Spoilers: The 12 Biggest Twists in Long Bright River
You’ve watched the show. Now relive the mid-blowing revelations.
Even if you’ve read Liz Moore’s New York Times bestseller Long Bright River about a Philadelphia police officer searching for a serial killer, you’d still be in for some surprises with Peacock’s new adaptation starring Amanda Seyfried.
And if you haven’t seen the show, STOP READING RIGHT NOW. There are serious spoilers ahead. Like, all of them.
Let’s break it down.
Warning: Spoilers ahead!
1. Mickey is looking for her sister.
There’s a personal reason Mickey is so invested in the suspicious deaths of the women in the area — her sister Kacey has been living among them on Kensington Ave. When Mickey discovers the first victim with pink hair, she worries it could be Kacey. Eddie Lafferty (Dash Mihok) presses her on why she cares so much about these women and that’s when she reveals her connection. By delaying the reveal until the end of Episode 1, it not only establishes Mickey’s personal stake in the murders, but also the possibility that she’s an unreliable narrator.
2. Kacey is not actually kidnapped.
The first time we glimpse Kacey in the current timeline, she appears to be locked in a basement, writhing on the floor, but she’s actually trying to detox.
“She's basically seeking comfort from a cold floor,” Moore explained. “It’s before she is able to get access to medication-assisted treatment, so she’s in pretty bad withdrawal in that moment.”
3. And she’s pregnant.
Kacey has a lot at stake and attempts to get her life in order, which means getting clean. When she volunteers to track down her friend who may have information about the Kensington killer, it puts her in danger of relapsing.
“As an audience member you had to sort of believe that Kacey was going down a dark path again,” explained Nikki Toscano, writer and executive producer. “Would she succumb to the demons that haunted her?” Fortunately not.
4. Mickey and Kacey’s father is still alive.
And he drives the red truck! Gee had been lying to the girls because, in his mind, that was his way of protecting them — and himself — from the same fate that took his daughter.
“I hate the guy,” said actor James Doman, who plays Mickey’s grandfather. “I don’t want him around these girls. I blame him for my daughter’s death, so I don’t want anything to do with him.”
5. Kacey is Thomas’ mother.
Kacey was a pregnant teen struggling with addiction, so Mickey took Thomas from her sister and raised her nephew as her own son. With this revelation, you understand why Kacey, who is pregnant once again, is hiding from her sister.
“One of the key mysteries of the series is that Mickey is desperately searching for Kacey, and Kacey is desperately hiding from Mickey,” Moore said. “[Kacey] doesn’t want the same thing to happen to her new baby that happened to her first.”
6. And Simon is Thomas’ father. Whoa.
Thomas’ deadbeat father is referenced from the beginning of the series, and in time we learn that he’s even worse than he seems. Simon is a police officer and a predator who grooms Mickey starting in high school. They raise Thomas as their own child — and actually Thomas is Simon’s son. In another stunning revelation, we learn that Simon forced himself on Kacey, resulting in her pregnancy with Thomas. Kacey warns Mickey that Simon is not a good person and, tragically, Mickey refuses to believe her.
7. Kacey was born addicted to drugs.
Ashleigh Cummings, who plays Kacey, explained how the timeline of their mother’s addiction informs her character’s development. “One of the biggest twists for me was finding out that Kacey had been born with neo-natal abstinence syndrome,” she said. “I think that answers a lot of questions for Kacey. She felt inherently broken and that it was her fault, and this alleviates some of her shame and fills in some of the puzzle pieces.”
8. Mickey and Truman fall in love.
For readers of the book, the love story is something they might not have expected from the show — and that includes Nicholas Pinnock, who plays Truman Dawes.
“You didn’t really see it coming,” Pinnock said. “You could see it from one side [Mickey’s], but didn’t really know if it was going to manifest — and it did.”
9. Truman is the killer.
Or so Mickey believes — and probably viewers who suspected that Truman was too good to be true.
“You’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Pinnock said. “It definitely allows us to see the flaws in him from one perspective. But then, when we find out he’s not the killer, we see that those flaws are not what we perceive them to be in the beginning. I thought that was really clever.”
For Seyfried, it’s another example of Mickey making decisions based on bad intel. “At the end of the day when she found it wasn’t him, it was a relief but the damage had been done and that’s tricky,” Seyfried said. “You make decisions based on what you know and you might have bad information and you got to live with it.”
10. Truman can’t forgive Mickey for pulling a gun on him.
But maybe he can? At least Pinnock hopes so.
“He loves her unconditionally, genuinely,” he said. “I think it’s just going to take some time. My belief is that beyond the story that we don’t see, that they find their way back somehow because he really does see who she is and respects who she is. And I think for Mickey, this is a man she needed right from [the] beginning that she never had in her life before. Because of her conditioning and the way that she had to survive in the world, she didn’t know how to navigate this thing. I think Truman can forgive her of that.”
11. Mickey’s “partner” is the killer. And that means it’s Lafferty, not Truman.
If Lafferty came as a complete surprise to you, know that some breadcrumbs had been left since the very first episode when Lafferty showed no interest in the murdered woman.
Then in Episode 6, Mickey goes to visit Lafferty, trying to understand how Sean Kelly could be the killer. Lafferty gives a speech about what might have happened and what might be going through the killer’s head.
“In the moment, he is pointing the finger at Ahearn, but what he’s really talking about is how he got lost in the course of the neighborhood and how he came to do this very thing,” Toscano explained. “So we think he’s talking about somebody else when he’s very much talking about himself.”
12. Lafferty was killed by a group of women.
When Lafferty is shot, you may think it’s Truman coming to the rescue, but it’s a group of women from the Kensington neighborhood, seeking retribution for their murdered friends. Plus, Mickey shoots him for good measure.
The scene underscores one of the most important themes of the show: family. Whether biological or chosen, the hopefulness at the end of the series lies in these relationships to heal.
“People can relate,” Cummings said. “Maybe you don’t see yourself in Kensington, maybe you don’t see yourself in the characters struggling with substance use, but everyone knows what it’s like to have a family, whatever form it might take."
Stream every episode of Long Bright River, only on Peacock.
