In Hulu's new comedy-mystery series, Phony, teenager Sonny Cooke is left feeling isolated and paranoid after a car accident when he wakes up to find that his mother has been seemingly replaced by an imposter. In the pilot episode, Sonny took it upon himself to test his theory, and when his mother Ellen failed to remember something she should have known (their secret sign for saying "I love you" to each other), Sonny knew something more sinister was going on.
In Phony season 1 episode 2, titled "Crosby, Stills, and Nash," we find Sonny hiding from Ellen and feeling too scared to confront her about the situation. Sonny is trying to logically search for answers about what's happened, but he's coming up short on ideas.
He's looking at the new Ellen like she's the villain here and is even scared to accept food from her, but he also doesn't want to alert her to any of his suspicions. He's left on his own to work through what's happening to him.
Sonny tries to figure out who he can trust at school
Sonny tries to recruit Weldon at school to help him come up with a plan, and Weldon might actually believe him. Sonny and Weldon consider that the new Ellen might be the only person who knows what happened to Sonny's real mom, but they don't know how to go about getting information from her. Things get a bit more complicated when Sonny and his longtime friend Vogel are called to the guidance counselor's office, though, and Vogel lets it slip that Sonny thinks Ellen is a fake.
Meanwhile, Sonny's girlfriend Chloe unknowingly stresses him out even more. She feels some guilt about being the reason he got into the accident in the first place, and now that she's grown closer to Ellen while Sonny was hospitalized, Sonny can see that he's not going to be able to trust Chloe with his theory.
What's even weirder is that when speaking with a police officer at school, Sonny learns that there was a break-in at his house while he was in the hospital. This was quickly teased earlier in the episode when we saw a broken window in Sonny's kitchen, but we didn't know why it had happened until much later in episode 2. Could the break-in be connected to his mom's disappearance?
Sonny and Weldon seek out a "private investigator"
Sonny meets with the school counselor again, and even though for a split second he thinks he may have an ally, Sonny comes to realize that he can't trust the counselor with this mystery.
So, with help from Weldon, the boys sneak off to meet with someone who they think is a private investigator — and we find ourselves in the office from the start of the series. It turns out Sonny hasn't been talking to an investigator at all but just a conspiracy theorist who's a little too active on local internet message boards.
Feeling an emotional connection to knowing what it's like to be an outsider, the woman agrees to help them. She opens Sonny's mind to new questions, like what the motive is behind the body swap.
At the same time, we see Ellen draining tens of thousands of dollars from her bank account. And in the final moments of the episode, we learn that another student was at the crash site that night, and he saw the dead body in the lake and that it was dragged into the back of the jeep.
New episodes of Phony drop Tuesdays on Hulu and Disney+.
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