Aahana Swrup
‘Flunked’ is a French comedy series where all the high-stakes action is unfolding in the hallways of a high school. Eddy is a notorious scammer with a long rap sheet to his name. Even as a child, he had never been a fan of high school. However, now as an adult, he must step into the dreaded halls of Charles Baudelaire High School, this time as a mathematics teacher. While the criminal himself has no passion for teaching, he’s compelled into this role by Detective Lucie, who offers to nullify his prison sentence in exchange for one crucial job.
Eddy’s mission is to identify the child of Sagirov, a high-level criminal, whose secret spawn is reportedly a student at the local high school in Lille. Thus, despite his reluctance, the con-artist-turned-educator has to step into an unwanted role to save his own skin. Yet, as he begins to find his footing in the classroom, under the watchful eyes of Principal Tiphaine, who coincidentally also happens to be his first love, things take an unexpected turn. SPOILERS AHEAD!
Flunked Recap
As a long-time conman, Eddy has multiple scams running to the point where he enters the same club and gets recognized as four different people. Nonetheless, he’s a seasoned professional who manages to play each role to perfection with no problems. That is, until his meeting with the club owner goes wrong and a team of law enforcement agents breaks down the door. Consequently, the scammer gets arrested with multiple charges to his name. As the detective on his case, Lucie, tells him, he could be looking at up to seven years in prison. However, she has a unique offer for him. This is how Eddy finds himself playing the role of Eduard Martin, a substitute math teacher at Charles Baudelaire High School. His first day on the job goes horribly, as his own fraught past with bullies leads him to punch a mouthy teenager and end up in the principal’s office.
Things only go downward from here when Eddy discovers that the school principal is Tiphaine, his girlfriend from high school. While he himself is still very much in love with the other, his ex-girlfriend still hasn’t forgiven him for how things ended between them all those years ago. Furthermore, she’s easily able to look through his secret identity, which makes her instantly suspicious of his presence in the school. Still, Lucie is able to solve the situation by pretending to be Eddy’s fiancée and fibbing an elaborate backstory of incarceration, redemption, and recreations for him. As a result, he’s able to retain the crucial job position and continue snooping around his students’ lives. Soon enough, the detective and he are able to narrow down their potential suspect list to six individual students.
Thus, on a school trip to Normandy, the duo tries to collect DNA samples from each “suspect” in hopes of finding a match for Sagirov’s offspring. However, the hijinks that precede their successful covert DNA collection trigger a series of unexpected events. The students of Charles Baudelaire decide to protest against Eddy after he uses Benjamin’s wheelchair in a high-pressure situation involving a landmine threat. While the protests lead to the shutdown of classes, Lucie and Eddy make another startling revelation: Sagirov has a mole in the faculty. As such, they momentarily shift their focus to unveiling the identity of the mole to get to the drug lord. However, all this does is put Eddy right under the radar of Suzanne, Sagirov’s close proxy. Although this leads to an attack in search of the math teacher at the school and later his apartment, Eddy is able to emerge from the incident alive.
Furthermore, an unpleasant visit from Eddy’s mother also gives the investigative duo a new theory to work on. Under the assumption that the mother of Sagirov’s child could have potentially lied to the crime boss about his biological connection to the child, Eddy and Lucie return to their original suspects. Thus, they finally pin Oceane down as the crime lord’s daughter. Nevertheless, the kid herself knows nothing about her parentage. As a result, Eddy’s snooping gets mistaken for care, and she comes to the false assumption that he must be her biological father. Instead of setting the record straight, Lucie lets their lie play out for her own benefit. Nonetheless, once Oceane gets abducted by her father’s henchman, Eddy realizes the detective has no real concern for the child’s safety. Consequently, he ends up making some decisions that change the course of his own future.
Flunked Ending: Does Eddy End Up With Tiphaine?
Early on, Eddy’s narrative becomes intertwined with Tiphaine, the principal of the school he infiltrates as an undercover teacher. The duo used to be high school sweethearts back in the day. However, their relationship eventually came to a crushing end. In their high school days, Eddy was the resident nerd who often got bullied by the other kids. On the other hand, his girlfriend was the daughter of the principal. Therefore, when his bullies compelled him to steal the test papers, the young boy ended up using his relationship with Tiphaine to break into the principal’s office. Nonetheless, before he could complete the theft, the duo got caught. In the aftermath, Tiphaine’s father ended up losing his job, the school received a five-year test ban, and Eddy dropped out to start running scams with his mother.
Since then, Tiphaine has believed that Eddy only used her as a means to an end. Worse yet, after he ruined her and her family’s lives, he simply disappeared from her life without any warning. For the same reason, she’s hesitant to put her trust in him again. At first, it’s Lucie who convinces her that Eddy has changed by telling her lies about his transformational time in prison. Furthermore, the other lies about their impending nuptials adds more legitimacy to his character. Therefore, she agrees to give Eddy a second chance, but only as a teacher. In their personal dynamic, Tiphaine still holds him at arm’s length. Yet, inevitably, they end up drifting back into each other’s orbit.
The day of Suzanne’s attack at the school arrives as a turning point in Eddy and Tiphaine’s relationship when the duo ends up hiding in the same supply closet. In that near-death experience, the former provides much-needed comfort to the latter, which leads them to hook up at the inopportune occasion. Initially, the principal wants to write off the incident as a mistake. However, surprisingly enough, Eddy’s mother saves the day by leaving a love letter for Tiphaine, signed by the math teacher. This letter changes her entire perception of her ex-boyfriend and gives her the confidence to pursue an actual rekindling of romance between them.
