Cassie is trying. Damn, is she trying.
She’s trying about as much as someone who woke up next to a dead body and descended into a cavernous fog of paranoia, alcoholism, and hallucination as she tried to escape blame for killing him while also attempting to solve the mystery, spy-style, on her own and then once it all got figured out decided to quit drinking completely, move across the country, start dating a hot sober photographer, and throw herself into work as a civilian asset for the CIA… can.
Even before the season’s brilliant twist of New Cassie being haunted by visions of her former boozy, destructive self, it’s painfully obvious. Bless her heart. New Cassie is screwed.
The first season of The Flight Attendant began with a jolt—one of those familiar experiences where you wake up with a startled gasp and, panicked, survey your surroundings to figure out where you are and how you got there. Usually, the answer is, “Oh good, bed.” For Kaley Cuoco’s Cassie Bowden, who had, as we’d learn was standard practice for her, consumed a kiddie pool’s worth of vodka the night before, the answer was, “In a hotel room in Bangkok next to the body of the man she had sex with but who is now very clearly murdered.”
The season chronicled her frenzied effort to cover that up and also find out what happened, a relatable attempt to figure out how in the hell she ended up passed out next to a naked guy who had been killed. The whole post-coital dead guy thing did no favors in curbing her habit of throwing back nips of vodka and destroying her relationships with those she’s closest to, including her best friends Annie (Zosia Mamet), Max (Deniz Akdeniz), and Megan (Rosie Perez) and her brother Davey (T.R. Knight), all of whom are hoovered into her vortex of mess.
The series balanced elements of soap opera, thriller, and screwball comedy, hinging that alchemy on a revelatory performance from Kaley Cuoco. While it’s generally accepted that Cuoco was the underrated secret weapon of The Big Bang Theory’s massive success, I’m not sure many people were braced for the kind of explosive performance that she pulls off in The Flight Attendant, where sardonic, millennial-brand kookiness and tragic, deeply human flaws combine in a fascinating powder keg.
That’s why Season 2 of The Flight Attendant soars. It knows when to isolate the different elements of Cassie and Cuoco’s performance—the warmth that makes her friendships so meaningful, the sense of humor that the show needs to stay light, and the demons that nearly destroy her—and how they all work in harmony.
The show is audaciously ludicrous. In Season 2, Cassie is working for the CIA, and becomes entangled in drama surrounding a German car bombing and a possible murderer/terrorist who is pretending to be her. The whole “Rosie Perez is committing treason with North Korea” storyline finally pays off. These things are on the just-right scale of silly and intense.
The show also could not be more stressful to watch. Each episode features multiple sequences in which its panic-attack score and long, stalking tracking shots make you feel like you yourself are being chased. But the real anxiety rests in Cassie, as well as its unexpected poignancy.
When the season begins, she’s trying to be a better version of herself. She is a year sober. She moved to Los Angeles into a cute house, where she even remembers to water her plants. She finds purpose in life thanks to her work with the CIA.
Against the backdrop of circumstances that are decidedly more extreme—most of us don’t find ourselves spying on notorious criminals in foreign countries—it’s a relatable journey: the deep, desperate desire to improve, and the oppressive, dejecting impossibility of achieving it.
The first season of The Flight Attendant used a narrative device in which Cassie would have visions of the dead man she woke up next to (played by Michiel Huisman), who would act as a version of her conscience as she unraveled. In Season 2, she disappears into a void where she interacts with different versions of herself, sort of angel-and-devil characters in her mind encouraging her to give into temptation or continue the good fight. It’s a clever, if maybe overused, device, and one that ends up being surprisingly resonant.
The “journey to a better you” is a common trope in pop culture, but I’ve never seen it portrayed like this. The stress of Cassie’s battle to maintain her sobriety never relents. It’s bleak, but realistic in a way that may actually be inspiring in its honesty: Maybe you really don’t get better. Maybe you don’t change in the drastic ways you’re supposed to. So how do you deal with that? How do you make that be OK?
Maybe more pop culture should be like this. Not cynical, but relatable and attainable.
How Stella Got Her Groove Back is an inspiring story about self-actualization for people who are as hot as Angela Bassett. Eat Pray Love will change your life, if you’re a skinny white woman who doesn’t gain weight from carbohydrates and has Diamond airline status. Brené Brown and her podcast are invaluable tools for all humans who have time in their day to listen to a fucking podcast.
That self-care and self-help is either a privilege or a complete farce, depending on how generous I’m being, should be obvious to anyone who has observed just how quickly and aggressively those concepts have been commoditized, and in turn bastardized.
But the asinine beauty of the human condition is the desire to strive. It’s what’s behind the optimism of betterness, and our embrace of pop culture that promotes the fallacy of being a better you. That’s as much of a fairy tale as any rom-com, but we chase that escapism, believing this could all be real—and real for you.
My two most recent Amazon purchases were a box of Just For Men hair dye and a cast iron skillet, as if once my grays are masked and I can sear a steak, the life-changing Better Me will have arrived, regardless of all the other real demons there are to overcome. Once I serve chicken thighs with perfectly crispy skin, my world will finally be what I fantasize. Meanwhile, my hunchback continues to approach bell-ringing level from spending hours a day typing at this computer—as I am right now—and I just rationalized skipping today’s workout because it would mean missing my favorite Thai restaurant’s delivery window.
But the high of trying—that was bliss.
It is why we continue to do it—to fool ourselves. It is why we love Stella, and all those like her. But it’s also what makes the way this show has evolved in Season 2 and depicts Cassie’s ambition to better herself so wonderfully destabilizing.
Kaley Cuoco in spy mode in The Flight Attendant
HBO MaxI don’t know how much of this is intentional about The Flight Attendant, a TV show that, above all else, is a riot of a dark-comedy thriller. But it is what makes it work on the kind of unshakable level that defines the TV that we obsess over in this era of laughably too-much-content. The globe-trotting mysteries and zanily opulent production value of the series are a delight. But it’s Cassie’s journey that roots the show, grounding it so that it’s not something that you dismiss as breezy entertainment, but actively feel for and with.
The fallacy that pop culture teaches is that getting better—fixing things—has a road map. Worse, that it’s sexy.
There are episodes of The Flight Attendant later in the season that are brutal and unflinching about not just the impossibility of improvement, especially when it comes to sobriety. Kaley Cuoco and Sharon Stone, the latter in a role we don’t want to reveal, are so good in this arc that they should have Emmys in their hands.
The hope is that when you fix something, everything else will go away. But that doesn’t happen. Not always. So often we think about that as a failure, but maybe it’s a triumph. We ignore that we did it. We did fix something. There was one thing that was broken. Maybe it was big, maybe it was small. And we fixed it. Just because everything else didn’t fall into place doesn’t mean that one thing doesn’t matter. It matters so much.
This is, again, a fun mystery show, and it’s sexy and hilarious and does those elements—the le Carré-esque mystery filtered through the batty millennial lens—really, really well. But to have the confidence to tread into those human waters, and not somehow feel pandering or patronizing, is so impressive.
