Abhiroop Das
Created by Ben Watkins, Prime Video’s ‘Cross’ steps into its second season with a grander and darker mystery than before, one surrounding a serial killer targeting what appears to be a network of sexual abusing elites. When the CEO of Crestbrook Industries is gifted a parcel containing chopped fingers, he immediately raises an alarm and seeks help from the best D.C. has to offer. As Alex and team gear up to solve the mystery, they unwittingly find themselves in the midst of a much larger conspiracy. Based on the acclaimed novel ‘Alex Cross’ series by James Patterson, this crime thriller series juggles both the inner contradictions of Alex’s mind and past, as well as the horrors that he has to confront on a daily basis. The first three episodes of season 2, titled ‘Harrow,’ ‘Scatter,’ and ‘Feed,’ respectively, introduce us to this new case and many, if not all, of its moving parts. SPOILERS AHEAD.
A Serial Killing Duo Rescues Teenagers From a Cruel Fate
Season 2 of ‘Cross’ begins with a mysterious island, where a cabal of the wealthy elite appears to be sexually assaulting teenagers in a horrific display of inhumanity. A lone man steps out of the boat under the pretext of making deliveries, but quickly begins neutralizing the guards one by one. Behind him, a woman emerges from behind the boat and makes her way straight to the inner quarters of the island, where billionaire Richard Helvig believes himself to be invulnerable. That is far from the case, however, as the woman breaks in, freeing the teenage girl from Richard’s clutches, before pushing him back at knifepoint. She introduces herself as the daughter of one Gabriela Porras, indicating some history, before slicing the man’s throat and chopping away two of his fingers. Elsewhere, her partner burns down the rest of the assailants before the duo sets sail with all the freed girls, concluding the opening segment.
In Washington, D.C., Alex Cross is giving a speech to the fresh batch of officers, and while he gives a candid account of the life of a law-enforcement officer, it is clear that the many burdens of his personal life haven’t left him just yet. At noon, he has a hearty lunch with his family, John, and, surprisingly, Elle. Although the duo appears to have stopped seeing each other, she is still an inseparable part of the family, and that shows in how Alex’s daughter confides her desire for a phone in Elle, and not Alex. Although he is reluctant about the idea at first, Elle and the others still convince him to give this a shot. It seems the family has finally started to look beyond its traumatic past, which unfolded a mere months ago.
Alex and Kayla Look Into a Box Full of Severed Fingers
Back at work, Alex is partnered with Kayla this time, and their first case concerns a billionaire business tycoon by the name of Lance Durand, owner of Crestbrook Industries. Durand claims that one of his stage events was infiltrated by someone who left him a warning in the form of a box containing chopped fingers. While we have a good guess about who the fingers belong to, Alex and Kayla are left perplexed and resort to screening through the footage for the entire environment event, where Durand was launching a new product, Prosperity Seeds. However, with more than 800 potential suspects at hand, the station has its work cut out. Instead, John gravitates towards a simpler case: getting a confession out of a person named Laydona, who has agreed to talk to no one but him.
When not working on the Durand case, Kayla gets her mind picked by the higher-ups, who want to mainline her deeper into the agency. However, her complex association with the project known as Operation Bad Religion, led by the antagonistic figure known as the Mastermind, has put things into jeopardy. Elsewhere, Alex makes the first breakthrough in the case when he notices that one of the suspects almost exclusively uses his right arm, suggesting that the left may be where the fingers come from. However, a whole other surprise awaits John, as during the interrogation, he learns that Laydona is none other than his mother, whom he believed to be dead for decades. Without saying a word, he storms out of the room, leaving Alex to collect the pieces of his best friend.
That night, Donnie, one of the two killers we saw at the start of the show, sneaks into a house where a family of four is fast asleep. By the next morning, the house is effectively under his control, and Beverly Soames, who works at a bank, is forced to go to her work and do Donnie’s bidding, or risk the lives of her kids. Elsewhere, the police continue investigating the suspect, who has now been identified as the smiling man based on one of the eerie-looking captures from the seminar. Just when the information seems to be drying out, forensics report the discovery of Richard’s burnt body, as well as his missing fingers, which bridges the two cases together. As it turns out, Durand briefly connected with Richard in the past, and while Alex is furious for not being told about this ahead of time, he and Kayla make the best of this new information.
