Home Before Dark Season 1, Episode 3 recap: Hilde solves Penny’s murder

Matt finally learns what’s inside the safe.

In the morning, Matt is bowled over by a killer headache, although Bridget does try to help by brewing him a gross hangover cure. She points him in Hilde’s direction. She’s worried about her dad.

Matt finds Hilde poking around in his office. She asks him if he misses writing, being a journalist. He gets evasive and tells her no, which is clearly a lie. When alone again, Hilde finds one of her grandpa’s origami projects in the trash and fixes it. In a flashback, we see that he used to teach Hilde how to fold them, “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

When she puts it together, she notices three numbers — the safe combination? Maybe Matt’s father has been trying to communicate with him all along. Hilde leaves it on the desk for her father to find later.

Hilde’s sleuthing gets back on track in the cabin. She wonders who the “they” is that Sam was referring to during their phone call. The young sleuth deduces that someone working at the prison might be the one Sam is afraid of — specifically, a corrections officer named Ed Quinlin. She dials Trip at the precinct and gives her the tip.

Donny counters Hilde’s suspicions by asking why someone at the prison would want to kill Penny.

“I don’t know, yet,” she responds.

Within minutes, Hilde is on her bike to meet up with Trip and see if she can tag along to question Ed. Trip reluctantly agrees, not that Hilde would have taken “no” for an answer.

No one answers at Ed’s houseboat. While Trip tries to gain entry the legal way, Hilde sneaks inside and does a little snooping of her own. “I’m not that good at following directions.” Well, yeah.

Trip tells Hilde they can’t do anything anyway, not without a search warrant, which would need probably cause — but Hilde found just that! She discovered one of the pill bottles from Penny’s medicine cabinet stashed inside Ed’s cupboards.

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From there, the case unravels. Ed Quinlin was blackmailing Penny to get him money and drugs. If she failed to come through, he threatened to make things worse for Sam on the inside. In a montage of scenes, we see Trip arrest Quinlin while Sam is told the warden wants to see him.

At the same time, Matt discovers Hilde’s message and tries the safe in the attic. Bridget realizes something while changing the license plates on their car. During the montage,  Hilde reads her article on Penny out loud to narrate. She seems to have taken the librarian’s advice to remember that Penny and Richie are real people with loved ones in Erie Harbor, to heart.

The safe reveals that Matt’s father never gave up on Matt — or Richie — for that matter. In the end, he believed his son. More than that, Bridget realizes that the van in the video didn’t have a license plate, proving that Frank definitely lied on the stand since he told cops he saw the last three letters.

Hilde’s article on Penny deeply moves Matt, “you’ve never written anything like this before.”

“She deserved to be more than just a body buried on the back pages,” she tells her dad.

Hilde’s article, coupled with Bridget’s discovery and the knowledge that his dad stopped doubting him a long time ago, encourages Matt to get his act together. It helps that Hilde tells him what Kim said, that Penny made a copy of the tape to give to Matt because she knew he was the only person who would help her.

He tells Hilde that the kidnapper told him to “run” at the time, but he doesn’t want to run anymore. Yes! It looks like we might be getting some Hilde/Matt-father/daughter-reporter-dream-team soon.

That said, it probably wasn’t smart for Matt to pick a fight with Frank after Bridget’s revelation. The first thing Frank does is smash the tape. Matt tells him it was just a copy. Frank punches him in the face, and the two start fighting on the docks at night somewhere.

I’d want to punch Frank too, but he’s a cop, and he can make life for the Liskos twice as hard. I would have kept him in the dark until I had more knowledge rather than confronted him. We’ll have to see how the fight ends up next episode!

Odds & Ends

• I love the mini-animations and artwork they add to each show. It adds to the Home Before Dark‘s distinct stylistic flair.
• I’m not sure if Winnie’s character has any plot relevance, she doesn’t appear again in the episode, but it would be weird to have her show up for two lines and then never see her again since they went through the effort of introducing her.

What did you think about the third episode of Home Before Dark? Are you looking forward to the rest of the season? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

The first season of Home Before Dark is streaming on Apple TV+.