In 2005, Alison Thomas (West Duchovny, daughter of David) and her upper-middle-class family fly to a Caribbean resort to soak in the sun, the piña coladas, and (for Alison) the many boys, both guest and employee, she can cavort with before she heads to Princeton in the fall. “This is our chance to try on someone new,” she gushes to her shy seven-year-old sister, Claire, who’s just old enough to idolize her big sister while being blind to her foibles. But on their last night before departing, Alison disappears, and authorities find her body a few days later.
Cut to the present, and Claire now goes by Emily (Alycia Debnam-Carey), who’s living in New York and trying to put Alison’s death—and the media firestorm that followed—behind her. But circumstances put her back in the path of one of the two Black resort employees suspected of doing it (Josh Bonzie’s Clive “Gogo” Richardson), and her obsession with answers grows. “The whole world knows more than I do” about her sister’s murder, she confesses, and she needs to know what truly happened.
Of course, one of the refreshing appeals of Schaitkin’s book was that it refused to offer that kind of closure. The point wasn’t to solve Alison’s murder but to examine how these people—not just Emily/Claire, but the dozens of folks whose worlds were shattered as a result—move on with their lives in the absence of such clarity. Hulu’s version, courtesy of writer/EP/showrunner Leila Gerstein, steers us toward a much more definitive answer, and is far less interesting as a result.
The journey, at least, allows us to explore the intermingling of grief, obsession, race, class, and wealth, especially given the differing way Alison’s death impacts those on both sides of the mystery. This is most potent when we actually get to see Clive’s side of the story: his lifelong friendship with gregarious fellow suspect Edwin (Jayden Elijah, also great), the difficult courtship with the mother of his child, Sara (Bre Francis), the way the arrival of a resort and his strict Christian upbringing conflict with the life he may want to live instead. Bonzie is compelling to watch, eyes racked with inner pain. It helps that he’s one of the few actors to carry over to both timelines without contending with hokey old-age makeup (looking at you, Michael Park and Betsy Brandt as Claire and Alison’s parents).
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