Nonetheless, in the end, Eddy’s dangerous double life ends up getting in the way of his happy ending with Tiphaine. By the end of the tale, he’s a fugitive who has to skip town. This means he will likely never see his ex-girlfriend again, at least not in a way that would allow them to be together. Their second-chance connection is already built on a mountain of lies. Almost everything Tiphaine knows about Eddy as an adult is part of an elaborate persona that he had to create for his undercover work. In reality, even if his actual past doesn’t vilify him to the principal, the fact that he continuously chose to lie to her about it definitely will. Ultimately, the possibility of Eddy’s reunion with Tiphaine was always a fantasy headed towards a doomed end. Therefore, he has to let go of it once he embraces the reality of his situation, as a teacher, an informant, and a con man.
Does Eddy Become a Real Teacher? Does He Tell Oceane the Truth?
At the start of the story, Eddy has no interest in being a teacher. Even though he’s a whiz at mathematics, his own trauma surrounding high school prevents him from ever pursuing a legitimate career where he would have to set foot in the building every day. Nevertheless, the decision is quickly taken out of his hands, forcing him to step into the role of an educator, even if it is only as a substitute. In the beginning, Eddy is predictably bad at the job. His years as a con man haven’t equipped him with the right tools needed to deal with a classroom full of high schoolers. Yet, eventually, he begins to settle into the role.
Particularly, it’s when he inadvertently takes on the responsibility of Fish Teacher that students and faculty alike begin to look up to him. This gives Eddy a strange sense of identity and purpose that had been missing from his life all this time. The con man didn’t turn to a life of crime of his own complete violation. After a mistake got him suspended from school, he became vulnerable to his dishonest mother’s influence. She convinced him to ditch a legitimate future and run scams with her. Therefore, before he knew it, long cons and swindles became the only thing he was good at. Yet, Charles Baudelaire shows him a different truth. It makes him realize that deep down, he has always cared for people.
Furthermore, on some level, he’s eager to help out the youth, perhaps as compensation for the guidance he himself did not receive at an impressionable age. This becomes particularly obvious in his relationship with Oceane. Where Lucie simply wants Eddy to use the young girl as a stepping stone to get to Sagirov, he recognizes her as a young mind in need of help. Therefore, when she runs away from home, he chases her down to convince her to take her final exams. Likewise, when she gets abducted in the immediate aftermath, he decides against Lucie’s orders and rescues her from Sagirov’s clutches. However, through it all, Oceane continues operating under the belief that Eddy is her biological father.
The latter doesn’t take the time to correct her. Once he helps her escape, he effectively signs away his deal with Lucie, which had turned out to be bogus anyway. Therefore, he’s only looking for a quick getaway. Still, he’s not expecting Oceane to hitch a ride with him after he explicitly asks her to return home to her mother and get some answers from her. Yet, in the end, Eddy makes the unexpected decision to let Oceane tag along with him at least for now. Thus, as the story ends, the duo rides off into the sunset, avoiding cop barricades in the process. This conclusion leaves their fates on an open end. Eddy can flee and start a new life somewhere else, where he can always apply for a new teaching job. Oceane can always eventually learn the truth about her parentage. However, their decision to stick by each other’s sides cements the lessons they have learned and how their journeys have intrinsically changed them as individuals.
Does Lucie Catch Sagirov? Does She Get Back Together With Her Husband?
Throughout the story, Lucie’s number one priority remains the arrest of Sagirov, so much so that she works on the case without even being assigned to it. Unsurprisingly, there is a personal angle to her vendetta against the crime boss. As it turns out, her sister used to work with Sagirov through a few degrees of separation. Inevitably, while running his drugs, she ended up getting hooked on them. Although she manages to survive the situation and is currently alive and well in rehabilitation, her harrowing experience has ignited a desire for revenge in her older sister. For the same reason, Lucie is hellbent on catching Sagirov, ready to sacrifice anything for her mission. Her marriage ends up being one of these things.
In Lucie’s marriage to her unnamed husband, their biggest problem has always been her inability to leave work outside of the home. She’s constantly working and refuses to prioritize her husband and her kids. Therefore, when she dupes them into a vacation at Normandy to keep an eye on Eddy, the discovery of her deception becomes the last straw for her husband. In the aftermath, he asks her to leave the home until her case is resolved, after which they can talk about the possibility of a future together. Initially, after Lucie and her team manage to catch Sagirov at the airport, she’s overjoyed at the fact. Nonetheless, the joy is extinguished quickly when Lucie learns that while she has caught Sagirov, she has also lost Eddy in the process.
When her team initially plans the attack at the airport, the maths teacher tries to center it around Oceane’s retrieval, which isn’t their biggest concern. As he’s kicked out of the group, he inadvertently learns that Lucie had lied about holding up her end of the bargain. When she first pitched the job to him, she offered to wipe his criminal slate entirely clean. Yet, in reality, she can only lower his prison sentence from seven years to two. Lucie has known about it all this time, but much like her marriage, she had sacrificed her conscience to achieve her goals as well. Thus, even though the show doesn’t provide a climax for Lucie’s potential reunion with her husband, it’s likely that her husband would finally give up on her once he learns of the wily, manipulative tactics she had employed in pursuit of her obsessive investigation.
Read More: Is Flunked Based on a True Story?
