‘The Flight Attendant’ Team on Season 2’s Mystery, Annie & Max’s Relationship, and More

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Flight Attendant Season 2, Episodes 1 “Seeing Double” and 2 “Mushrooms, Tasers, and Bears, Oh My!”]

Another season means another mystery for flight-attendant-with-a-side-gig-as-a-CIA-asset Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco) to get wrapped up in on the HBO Max series.

In the first two episodes of The Flight Attendant Season 2, which dropped on April 21, Cassie, a year sober, is only supposed to observe a target at a hotel, only to instead follow him, watch him have sex with a blonde woman with the same tattoo she has on her back, then witness him being blown up. Then someone checks out of her hotel room as her, and when she returns to Los Angeles — her new home base now — her suitcase is returned to her … only there’s a bloody wig and a viewmaster inside. That’s when she alerts her best friends, Annie (Zosia Mamet) and Max (Deniz Akdeniz), to her CIA side job.

“Last season, Cassie was really trying to figure out what happened during her blackout, and it started with ‘Oh, there was someone else in the room. Oh, that person is Miranda [Michelle Gomez], she’s a killer. Oh, wait I got this whole thing wrong,'” executive producer Steve Yockey tells TV Insider. “I feel like Season 2, we’re starting from a place of, ‘I know exactly what just happened because I watched it happen and that was not me. Someone’s pretending to be me, and I need to figure out why.’ And I think that sets us off on a very different journey.

“Season 1, the thematic was all about the truth: ‘What happened to me? I’m going to find out,'” he continues. “This season is all about acceptance, and so we decided the best way to tackle that is with this idea of doubles, which [executive producer] Natalie [Chaidez] brought to the table. On Day 1, she was like, ‘I’ve been thinking doubles,’ and I was like, ‘I’m thinking we should run that into the ground. We should put it in every storyline, we should put it in the mind palace, we should put it everywhere on signs,’ so we did.”

Jennifer Rose Clasen/HBO Max

Cassie zeroes in on a new flight attendant, Grace (Mae Martin), as a possible candidate as the double, due to her ears ringing and the fact she’s wearing a scarf (the blonde was choked during sex) the day after the explosion. But when she follows Grace then snoops in her home, she learns that Grace doesn’t have the tattoo and is helping those in need without access with medical-grade fentanyl lollipops.

However, one of the first things Grace says is “I’m not a good person.” So what did she mean by that exactly? “I think Oprah always says, when people tell you who they are, you should believe them, so yeah, I think that’s a red flag for sure,” Martin says. “I think Cassie knows there’s something up but is just trying to figure out what it is. We know that there’s definitely a shadow side to Grace. I think Cassie’s right to be worried.”

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The first two episodes also reveal that Annie is now wearing an engagement ring, though she won’t say that she and Max are engaged yet. “I think Annie wants to have her cake and eat it, too,” Mamet explains. “I think she’s afraid of taking the plunge, not even necessarily of committing to Max because she loves him and doesn’t want to be with anyone else, but I think she’s just afraid of letting something in and letting her guard down entirely, so she’s wearing the ring, but she refuses to say they’re actually engaged. Keeping some sort of fake rules in play makes her feel like she’s in control when every aspect of her life makes her feel like she’s out of control. Poor sweet Max, his patience is wearing thin.”

But according to Akdeniz, Max is “just happy that he’s making baby steps right now. She’s got the ring, she’s accepted it, it’s on the finger, that’s huge.”

The Flight Attendant, Thursdays, HBO Max

From TV Guide Magazine

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