‘Prodigal Son’ Bosses on Bright’s Investigation Into the Girl in a Box
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Episode 2 of Prodigal Son, “Annihilator.”]
Did Martin (Michael Sheen) have a girl in a box, or is she just part of Bright’s (Tom Payne) nightmares?
That’s the question posited by the second episode of Fox’s new hit Prodigal Son. Though Bright insists she existed, no one ever found her and everyone’s telling him she never existed. “Again with the girl in the box,” Jessica (Bellamy Young) says. “They never found her. She didn’t exist.” He thinks there’s a reason he keeps seeing her. “Nightmares aren’t real,” his mother insists. “Neither was she. End of story.”
Martin tells him the same thing when he visits him again, and no, he didn’t drug his son with chloroform after he found her. “Ask the police, ask your mom. They all agreed,” the Surgeon says. “There was no girl in the box.” But when Bright remembers his father drugging him (which can be called into question since he was given “serious sedatives” during the latest case with the NYPD), he confronts him. Martin, in turn, asks him what he did during his missing time and wonders how long it took Bright to call the police.
So, did that girl exist?
“In Bright’s mind, he remembers a girl in the box,” showrunner Chris Fedak tells TV Insider. “But when they went down there, they didn’t find one. Bright’s been told for years and years there was no girl in the box and that mystery, that question, is a thing that will drive him. It haunts him, too. He knows inside of himself, inside his mind, that he keeps remembering her. The question then becomes, for Bright, what happened to her?”
“That’s the emotional case that Bright’s on,” showrunner Sam Sklaver adds. The official story he’s been told by people like Gil (Lou Diamond Phillips) and his mother is that she and his nightmares aren’t real. “But Bright has other thoughts, so he needs to figure that out.”
(Peter Kramer/FOX)
At the end of the episode, a guard calls Jessica to inform her Bright’s been visiting his father again, and she throws her phone down in anger. While it is about keeping an eye on her son, there may be more to it.
“Does Jessica have an ulterior motive? Does she have other plans? Is there a bigger thing going on? There’s always another thing going on with Jessica,” Fedak teases. “For Jessica, there’s always a bigger picture. We don’t see all of that quite yet.”
Do you think there was a girl in a box? And what do you think is going on with Jessica? Sound off in the comments below.
Prodigal Son, Mondays, 9/8c, Fox
