The Happy Face season finale is finally here, and there’s one thing on my mind: When does season 2 arrive? I know it's billed as a limited series, but given how season 1 ends, I’d say the door is wide open to another season.
In episode 8, “The Star,” Keith (Dennis Quaid) suffers a heart attack while Melissa (Annaleigh Ashford) solves the Heather Richmond case and almost loses her own life in the process. While she emerges as the real star and finally frees herself from her father’s grasp, Hazel (Khiyla Aynne) takes her power back at school, and Ben (James Wolk) faces unexpected consequences for his actions. Let’s break this season finale recap down in detail!
Keith has a heart attack
It’s a day full of excitement for Keith. First thing in the morning, he overhears an inmate named Frankie (Jason Beaudoin) talking about calling a reporter with a story about Happy Face. When Keith questions him and Frankie mouths off, Happy Face asserts his power by popping him in the face with right hook and taking him down. After Jesperson is back in his cell, Chavez (Philip Granger) approaches Frankie with a proposition.
Later in the yard, Frankie makes a move to kill Happy Face but before he can do anything, Keith has a heart attack. As he’s whisked away in an ambulance, he flashes back to the first time he saw a dead body. He was intrigued.
Melissa solves the case
While Melissa and Ivy (Tamera Tomakili) work to uncover who really killed Heather Richmond, cameraman Tyler (Connor Paton) finds the first clue. He notices in the video from the night Heather was killed that before she went up on stage, she was wearing a letterman’s jacket belonging to Cody O’Neill (Patrick Gilmore), the current owner of Whiskey River, which is where Heather worked when she died.
Cody has a history of domestic violence and is no stranger to the police. When Melissa and Ivy confront him, he freaks out and runs, first causing a scene with his mother, and next by leaving the scene of a car accident.
As police search for him, Cody’s mother reveals he kept saying “kept the guitar,” which makes Melissa think he means Heather’s guitar, so she heads back to Whiskey River. Sure enough, she finds the guitar’s headstock being used as a tap handle. Before she can leave with the evidence, though, Cody’s dad Carl (Eric Keenleyside) walks up on her.
The more he drinks, the more he talks, and the more he talks, the more he reveals. Back when he owned the bar, he and Heather had an affair, but she ended it, and it drove Carl crazy. He says he drove Heather to Ziggy’s the night of her final performance but got upset after hearing her sing her song, “Was It Worth It?”. The two argued in his truck and, long story short, he killed her, and Cody knew about it.
After confessing to Melissa, who was secretly recording their interaction, Carl briefly points a gun at her before killing himself. Finally, the mystery of who killed Heather Richmond is not only solved but also put to bed.
Hazel takes her power back
At school, Josh (River Codack) apologizes to Hazel for what happened in episode 6. He gives her a snow leopard necklace as a gift of reassurance that he likes her and is not interested in Summer (Ava Telek). Hazel realizes he’s lying when she sees him making out with Summer after school.
With her mother home from Texas, Hazel has a moment with her over breakfast. She tells her mother Josh is an a-hole, and she is stupid for liking him in the first place, but Melissa is quick to stop her daughter from that kind of thinking. She reminds Hazel that when a guy does something bad, it is not always the girl's fault.
At school, Hazel takes her power back from Josh and the others who have pretended to be her friends when she approaches him at lunch, drops the necklace in his food, and tells them all to “F*** off.”
The real star emerges
After solving the case of Heather Richmond and proving Happy Face the liar she claimed he was, Melissa sits in the cat-bird seat. She hadn’t planned on going to see him in the hospital, but she changes her mind after Hazel encourages her.
Happy Face laughs upon hearing she solved the case. “I always knew you were the smarter one,” he says. “I went through every death row case for seven months looking for one I could take credit for. [When] I found Elijah and Heather ... It was like a message from God: ‘Go ahead, Keith, do it.’”
When she asks him why he did this to her, he says he didn’t do it to her; he did it for her, "to make you a star because that’s what you are.” Then, after the worst crying impression ever, Keith apologizes for trying to kill her as a baby: “I didn’t know you yet,” he says. As she turns to walk away, he tells her when his heart gave out, he saw all the women: “They’re together, just waiting for me on the other side, to get their revenge.” He’s scared. Melissa laughs and says, “They’re all you have left. We’re all done with you now.”
Just like that, Melissa cut the cords of her father that have been weighing her down her entire life. She not only freed but also healed herself, and as a result, she emerges as the real star of this story.
During another interview with Dr. Greg (David Harewood), she announces she is leaving her job as a make-up artist on the show to be a producer alongside Ivy. The two will be launching a new true crime segment as part of "Dr. Greg" that will tell the stories no other shows are telling.
Ben gets a surprise phone call
Sick over what he’s done, Ben tries urgently to get Chavez to call off the attack on Keith, to no avail. After learning of Happy Face's heart attack, he hopes for the best and focuses on resuming a normal life.
That soon changes when he gets a phone call from Keith: “I know what you did… or what you tried to do. You couldn’t even get that right, could you, Benny boy? Ohhh, Benjamin, Benjamin, Benjamin, did you really think that it wouldn’t get back to me, that I wouldn’t find out?”
Happy Face episode 8 review
What a season Happy Face has been! Paramount+ made a solid decision in adapting the Happy Face Killer’s story from his daughter’s perspective, and it worked brilliantly. Had it been told from Keith’s perspective, it would’ve just been another true crime adaptation.
The fact that Happy Face jumps off from a true-life story to follow a fictional account of one way the manipulative killer might try to worm his way back into his daughter’s life (and the ripple effects that effort might cause) is what sets it apart from other adaptations.
Episode 8 solves our mysteries and brings us a solid resolution we can accept, reminding us we have the power to free ourselves from our life’s trauma. It even leaves us with a pretty big twist we never saw coming that opens the door to a potential future for the series.
Not only have we been drawn into the narrative, but we’ve also genuinely connected with Melissa as she has braved public scrutiny to reveal her true story and put her vulnerability out there. In doing so, she inspired other victims of crime’s trauma to come forward and face their own pasts.
Stream all eight episodes of Happy Face on Paramount+.