WHAT SHE SAW
‘Fool Me Once’ does the twist with a novel vanishing act
MOST Netflix adaptations of Harlan Coben’s novels are characterized by solid writing, solid acting, and enough twists and turns to keep viewers interested. Its new Coben entry, “Fool Me Once,” has all of those elements, but executes them at a slightly higher level than some of the other adaptations of the author’s novels.
The series opens in 1996, with a bunch of teenage boys run out of what looks like a boarding school building. Cut to a closeup of a group of masked teens chanting in front of one teen in a chair.
We then return to the present day where, on a big countryside estate, a funeral for Joe Burkett (Richard Armitage) is being held. During the funeral, his widow, Maya Stern (Michelle Keegan), thinks back to when they met, when they got married, and the family they started to build together. She also thinks back to when she saw him murdered, as two teens on scramble bikes shot him at close range.
Maya sees DS Sami Kierce (Adeel Akhtar) at the house afterwards, and is surprised the detective in charge of the murder investigation is there; he says he’s there at the invitation of Joe’s mother, Judith (Joanna Lumley). When Maya asks Judith about it, she says she wanted Kierce to see Joe as a person, not a case. Judith also thinks that Maya needs some help to process all the trauma she’s experienced in the last year, which also includes her sister’s death.
When Maya returns home with her young daughter Lily (Thea TaylorMorgan), her friend Eva (Adelle Leonce) gives her a present: A digital picture frame with a tiny nanny cam hidden inside. Maya insists she doesn’t need it; the family of her nanny Izabella (Natalia Kostrzewa) has worked for the Burketts for years. But Maya puts the camera in Lily’s room.
Maya is former military, and in addition to the trauma from her husband’s and sister’s murders, she holds trauma from an attack on civilians that led to her leaving her combat unit. At the training facility where she works, she runs into her friend Shane (Emmett J. Scanlan), who wonders why she’s back at work so soon, and insists that he and a few work friends come over to keep her company. “It’s my grief. I need the normality,” she tells him.
The next morning, when Maya looks at the video from the nanny cam, she’s shocked to see a man walk into the picture and hug Lily. When he turns his head, she’s even more shocked to see that it’s Joe. When Izabella shows up for work and Maya confronts her about it, Izabella responds by spraying Maya with pepper spray and running off. Not long after that, DS Kierce shows up, coincidentally to ask follow-up questions, and when Maya goes to play the video for him, the memory card it was on is gone, leading Kierce to wonder if grief is getting the better of her.
Kierce is dealing with his own issues: He’s planning a wedding with his pregnant fiancee Nicole, and he seems to be blacking out at weird times. When he crashes his car after one of those incidents, his boss, after getting assurances from Kierce that he hasn’t started drinking again, pairs him up with a young partner, DC Marty McGregor (Dino Fetscher), whom Kierce bemoans to Nicole that he’s so young “that Duran Duran came on the radio; he’d never even heard of them.”
At a soccer game her niece, Abby Walker (Danya Griver), is playing in, she has a confrontation with Abby’s aggressive coach; after the game, Abby’s dad Eddie (Marcus Garvey) tells her to stay away from his kids, telling Maya that “death follows you.”
Meanwhile, Maya is seeing Joe’s face everywhere, but insists that what she saw in the video was real. However, Izabella won’t see her and no one else believes her. Judith starts making noise that Maya may not be fit to take care of Lily for the time being.
Adapted by Daniel Brocklehurst from Coben’s 2016 novel, “Fool Me Once” has all the usual aspects of a Coben adaptation: a twisty plot, solid acting, and a bit of a wry sense of humor that pops up a few times per episode. And while there are points during the first episode where things seem to be a bit too complicated for our tastes, it still sets up an intriguing scenario.