Step aside James Bond; Keeley Hawes is here.
If we’ve been sceptical about Amazon’s ability to produce a Bond film, Prime Video’s new show The Assassin is a good warm-up.
It stars Hawes as Julie, a retired hitman who comes back out of retirement when the ghosts of her past catch up with her. Soon, she and her son Edward (an appalled Freddie Highmore) have become involved with mining tycoon Aaron Cross (played by Neighbours star Alan Dale) and it turns out he has a massive secret to hide.
So does Julie, apparently. As the show nears its explosive end, here’s what to know about the finale, including some whopping plot twists.
Spoilers ahead, of course.
Who’s Edward’s father?
The episode begins with Edward waking up in a child’s bedroom. Looking down on him? His ‘aunt’ Marie (Gina Gershon). The last we knew, Edward was fleeing a female assassin, only to be saved my Marie, driving a huge black Range Rover.
She promised to take him to a safe house where Julie was – and promising to tell him the truth about his father (you know, the one who left him that massive trust fund).
When Edward got suspicious and jumped out of the car, Marie chased him and injected him with ketamine, knocking him out.
Trapped and confused, Edward then listens as Marie tells him who his real father was – something Julie had been keeping from him for years. Marie herself has been a bit coy about this – at one point, she called his dad Roy, then Ray.
But the truth will finally out: his dad was actually a French arms dealer called Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc also happened to be Marie’s husband.
That makes Marie his mother, he deduces. The pair share a tearful moment and Marie tells him his name is actually Florent.
What is Chantaines?
Turns out, it’s connected to the mystery of Edward’s birth. The head of IT for Aaron Cross, Jasper, used the code word to escape a Libyan prison after blackmailing his employer about revealing what it meant.
Jasper got free, but Cross’s daughter, Kayla (and Edward’s fiancée), also had questions. In episode five, Kayla found a suicide note from her mother Leila, saying she’d killed herself because of ‘Chantaines’; in episode six, we find out what it means.
It was actually a code word for an assassination attempt that Cross and Leila organised. When they set up their company, Cross Global Mining, they borrowed money from an arms dealer, who then became a bit of an issue.
To solve the problem, the pair hired a hitman to kill the arms dealer – who was called Jean-Luc. Turns out, of course, that the assassin was Julie. Leila, racked by guilt, took her own life afterwards.
How did Edward become Florent?
As Marie tells Edward, the hit took place while she and her husband were upstairs (having sex, she explains). Julie killed Jean-Luc and then shot Marie. She then realised there was a baby upstairs, and rather than kill it – or leave it – she took it with her.
The baby, of course, was Florent/ Edward. Julie then goes onto explain that she was pregnant once, but had a miscarriage, thereby explaining the moment we saw at the start of the series.
As for Marie – though Julie assumed she was dead, she wasn’t. Instead, Marie languished in a coma for years and then had a slow agonising recovery, plotting her revenge against Julie all the while.
What happened after?
After Marie’s revelations, Julie shows up, having tracked down Edward with help from a laptop, Jasper the IT specialist and a new love interest, Luka.
She appears and kills most of Marie’s guards, only for Marie to drop another bombshell: Florent isn’t even her real child. She never wanted children, but Jean-Luc did, so they paid for a surrogate. As Marie tells Edward, “Jean-Luc wanted kids. We paid for a surrogate. I wouldn’t even change your diaper!”
After this dramatic moment, Edward collapses. We then discover that Marie has poisoned him not with ketamine, but with the deadly plant Monkshood. It’s an ironic death for a vegan, and even more ironically, Marie found out about it through an article Edward wrote.
Marie tells Julie that she has an antidote, but she’ll only administer it if Edward shoots and kills Julie. Julie hands Edward the gun and closes her eyes, saying she deserves it… only for Edward to shoot Marie instead.
He tells Julie that he did it because she kept calling him Florent. Then Kayla appears, with one of her father’s private helicopters, and Edward is sped off to hospital.
What happened to Aaron Cross?
Turns out, he’s dead too: he dies at the end of the series. Before rushing to help Edward, Kayla finds him slumped over his desk, unconscious. While she tries to resuscitate him, the hospital confirm the news: Ezra, her brother, would need to take over his job as CEO. Suspicious – and Cross then dies in hospital.
We find out it’s from an overdose of the opioid oxycodone, which an employer tells Ezra he never saw Cross take. Ezra says his father must have confused the bottle with his sleeping pills. Ominous.
How does the series end?
We finish the series three months later, with Edward on a sailing ship with Kayla – presumably somewhere in Greece. Julie appears, and we learn that they are on their way to meet Edward’s real, biological surrogate mother.
Julie and Luka are in a relationship, we find out (it seems he’s forgiven her for being the reason his entire family were killed in that wedding shootout). Happy ever after? Maybe…
The Assassin is streaming now on Prime Video
