The USP of Netflix’s new series, “Kaleidoscope,” is that it is presented in a non-linear manner, i.e., the episodes can be watched in any order. “Kaleidoscope,” created by Eric Garcia, tells the story of a felon who has made it the mission of his life to destroy the person who has taken everything from him. The series might boast of an attempt to do something unique by creating a non-linear order, but it does not have a lot to offer when it comes to the storyline. It fails to keep the viewers hooked because of a weak narrative that becomes way too predictable at times. Giancarlo Esposito is in good form and is quite persuasive in the role of a flawed protagonist. Paz Vega, Rosaline Elbay, Peter Kendall, Niousha Noor, Rufus Sewell, and others perform their roles to perfection, but the series fails to back their performances with a gripping and tight screenplay. So, let’s look at why Ray Vernon wanted to risk his life to commit a robbery and whether or not he was successful in it.
Spoilers Ahead
‘Kaleidoscope’ Plot Summary: Why Did Ray Vernon Want To Take Revenge From Robert Salas?
Ray Vernon, who used to operate under the alias of Leo Pap, broke out of prison, and started building his team to commit one of the biggest heists of his life. He wanted to rob SLS, an organization owned by Robert Salas, which boasted of an unbreakable vault. Ray knew that he needed people who were good at what they did, so he started chasing players to be on his team. Ava Mercer had worked with Ray before, and she used to help him launder money. Stan Loomis and Ray also knew each other from when they shared a cell in prison. Bob Goodwin was good at breaking into vaults, and his wife, Judy, knew how to design explosives. RJ Acosta was not a hardened criminal like Bob, but Ray knew that he would need him when the time came. He had told everyone that he was in it for the money, but as time passed, we realized that Ray knew Roger Salas from before and that his main intention behind committing the robbery was to take revenge for something that had happened between them.
Roger’s real name was Graham Davies, and he used to work with Ray. Roger and Ray had been a part of many robberies together, and during one such act, a misunderstanding had led to Ray’s life being ruined. Both of them had decided to steal from a Christmas charity auction, but things didn’t go as planned. Roger had to attack an employee, and in order to destroy all the evidence, he had set the place on fire. Ray had almost escaped when he saw his wife’s car parked outside the campus. Lily, Ray’s wife, used to work for the owner of the place, but she had recently resigned because of the racist attitude of her employer. Ray didn’t know that the owner had asked her to come and help him as he was falling short of manpower. He went back inside with Roger following him. Roger was standing at the entrance of the room where Lily was trapped, and Ray begged him to go inside and save her. But Roger couldn’t go inside as he was scared that he would also burn in the fire. Lily died in that incident, and Ray had to leave behind his daughter, Hannah, as he got convicted and was sent to serve a sentence. From that day on, all Ray wanted was to take revenge on Roger, and the fact that he had created a fortune for himself aggravated him even more.
Who Had Stolen The Bonds?
In the episode titled “White,” we come to know what exactly happened during the heist and who had the unsecured bearer bonds. Everything was going as per plan, and Ray Vernon, a.k.a. Leo Pap, after figuring out a way to enter the SLS vault, was all set to take revenge on his nemesis Graham Davies. Ray’s daughter, Hannah Kim, had warned him about the implications of what he was trying to do. She had told her father that Stefan Thiele, Suzanne Grosvenor, and Cho-Young Woo, known as the Triplets, were very powerful and influential people. She was scared that if Ray committed the larceny, the Triplets would come after him. But Ray was adamant about breaking into the most secure vault in New York and taking his revenge. Obviously, money was a driving force but there were a couple of other factors that took precedence. He had long waited for the opportune moment to take revenge on Graham Davies. He wanted him to repent and suffer, just like Ray had when he was in prison. Hannah was what Ray referred to as his “inside man,” and she was feeding him all the information. SLS made use of some high-level technology, and to break into the vault, Ray needed to know how the system worked and what its weaknesses were. Ray and his team sedated the guards at the entrance and then reached the vault hallway. They used honeybees to pass the multi-matrices biometric gait recognition unit, which recognized the walk of the person authorized to enter the secured area, which in this case, was Roger Salas. Their next step was to stop the temperature from rising, which they did by flooding the entire vault. That is how Bob and Stan were able to steal all the bonds.
The FBI agents, Samuel and Nazan, had almost arrived at the scene, and Bob decided that he wouldn’t risk his life because Ray was being greedy and wanted to take every single bond. But Ray was not being greedy; he wanted to do something that would incriminate Roger Salas. Ava told Ray that stealing the money from Salas’ vault and destroying his career was already a huge blow, and he didn’t need to do anything else. But Ray wasn’t convinced, and he went back inside the flooded vault to place a piece of jewelry that he had taken from the Christmas charity auction years ago. Ray wanted to remind Salas of the time he had betrayed him while bringing his dubious past to light. Ray didn’t want Hannah to be a part of the actual heist, and he had just kept her in the loop so that she could track the movements of Roger Salas. But Hannah decided to act on her own, and she intercepted the parcel that contained the bonds before it reached RJ, who was supposed to put it inside the truck.
Hannah had gotten Liz Kim a job at FedEx, so she had access to their office. She stopped the elevator at the FedEx office and took the boxes that had the bonds and replaced them with ordinary paper. She left a few bonds on top in case somebody decided to take a sneak peek. Hannah had made an arrangement with the Triplets because she wanted to save her father. Hannah had informed Stefan Thiele that their bonds would be stolen, but she would return them to him, safely. The Triplets had agreed to the arrangement as it gave them the opportunity to claim insurance money for the stolen bonds in addition to getting them back. When Ray got to know about Hannah’s secret plan, he couldn’t understand why she had betrayed him. But slowly, he understood that whatever his daughter was saying was absolutely right. He wanted to justify his vengeance, but what he didn’t realize was that he was getting sucked into a swamp with no escape. Also, stealing gave Ray’s life a sense of purpose, and, as Roger Salas had rightly put it, the attribute was so ingrained in him that he could never escape it. After Lily had died, there was no motivation to lead a good life. But his daughter came as a blessing in disguise, and she had not given up on her father. She returned the bonds to the Triplets, thereby ensuring that her father could come out of the swamp and lead a happy and fulfilling life.
