The New Netflix release “Fakes” is a Canadian comedy-drama series about two high school best friends indulging in the dangerous act of printing fake IDs. Given that the show is not one to adhere much to reality or believability, the narrative and presentation are not too bad as every episode is from either of the friends’ perspective. Overall, “Fakes” is an entertaining watch without much depth or any serious consideration.
Spoilers Ahead
‘Fakes’ Season 1: Plot Summary – What Is The Series About?
“Fakes” begins with scenes of a party being interrupted by the police and two teenage girls being arrested. At the same time, the background narrator explains that the two had been running a business of printing and selling fake IDs. The two best friends, Rebecca and Zoe, though, claim that it was the other who had led to such an outcome. From here on, the show presents every episode from the perspective of the two characters alternately.
Zoe, a young girl, interested mostly in her studies, had forged a fake ID for herself to get access to a library that she wouldn’t have been allowed to enter otherwise. Her best friend, Rebecca, calls her up that very night and asks her to help with a car ride. When Zoe goes over, and her friend gets wind of the fake ID she has made, the two girls come up with an idea to try and make a business out of this forgery act. Zoe researches some more on the topic and makes a copy of Rebecca’s driving license. They quickly realize the extensive market that such an in-demand forgery business could give them, as all underage school children look for fake IDs in order to buy alcohol for parties, and the two girls could therefore make a fortune out of it. Rebecca, the more extrovert of the two, gets hold of a potential dealer, a man named Tryst, who works as a cashier at a clothes store in a mall. The two girls make a fake ID for Tryst and give it to him, which impresses the man, and he says that he could indeed sell such documents if the girls could make more. However, Zoe soon gets cold feet trying to deal with the matter, as one of her classmates directly approaches her for a fake ID, and she has a terrible panic attack. Rebecca helps her through it, and the two promise that they would not go ahead with such a plan. But fate clearly has a different plan for the teenagers, as they are approached by Tryst after school. They tell him about their change of mind, but Tryst says that he has already taken orders from customers and has even taken advance payments from them. Rebecca and Zoe are left with only two options—either forge the IDs that customers have sent in or pay the large sum of money that they have paid in advance to Tryst.
How Does Their Plan Of Forging Documents For A Living Work Out?
Zoe and Rebecca go about improving their forgery skills, as their initial few prints had shortcomings of various kinds in them. The absence of an adequately good printer to do the job troubles them for some time, as they mess up the printer at Rebecca’s house and then get the job done at their school’s computer laboratory. But this does not prove to be feasible either, and they try to get the cards printed at the free printer zone at an electronics shop. Here too, they almost get caught indulging in such an illegal crime, and somehow make their way out of the place safely. This situation of theirs is ironically solved by a different problem when threatening letters are left stuck on both their houses’ front doors repeatedly. These letters, signed by someone calling themselves “Kurbstomp”, threaten the girls to stop selling fake IDs at the Holy Child Catholic School, which is apparently this group’s selling turf, or else face their menacing actions. With the help of Rebecca’s friends from the school football team, they find out that Kurbstomp and the rest of the group are just middle-school children, much younger than them, who make fake IDs and print them at their school lab. Zoe and Rebecca cleverly hire this entire team to work for them shortly on a batch of fake IDs, and this cuts the deal for them. Tryst notices how much money the two have been making for him, and decides to take their business to the next level. He calls the two girls and takes them to a lavish penthouse apartment in a posh building and lends them the place as their workstation for the next few months. The man also gets hold of printers for the place, meaning that Zoe and Rebecca did not need others to print the IDs anymore. With manufacturing now under control, they needed people to distribute the contraband, and for this, they decided to appoint two girls from their class—Sally and Sophie.
It is, however, with this new branched-out distribution system that the next set of bigger problems arise for Zoe and Rebecca. Sophie was a popular girl in school, mostly due to her pretty looks and charming nature, and it was Rebecca who had appointed her. On the other hand, Sally was the typical high-school nerd with a strange obsession with art and literature, and she had been appointed by Zoe. While Sophie clearly made the most sales among the two girls, Zoe tried her best to groom Sally to make her a better distributor, but nothing seemed to work with her. What made things even worse was when Sally lost her satchel on the bus while taking a ride, and this satchel was full of the IDs that customers had given to be forged. The two protagonists are terribly scared by such an event at first, and then they decide to try and act before they land in trouble. When they go to the bus depot to retrieve their lost item, they learn that the depot has sent it over for a public auction at the local police station, and the two girls try their luck there now. Here, Zoe gives the attendant a fake ID of hers and manages to retrieve the satchel, but they quickly realize that the IDs inside have been removed by the police for an investigation. Also, they realize that what Zoe had done was criminally chargeable, and the girl now changes her appearance as much as possible, cutting her hair short and dyeing it red. She and Rebecca wait for the police to track them down soon, and in the meantime, manage to convince Sally to not tell the police their names when she is interrogated. Soon the day comes, when the police visit their school and talk to Sally, and the girl is arrested. However, Sally does not stay in custody for long, as she explains later to Zoe and Rebecca that she had not taken their names to the police but had actually told them of a mysterious man who was making school kids like her indulge in distributing fake IDs for him.
