The Flight Attendant Season 1, Episode 2 recap: Rabbits

Cassie tries to track down the mysterious Miranda in The Flight Attendant Episode 2. Later, she meets with the FBI yet again.

The Flight Attendant Episode 2 is aptly titled “Rabbits,” which fits in with two threads in the show’s second hour. One is the giant statue that Cassie knocks over while attempting a bit of ill-advised investigatory work — more on that later — and the other is because of some vaguely sinister flashbacks Cassie keeps having to her childhood. It appears she had something traumatic happen to her as a child, even before the waking-up-to-a-dead-guy-in-her-bed thing.

The first episode also had a few glimpses of Cassie appearing to hunt a deer with a man I presume was her father. In the second episode, we see glimpses of her running and a rabbit. The first episode also established that Cassie has a big heart for animals and likes rescuing bunnies, so I’m wondering if her father forced her to kill a rabbit as a kid, and it traumatized her. Regardless, we don’t find out in this episode.

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Instead, Cassie is determined to get to the bottom of this “Miranda” business. Realizing she still has Alex business card (with the help of hallucination!Alex) she visits Unisphere to try and learn more about his business associate Miranda.

All she ends up doing is making a lot more people suspicious. At Unisphere, Cassie goes by the name Alessandra Ricci. When she mentions Miranda, the receptionist Sabrina immediately reacts, but the head of HR, Jean Miller (Cindy Cheung) maintains her poker face as she guides Cassie into a meeting room to discuss her ties to Alex and the company.

When Jean presses Cassie for more information on her relationship with the company, she lies and says she was an investor on the Stalwart’s account, something she remembers from her night with Alex. Jean excuses herself and Cassie sees her meeting with two big scary guys from the opposite side of the glass-paneled building. As Jean brings them to meet with Cassie, she decides fleeing is her best option (didn’t she learn the first time!?) and that’s when she busts the rabbit statue on her way out the door.

Later, Agent White reaches out to Cassie to bring her in for questioning again. This time, she contacts her lawyer friend Annie and tells her the whole story from beginning to end. Annie agrees to become Cassie’s lawyer but is shocked by all of her bad decision-making thus far, especially her visit to Unisphere. She tells Cassie to get some rest and the next morning she’ll accompany her to her second FBI session. There, Annie will be in charge of which questions Cassie should answer and which she should plead the fifth too.

But Cassie being Cassie, she doesn’t go home and rest. Instead, she goes out partying with Shane and Jada to escape the quiet solitude of her apartment. She meets a cute, out-of-work actor named Buckley (Colin Woodell) and goes home with him. The next day, reeking of booze and late, as usual, she shows up to her meeting to an irritated Annie.

The FBI doesn’t actually have much on Cassie. The surveillance footage for 12 hours during the time Alex was killed was mysteriously scrubbed. All they have is a single picture of Cassie in her weak disguise from Bangkok. The more damning evidence is an obvious photograph of Cassie at Unisphere, although it’s still not proof of anything.

Agent White gets ahead of himself and shows her a shocking image of Alex’s dead body which retraumatizes Cassie and pushes her to reveal the truth — or at least most of it. She admits to going out with Alex, getting super drunk, and having a one-night-stand. But then she claims when she left he was still very much alive. She also mentions Miranda, although admits she doesn’t know much about her.

As an aside: After the meeting, Agent Hammond gets to lay into Agent White for being so bold as to show Cassie the crime scene photos. He’s arrogant and hard to like and his comments about being as good at the job as Hammond despite her being there much longer than he has leave a bad taste in my mouth. However, it was nice to see Hammond give him a perfect verbal takedown as she comments that he’s a white, male, Yale alum whose attitude is tolerated because he fits the perfect FBI image, whereas she, as a Black woman, would never be able to get away with a stunt like that. So no, his “attitude” isn’t something to be proud of, nor has he earned his massive ego.

After the meeting, Annie scolds Cassie for going off-book and revealing more than necessary to the feds. She’s further implicated herself in the situation. However, they also both realize that Cassie likely did try to leave Alex earlier and didn’t make it home. Annie comments that it would make sense, and is likely the only reason Cassie is still alive. Someone probably killed him in that small window when she drunkenly stumbled out of the hotel room. But then she later returned, crawled into bed with a dead guy (which is easily the most disturbing part for Cassie), and fell back asleep.

Despite Annie’s advice that Cassie tries to carry on as usual by going on her next scheduled flight to Rome, she can’t help but meddle even further as she remembers Sabrina’s visceral reaction to Miranda’s name. Cassie tracks Sabrina down and coyly encourages her to share a drink in honor of Alex. After they’re both a few cocktails in, Cassie gets Sabrina to spill everything she knows on Miranda Croft. According to Sabrina, Alex and Miranda were dating but then he broke things off with her. Sabrina thinks Miranda is the crazy jealous type, so maybe it’s feasible that she killed Alex.

The Flight Attendant Episode 2 recap: Miranda starts stalking Cassie.

While we don’t yet know if Miranda is the real murderess here, she is undeniably involved. We meet Miranda in the flesh this episode, played by the always-amazing Michelle Gomez. Miranda scopes out a bar Cassie previously visited and sneakily gets Cassie’s personal information. She later breaks into Cassie’s apartment while she’s not home and follows her around town. At the end of the episode, Miranda stalks down the street with a butterfly knife in hand, seemingly going in for the kill.

The Flight Attendant Episode 2 recap: The people in Cassie’s life are worried about her.

Beyond the major drama and action of the episode, at least two people in Cassie’s life are seriously concerned about her and her safety. Her brother Davey is apprehensive about his upcoming family trip to New York because he’s not sure Cassie is in the right headspace for visitors (she’s not) and he’s worried about having his girls around her because she’s drunk all the time. Cassie assures him everything will be fine and persuades him to come anyway. We’ll see if he actually does and if his daughters are in tow.

Cassie’s other close friend and fellow flight attendant Megan is also scared for Cassie. She’s seen the Bangkok image of Cassie on the internet and while Cassie adamantly denies that it’s her, it’s clear Megan doesn’t believe her. Megan takes money hidden from a decorative rooster in her house and uses it to buy prescription drugs to trade for flash drives from a local kid named Mason. Honestly, this scene confused me so I’m guessing we’ll figure out what the deal is later (the nature of streaming shows is that a lot of loose ends are left up in the air from one hour to the next).

Even TVLine‘s recapper wasn’t sure what that scene meant so at least it’s not just me! My first thought was that Megan somehow scrapped the security footage from Bangkok but that seems like a stretch.

What did you think about The Flight Attendant Episode 2? Let us know your thoughts and opinions in the comments below.

The first five episodes of The Flight Attendant are now streaming on HBO Max. New episodes release on Thursdays.