at UT Austin, Bailey and Hannah remembered Owen’s story of a math professor who framed his bad grade on a midterm exam to show other students as an example of what not to do. Professor Cookman (Victor Garber) did not take kindly to them interrupting one of his lectures after his student aid Cheryl (Taylor Dearden) tipped them off as to where he could be. But Hannah convinced the professor to help them out. He told them he remembered that Owen wrote a long email to him explaining that he was in love with a young woman in the class and that it was hard to focus because of her. This must have been Olivia, the only info about whom Owen had shared with his wife and daughter was that she was killed in a hit and run car crash. Bailey and Hannah later took a list from Cookman’s class that would have had Owen and Olivia and went to search for them in the yearbook’s digitized archives. They found a young woman who was a spitting image of Bailey. Her name was Kate Smith, and Charles Smith was the groom at the wedding Bailey had attended. His bride was Andrea Reyes.
Family Reunion
Hannah tracked down the party where Kate had been pictured in the yearbook — The Never Dry, and she went there. She found Charlie Smith, owner of the bar, and carefully toed a line asking him questions until she showed him a photo of Owen, and he reacted very strongly. Bailey came into the bar, and he called her Kristin. Then she and Hannah ran for it.
Charlie called his father and told him of the Kristin sighting.
Back in California, Jake and Jules teamed up to do some digging for Hannah. She had asked Jules to look at Bailey’s Lady Paul piggybank after L. Paul was a hint for the password to Owen’s encrypted latest will document on his work laptop. In the piggybank, Jules found a Honeywell key that unlocked a safe, and there lied the bulk of the information that Owen had been hiding.
Olivia, Bailey’s mother, was really Kate Smith, and her father was Nicholas Bell (David Morse), famous mob lawyer for The Syndicate, or The Organization, a group notorious for crimes and brutal retaliation against their enemies. Owen got somewhat tied up in Bell’s dealings via Kate, and he had previously been known as Ethan Young.
The Campano family were Nicholas’ most colorful clients, and Owen turned in information about them that got many sent to prison, including Nicholas, who took the fall for them instead of incriminating them. Nicholas spent six and a half years in jail. Owen built a software that encrypted messages sent from Syndicate members behind bars to their families on the outside, which was illegal and crossing a huge line for Nicholas. Owen didn’t realize what the software was for, so he wasn’t directly involved, but he ultimately helped Nicholas. The Campanos never forgave him for his presenting evidence against them.
With some help from Bobby, Bailey tracked down Andrea Reyes’ address and when to her house. Though she was no longer with Charlie, Andrea shared a lot of the past history with Bailey. Hannah called Bobby, who shared where Bailey was, and Deputy Bradford, who had tracked down Hannah to the hotel right as she lost track of Bailey, was able to go get Bailey.
By this point, though, Hannah knew what she had to do to make it all stop.
Hannah Negotiated with Nicholas
Hannah made the ultimate sacrifice by bartering with Nicholas to keep her and Bailey safe in exchange for Owen never being able to come home and be with them. She stood toe to toe with the intimidating lawyer and Bailey’s grandfather, wagering that he would want to get to know his granddaughter more than he would want to punish Owen. He guaranteed Bailey’s and Hannah’s safety from the Campanos as long as Owen never went home again.
Grady Bradford wanted to put Hannah and Bailey into WITSEC or Witness Protection with new identities, but Bailey made the call to trust Hannah after one final phone call from her father, who knew Hannah would strike the deal. He had been preparing Hannah to do this and take care of Bailey since the start of their relationship. Bailey showed growth in hugging Hannah once she returned from Nicholas’ country house, or lair, known as “The Sanctuary” having made her deal. Later (read below), Bailey called Hannah mom.
Five Years Later
Five years passed, and Hannah was shown in a pretty white and blue dress during an exhibition of her work. She directed Bailey to the show via phone.
Owen showed up in a long beard and made eye contact with Hannah, whispering that “the could’ve been boys still love you” which was a Baileyism for men who dated Hannah in the past and became exes. At the sight of him, Hannah dropped some flyers she had been straightening, and he helped her pick them up. This was where Season 1 ended, “the ultimate cliffhanger” as Jennifer Garner called it. Laura Dave came back with The First Time I Saw Him, which inspired Season 2, and the first episode, titled “Cape Cod” picks up at this moment.
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