During all this time, both Zoe and Rebecca had been dealing with personal issues as well, as both of them had troubles back at home. Zoe lived with her elder brother and her mother, who worked extremely long shifts as a medical worker in a hospital. The elder brother had been involved in some jobs but got fired from them soon, and he had a constant habit of taking away the money the family kept saving up. It is suggested that Zoe’s father, who had separated from the family, had a problem with alcohol abuse and denied that he had any such problem, and Zoe was now fearful that her brother, too, was growing into a similar person. After she started to make large sums of money from her illegal business, Zoe decided to carry on doing the work only to ensure that her mother did not have to work so hard. One night, she has a terrible confrontation with her brother right in front of their mother, in which she reveals how he was driving around in a drunk state and announces that she is the one in control of the family now. Although Zoe had good intentions for her mother, her expression was terribly wrong, and beyond that night, the mother grew quite scared and timid in front of her daughter.
On the other hand, Rebecca hailed from a rich Asian family and lived with her strict father, her younger sister, and her loving grandmother. While her successful and busy mother was a very important figure in the family, she could hardly spend time with them as she had to be away for business purposes most of the time. It was this absence of a motherly figure that troubled Rebecca for a long time, as she hated to see that her father was having an affair with his secretary. When the mother returns to spend an evening with the family, though, she is revealed to be extremely strict and controlling of her daughters’ actions. She constantly keeps insisting that Rebecca should be strong and independent and almost presses her into applying to Ivy League colleges for further education. While the young girl struggles to relate to her mother still, she learns about her father and her family as a whole. Rebecca’s family had been employed in helping a lot of Chinese migrant families to get back money from the government that had been unjustly taken from them many years ago due to racist laws, and the family had therefore created a bright legacy for themselves.
The two best friends had a terrible fight with each other over these differences while their business was in full swing, and they had even stopped talking. However, they had to mend their relationship again when the next set of dangers posed themselves in front of them. While they had kept Sally’s arrest a secret from Tryst, the man somehow got to know about it and confronted the two about it. He ordered them to leave the business immediately and to never return to the penthouse, but the two still broke into the place with their spare keys. Going there, they see Tryst working with the printers with an elderly woman they do not know, and Tryst once again drives them away and takes away their spare keys. For all the good learning that the two could have imbibed from their families, Zoe and Rebecca remained fixated on their purpose of making money and making a legacy for themselves, respectively. They were not just in love with their business but also with the high-end printers that had been brought into the penthouse by now. They had sneakily made spare copies of their spare keys and broke into the apartment in order to steal the printers. However, this proved to be an impossible task as the machines could not fit into the elevator, and they required access to the bigger service elevator.
To pull off this entire plan, Zoe and Rebecca host a party the next evening at the penthouse apartment. It seems like almost the entire school has been invited to it. The two girls cleverly make use of the football team to disable the main elevator and get access to the service elevator to bring the printers down. However, before they could transport the printers out of the building, things started to go downhill for them. A classmate of theirs, an honest and sincere boy named Clem, had been Rebecca’s boyfriend from the beginning, but the girl had cheated on him several times and then ultimately dumped him. During this time, Clem and Zoe developed an interest in each other, and after the breakup, they got together. Now Clem arrives at the party and asks Zoe for an explanation about who they actually were. Zoe has no option but to tell him the truth about them, and before the boy can react, the police barge into the apartment and arrest the two girls.
‘Fakes’ Season 1: Ending Explained – What Ultimately Happens To Zoe, Rebecca, And Tryst?
In the end, it is revealed that Tryst, who was trying his own way to earn money, especially to provide for his young wife and baby daughter, who were living away from him, had gotten involved with a seriously dangerous criminal. This gangster, Guy, had found out about the successful fake ID business he was running with two high school girls, and now wanted to acquire it. Although he initially knew that it was Tryst who was making the forgeries, he soon learned that it was Zoe and Rebecca who were doing it, and wanted to meet them. However, Tryst did not want this to happen, knowing how the girls would be caught up in a life of danger like him, and he had instead planned a different outcome. Being a drug dealer as well, Tryst had bags of illegal drugs with him, which he planted in the empty penthouse apartment and then tipped off the police about it. Since the apartment actually belonged to Guy, he thought that the gangster would be arrested, and the two girls would be safe. What he did not know, though, was the fact that the two girls were having a party that very evening, and it was ultimately they who got arrested.
What Tryst had also not anticipated was the fact that Guy himself had his reach in the police as well. This is soon revealed when the arrested Zoe and Rebecca are sneaked out of the police car by the same woman they saw earlier in the penthouse with Tryst, who is now in police clothes, and are then taken to meet with Guy. Here, the two are asked by the gangster to work for them, but Tryst, who was also apprehended, tries to stop this. Guy finally has enough with Tryst, and he pulls all three of them out of his car. Now, he throws Tryst down on the ground and holds a gun out to Zoe and Rebecca, saying that one of them needs to shoot their friend dead.
What To Expect From ‘Fakes’ Season 2?
As “Fakes” ends with a huge cliffhanger, with none of the problems of the first season solved, what really happens to either of the three central characters remains unknown. Other smaller issues, like how Rebecca would react when she found out her best friend was now dating her ex-boyfriend, also remain to be seen. The ending of season 1 lands the two high school best friends in a really messy situation, and it ultimately ends up being a huge build-up to further seasons. Let’s see if Netflix decides to renew the show for another season, and whether we get the answers or not.
“Fakes” is a 2022 Drama Comedy series created by David Turko.