The Two Serial Killers Dig Deeper Into the Conspiracy
Meanwhile, at the bank, Soames meets the other killer, who pretends to be another one of Donnie’s victims, committing a robbery on his behalf. As the duo enters the safe house and takes out the box, we learn that it contains none other than Richard’s private documents. Seeing some of these, Soames turns white for a moment, then pretends to discard them in favor of the cash. This prompts the woman to drop the act and use force to get the rest of the documents from Soames’s hands, before killing her due to her role in child trafficking. At the station, detectives manage to track the smiling man to the streets, where they find him interacting with a nurse named Zuko. Upon being interrogated, however, she only gives the detectives basic information and claims that she was merely friends with the man. Unconvinced, Alex keeps a track of her activity and soon discovers she is going to Chicago.
Chasing down Zuko, Alex and his team soon make it to The Windy City, where they unexpectedly get their first clear view of the smiling killer. However, when he learns that the cops have checked on Zuko once, he wastes no time in running out of there, prompting a long cat-and-mouse chase between him and the police, including Alex. In the end, the man dives into the city’s elaborate subway network, leaving Alex and company inside a completely unfamiliar space. By the time they make their way to the smiling man’s lair, he is long gone, leaving behind a collection of skulls, maps, and occult tools that only add to the police team’s suspicions. However, Kayla finds what she needs in one of the pages left behind, which reveals the coordinates to a town in Southern Texas, a stone’s throw away from the border with Mexico.
Alex Makes a Breakthrough in Texas, Only to Slip Deeper Into Chaos
With the department’s resources steadily declining, there are not enough officers to bring to Texas, and alongside figures like Alex and John, Kayla has to rely on local police support and get some strings pulled to arrange the temporary release of Bobby Trey, the mysterious killer who partnered up with Edd Ramsey in the previous season. The team’s first pitstop is the truck station where the coordinates pointed to, and soon enough, Alex notices an odd exchange of drivers between two vehicles. To his surprise, the smiling man is neither of the drivers, but a cameraman, secretly clicking pictures and keeping watch of the same truck. Before Alex can ambush him, however, a police officer named Larsen blows up their identity, nearly triggering a large shootout between the truck owners and the police.
During the shootout, Alex learns that the truck is trafficking teens and children, and after an intense exchange, the truck is ultimately brought to a stop, alongside the arrest of the smiling man, who is now identified as Lincoln Esteban. While his real aim is revealed to be the stopping of the truck, this vigilanteism doesn’t yield him many favors from the detectives, and Alex is still curious about his whys and whens. Elsewhere, the two serial killers, Donnie and Luz, make their way to Mexico in search of one of the survivors, who is now an adult just like them. The man, whose face is scarred from one end, is revealed to be leading a satisfied life in the village, but Luz is surprised to learn that her late mother was a native here too, in a place far away from violence and cruelty. In Texas, Alex tries to bond with one of the rescued kids, Roberto, and suggests taking him to his children at home for the time being, to which the kid enthusiastically agrees.
As the day draws to a close, Alex and Kayla begin partying at a cowboy-themed bar, where things soon turn into a romantic dance, leading to a passionate kiss. While the two momentarily stop to rethink professional boundaries, that idea ultimately goes out of the window, and the duo makes love that night. The next day, however, their opinions are firmly split. While Kayla wishes to keep this a one-night stand, Alex secretly wants more. Back in Washington, D.C., John finally gives talking to his mother another chance, knowing the baggage this can potentially bring to his dynamic with Alex. The biggest twist of the episode, however, is the discovery that Larsen, the shady policeman hellbent on killing Lincoln, has been killed, and that Lincoln is on the loose. In the final scene, we see him show up at Luz’s door, suggesting that the two have something much bigger in play.
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