The Good Samaritan

Laura surveils Ryan’s sparsely attended funeral from her car. To ensure media coverage, she had previously tipped off the press. After the service, she returns to her home, which she has had completely renovated. She reflects on the fact that Tony and their daughters moved, and that Alice is apparently attending school abroad; Tony has also filed for divorce and changed their phone numbers, so she has no way of contacting her family other than email. She has recently sent several messages to Tony expressing concerns about Henry’s health.

Laura receives a call from Kingsthorpe Residential Care Home, where Henry lives. The staff informs her that Tony is visiting Henry. Laura rushes to the care home and spots a man with Henry near a lake on the grounds. Believing it is Tony, she walks toward them. As she gets closer, she realizes with shock that the man is not her husband but the supposedly dead Ryan Smith.

The man with Henry is actually Johnny, Ryan’s brother, disguised to look like Ryan. Johnny now confronts Laura on the grounds of the care home, holding Henry’s wheelchair on a dangerous slope near the water to force her to listen.

Johnny reveals his true identity and accuses Laura of murdering Janine, framing his brother Ryan, and manipulating Charlotte into a suicide pact with Nate. When Laura denies the allegations, he explains that he is not simply repeating what Ryan told him: Effie, consumed with guilt, sought out Johnny and told him everything she knew about Laura’s criminal history. He then exposes the secret behind Henry’s disability: Years ago, during a fight with Tony, Laura set their house on fire. She did not know Henry was inside at the time, and he sustained brain damage from smoke inhalation. Laura herself was subsequently placed in a psychiatric hospital—a hospitalization she reinterpreted as treatment for cancer. Laura initially begs Johnny to stop talking but, under duress, eventually acknowledges the role she played in Nate’s death for the first time: He wanted to enter a suicide pact with Laura herself, but Laura insisted that she couldn’t leave Henry and therefore found someone else to die with Nate.

Demanding justice, Johnny begins recording with his phone and orders Laura to confess. Instead, Laura screams for help, and Johnny is suddenly struck from behind.

Laura sees that Tony has arrived and knocked Johnny to the ground. Seizing the opportunity, Laura screams that “Ryan” is back and has threatened to drown Henry. Enraged by the lie and believing he is protecting his family, Tony begins to brutally beat Johnny. Johnny’s phone, which is still recording, slides from his hand. Meanwhile, Laura secures Henry’s wheelchair before turning to watch.

As Tony pummels Johnny, Laura feels a sense of triumphant arousal. She interprets Tony’s violence as the ultimate proof of his devotion and silently wills him to kill the man at his feet. The savage beating continues until Johnny is dead.

Laura is the new branch manager at the End of the Line charity. She watches as workers remove the plaque bearing Janine Thomson’s name, a change she orchestrated by “anonymously” leaking details of the embezzlement for which she framed Janine. Her family is now reunited under her roof. She reflects on how fortunate it was that before visiting the residential facility on the day of Johnny’s death, she sent Tony an email implying she would see him there. This confused him, and he decided to visit himself. Afterward, she coached Tony on a self-defense story to explain Johnny’s death and then used the video of the killing, obtained from Johnny’s phone, to blackmail him into moving back in with their daughters. Tony attempted to strangle Laura before stopping himself and agreeing to her demands. Laura also kept Tony’s bloody clothes, which she wore to murder Janine, as insurance against him. She is frustrated that he still has not warmed to her and hints that she may need to rid herself of him.

Her victory is shattered when she receives an anonymous email from Janine’s old account. Inside is an audio file. When she plays it, she hears a recording of herself goading Steven and encouraging him to die by suicide. In a wave of panic, Laura understands someone knows her secrets and is blackmailing her.

From her bedroom, Effie watches her mother’s panicked reaction and reveals that she sent the email. Amid her mother’s battle with Ryan, Effie discovered Janine’s Dictaphone, which contained recordings of Laura manipulating callers, and copied the audio files, thinking that she might ask her father about them. However, Effie already felt guilty about the role she had played in framing Ryan for sexual assault; the bullying she began to experience at school, followed by Ryan and Janine’s deaths, cemented her resolve to seek retribution against her mother.

She first went to Johnny and told him everything she knew, but she did not give him the Dictaphone recordings, thinking that she “might need those [her]self” (383). After Johnny’s murder, Effie overheard Laura blackmailing her father with the video of the killing. She wished Tony would kill her mother but realized he was too broken. Determined to save what is left of her family, Effie has decided to dismantle her mother’s life piece by piece. She embraces the fact that she has learned from Laura’s own manipulative methods and now plans to use those lessons to torment and ultimately destroy Laura.