Are Ava Mercer And Bob Goodwin Dead? What Happened To Judy And Stan?
Though the entire crew thought that Bob had died, he was still alive and burning with the desire to take revenge on Stan. Bob went to meet Roger Salas in prison and told him that he could get revenge for him, provided he agreed to pay a sum of $50,000 for it. Roger told Bob that he would pay him twenty thousand dollars if he killed Ray Vernon. Bob started collecting intel on where the crew was hiding, and he was finally able to track down Ava and Ray. He went there with his men and asked them to tell him where Stan and Judy were hiding. At gunpoint, Bob asked Ray to make a call to Stan and ask him to meet. Ray was shrewd, and he knew that he would have to make some calls in order to save his and Ava’s lives. He had a phone directory in which he had saved the numbers of important people, knowing that he might need it someday. He was smart enough to use a pseudonym for every contact so that even if his phone book fell into the wrong hands, they wouldn’t get to know whose numbers were written in it.
Ray, instead of calling Stan, made a call to Nazan Abassi and told her to meet him at a particular spot. Bob was unaware of this, and he drove to South Carolina in order to kill Stan. As soon as Bob reached there, he realized that he had been deceived by Ray completely. Judy, who was in the vicinity, sensed somehow that Bob was near her. She saw a bloodstained car, and she knew instantly that her intuition was absolutely right. She found a bag full of cash inside which Ray had given to Bob earlier. She just froze for a moment, unable to think of what she should do. Judy saw Stan sitting at a distance, and then she saw an empty road which presented her with an opportunity to forget everything and start afresh. Judy didn’t want to break the trust of yet another guy, but deep down, she knew that Stan was not the person she wanted to spend her entire life with. If “Kaleidoscope” returns for a second season, we’ll probably find out which option she chose, but knowing her sensibilities, we think she’ll take the bag of money, leave Stan and flee the horrors of her past life.
‘Kaleidoscope’ Ending Explained: Who Killed Nazan Abassi? Is Ray Vernon Dead Or Alive?
Though it wasn’t proved conclusively, we believe that Ava had a mole inside the FBI, and through him, she was trying to get Nazan off the case. It could be possible that Ava’s informant was none other than Samuel, who worked closely with Nazan and also shared an intimate bond with her. It was Samuel who had given Nazan a tip that Ava was going to meet a contact in Bushwick. Samuel said that he had an urgent matter to attend to and that Nazan would have to go there alone. That was the same night that drugs were planted on Nazan, which had an adverse impact on her personal and professional lives. Later we saw that an anonymous old man came and shook Nazan’s hand, and the next moment she fell on the road and died. Maybe Samuel wanted her to leave the case from the very beginning, but because she was so persistent and stubborn, he kept creating roadblocks to make her give up. Ava and Ray had become Nazan’s obsession, and maybe Samuel had realized that the only way to make her stop chasing them was to kill her. It is also quite possible that the Triplets would have orchestrated the entire thing, as they didn’t want to take the chance of Nazan finding any sort of dirt on them. They were stalling her for quite some time, and maybe they realized that unless and until they took some steps, Nazan wouldn’t give up on the case so easily. Alternatively, it could also be possible that Hannah hired someone to kill her, knowing that her father wouldn’t be out of danger until she was alive. We don’t know if Nazan actually died or if she just fell unconscious, but the goal of making her stop her mission had been accomplished. At the end of “Kaleidoscope” Season 1, Bob’s henchman killed Ava and her nanny, Teresa, while Ray just sat there mourning his loss. He finally gave a call to his daughter and made up his mind to become the person that his wife wanted him to be. Just when we thought that the multiple tragedies would give way to some hope, an unknown person came and shot Ray.
The end of the first season of “Kaleidoscope” doesn’t tell us whether Ray lived or died, though, by the looks of it, it seems like it was a fatal blow. We saw in the episode titled “White” that when the heist was being committed in the SLS vault, Roger and his son were having a conversation back at their place. Roger’s son wanted to drop out of college and work for him. He was of the opinion that he would learn more on the job than he would in college. Roger didn’t want to force his opinions on his son, but he just wanted him to know that the choices a person made in the past had an impact, be it good or bad, on the future. Roger was speaking from his own experience. He was a successful businessman, but still, his past haunted him, and he didn’t want a similar life for his son. Roger’s son wanted to take revenge on Ray because the man had destroyed his family. The killer was wearing the same t-shirt that Roger’s son was seen wearing in the scene where he was having a conversation with his father. Roger had still made peace with the fact that he had to serve a sentence, but maybe his son hadn’t, and he wanted an eye for an eye. Though Roger’s son is the one who shot Ray, we want to still keep the possibility open (considering the precedent set by Netflix thrillers) and entertain the possibility that the killer could have been anyone who had been wronged by Ray in the past. He had spent 25 years obsessing over his revenge on Salas, but when the moment arrived, he realized that vengeance could never give him the freedom he desired. Unlike Salas, Ray was imprisoned for life, and in the process, he lost almost everything he treasured. There are still a lot of things that are uncertain, and probably in the second season of “Kaleidoscope,” we will get to know more about them.
“Kaleidoscope” is a 2022 Drama Thriller series created by Eric Garcia.
