Warning: This post contains spoilers for Long Bright River.
Another day, another gritty crime drama about the hunt for a killer responsible for a string of murders targeting vulnerable women.
In Long Bright River, all eight episodes of which are now streaming on Peacock, Philadelphia police office Mickey Fitzpatrick (Amanda Seyfried) sets out to investigate why a growing number of sex worker are dying under suspicious circumstances on the streets of Kensington, a neighborhood ravaged by the opioid crisis. While Mickey takes on the case in a professional capacity, her personal ties to Kensington and its occupants—particularly her younger sister Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings), who has suddenly disappeared after a years-long struggle with addiction—soon push her into dangerous territory.
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Although the police department dismisses the deaths as overdoses, evidence that suggests otherwise compels Mickey to take matters into her own hands. With the help of her trusted former partner Truman Dawes (Nicholas Pinnock), a veteran officer who’s been on leave from the force since getting injured on the job months prior, Mickey begins to uncover a dark web of systemic corruption that leads back to her own employer.
Adapted for the screen by showrunner, writer, and, executive producer Nikki Toscano (The Offer, Hunters), Long Bright River is based on the best-selling 2020 novel of the same name by Liz Moore (also a writer and executive producer on the show) and ultimately stays pretty true to the twists and turns of its source material.
Read More: Long Bright River and the Fantasy of the Lone Female Cop Who Redeems the Police
Who is the killer in Long Bright River?
Following the Episode 6 reveal that a pregnant and now-sober Kacey has been living at the home of their estranged father Daniel (Michael Gaston), whom both sisters previously believed was dead, the penultimate episode ends with a devastated Kacey telling Mickey that the cop behind the murders is none other than her former partner Truman.
Mickey is reluctant to believe that Truman, whom she’s also started dating, could be capable of such a thing. But after she follows him to a local drug house and sees him sticking a needle into an unconscious girl, she ends up pulling a gun on him. However, it turns out the girl had overdosed and Truman was injecting her with life-saving naloxone, not the lethal dose of insulin that was used to kill the other victims. She learns Truman has been helping an old friend keep watch over the neighborhood’s at-risk population. But the damage to their relationship has already been done.
When Mickey confronts Kacey about the allegations against Truman, Kacey reveals she was told only that the killer cop was Mickey’s partner. But Kacey didn’t know Truman had been on leave. Mickey finally puts the pieces of the puzzle together and realizes the culprit is actually her more recent partner, Eddie Lafferty (Dash Mihok). Early on in the investigation, Mickey requested to stop working with Eddie because she felt like he was disrespecting the women who were being targeted. After Mickey shows Kacey a picture of Lafferty, Kacey IDs him as the supplier of a new drug that’s been sweeping through Kensington and says he’s been with a lot of the sex workers she knows.
Mickey eventually ends up confronting Lafferty at an abandoned church, where, unbeknownst to her, Kacey and her drug dealer baby daddy Dock (OT The Real) have already set a trap for him. Lafferty confesses to Mickey that he killed the women because things “got out of hand,” and she surmises that they started threatening to expose him for the drugs when he wouldn’t stop extorting them for sexual favors. Suddenly, shots ring out, Lafferty goes down, and Kacey and four of her sex worker friends, one of whom is armed, reveal they were hiding in the room all along. Mickey then shoots Lafferty a final time, proving she’s on the women’s side.
Knowing the corruption in the force runs deeper than Lafferty’s crimes but unable to do anything about it, Mickey ultimately ends up resigning. Still, the series ends on a relatively happy note for the Fitzpatrick family, with Kacey giving birth to a healthy baby and the sisters at long last making amends with one another.
