Home Before Dark Season 2, Episode 8 recap: The Bad Guy

Now that we know Strata Tech are the bad guys behind the cadmium in Eerie Harbor‘s water supply, the company’s suffocating presence over the town is impossible to ignore. Everywhere Hilde turns in Home Before Dark Season 2, Episode 7, “The Bad Guy,” she can see Strata’s impact on the town.

Things get even worse when she comes home and finds Strata CEO Grant Williams waiting for her. No longer a friend, Grant is clearly working from a PR standpoint as he tries to silence the Liskos and twist the story about cadmium poisoning the water supply for his company’s gain. Based on a recent news report, they find out that Wott Management finally succeeded in harassing Junior to sell the farm.

Grant tells reporters that he and his company are going to turn the farm into a place for runoff to ensure that there is no harm to Eerie Harbor’s water supply beyond the confines of the farm. We know that the water there tested positive for heavy metals based on the previous episode.

Home Before Dark Season 2, Episode 8 recap: What is Strata hiding?

Elsewhere, Hilde makes amends with Donnie and Spoon, agreeing to never put the story above their friendship again. But that’s easier said than done when Ethan and Emma get involved. Once they learn the whole truth about Strata, Ethan points out that his mother is Grant’s personal assistant. That means she likely has valuable intel stored on her laptop they won’t be able to find anywhere else.

The older teens come up with a plan for Ethan to introduce Izzy to his mom as a means of distraction while the three kids break into her office and log onto her laptop with Emma serving as the lookout. The plan works at first, but then Grant gets a security notification and rushes to Ethan’s house to find out what’s going on.

The adults catch Hilde, Donnie, and Spoon in the act of copying files onto the flashdrive. It’s a good thing they did that, too, since Hilde uncovers an entire file of content regarding the Lisko family. Ethan’s mom doesn’t seem to notice the thumbdrive sticking out of the laptop when she takes it away from them.

In the final moments of the episode, Ethan leaks a video clip from 1987 where Sam’s dad, Hank Gillis is talking about how Strata is using dangerous chemicals. Hank also mentions a kid that got involved in the conspiracy, which Hilde believes could be Richie. The video gets sent around town and immediately proves that Grant lied when he said the company stopped using poisonous chemicals in the 1970s since the video is from the 1980s.

New episodes of Home Before Dark Season 2 air Fridays on Apple TV+.