Long Bright River’s ending might not impress everyone, as it has its fair share of dramatics, which can come off as slightly unconvincing. Nonetheless, most of its plot and twists still remain quite believable and enjoyable, and the way in which the bond between the two sisters strengthens over a short period is particularly heartwarming. When episode 8 begins, Mickey has just learned that her trusted confidante and also, very recently, her lover, Truman Dawes, is probably the serial killer she has been looking for. However, Long Bright River still has a few twists remaining, and the ending is marked by Mickey making a bold choice to protect those in need by technically upending her own life.
Spoiler Alert
Is Truman really the serial killer?
Mickey Fitzpatrick’s investigation into the serial killings takes a definite turn when another sex worker, Melissa, is shot by someone with the intention of killing her, but she manages to survive and be rushed to the hospital. Although the style of the attack does not immediately resemble the previous murders, as it does not involve either injecting insulin or stabbing the victims, Mickey is confident that the serial killer she has been trying to catch is behind the attack as well. Melissa belonged to the same group of prostitutes who worked on the streets of Kensington, and so it is clear to her that the killer is trying to hide his secret by targeting everyone. Since the primary suspect, Robert Mulvey, is also in custody when this attack takes place, Mickey believes that this is the ideal chance to get hold of the real murderer.
Therefore, she plans on talking to Melissa to learn about the identity of the attacker, but directly interacting with her does not yield much result, since Mickey is considered a hostile enemy by most of the women because of her joining the police force. Although Melissa’s reactions confirm that she had indeed seen the face of the man who had attacked her, and that he does belong to the police force, as suggested by another of the victims, Paula, earlier, nothing concrete can be found out. Melissa simply refuses to speak to Mickey, and she then even flees from the hospital to score drugs and get high. Since the woman is still actively addicted to opioids, it becomes impossible for Mickey to find and approach her until Kacey decides to help.
As Kacey knows all the spots to score and do drugs in the neighborhood, since she too was used to this sort of lifestyle until recently, she manages to track down Melissa in one of the derelict houses now used as a drug den. She has a word with the woman as well and then reports to Mickey about the conversation, which makes it seem like one of the worst and most unexpected betrayals had been in the works against the protagonist. Kacey states that Melissa had told her that it was the police detective, Truman Dawes, who had fired the gun at her, making it clear that it was Mickey’s most trusted associate who is the real serial killer. This is as shocking to Mickey as it is heartbreaking, for she had not just put complete faith in Truman regarding the case, but had also recently gotten romantically involved with him.
Mustering all her courage, and also with the support of Kacey, Mickey goes to Truman’s house to confront him, only to see him sneak out of the building wearing dark clothes and carrying a suspicious-looking duffle bag. She decides to follow him, only to see him arrive at the drug den and inject a woman with a syringe, which is enough to justify her suspicions against the man. Mickey enters the scene with her gun pointed at Truman, and she orders him to stop whatever he is doing, only to realize that she has made a grave mistake. In reality, Truman had come to the place to save the woman and help her recover from the effects of the drugs she had taken, which would have surely killed her otherwise. After all, Truman had always seemed to be understanding and helpful towards the addicts and sex workers of the neighborhood, for he felt sympathetic for them, and so imagining him as the serial killer is quite difficult.
Truman repeatedly states that he had nothing to do with the serial killings and is appalled and heartbroken that Mickey had so easily believed an addict’s account against him. This makes Mickey reanalyze the situation, and once she is back at home questioning her sister, the real matter becomes clear. When asked by Kacey, Melissa had stated that the police officer who had shot her was Mickey’s partner in the police department, and Kacey misunderstood this to be Truman. The last time that Kacey had been in touch with Mickey, or at least known anything about her, Truman was indeed her partner in the police department. This had changed a few weeks earlier, though, when Truman took some time off the force, and another police officer, Eddie Lafferty, was made Mickey’s beat partner. Since Kacey had not known about this change, she had reported to Mickey that Melissa meant Truman, whereas the woman had actually been referring to Eddie Lafferty.
While this twist does help Mickey get closer to solving the case, the confrontation truly mars her relationship with Truman, which can perhaps never be changed. The budding romance is suddenly brought to a jolting end by the traumatic experience for Truman of being held at gunpoint by his own lover and by the overall distrust that had quickly seeped in between them. Mickey’s extreme determination, which is laudable in every other context, makes her turn against her lover in an instant as well, only so that she can get to the bottom of the case and arrest the heartless man committing the crimes.
During Long Bright River’s ending, Mickey apologizes to Truman and tells him that at that point it was more important for her to not just catch the killer but also to prove to Kacey that she believed in her, and it was for this reason that she so readily sacrificed her romantic life. Although Truman is seen to turn friendly towards Mickey in the end, they can probably never turn lovers again considering their experience.
Who is the real perpetrator?
As soon as Mickey shows Eddie Lafferty’s photo to Kacey, she recognizes the man to be a drug supplier who worked with her now estranged boyfriend, Dock McClatchie. Mickey had earlier met Dock, whom she initially suspected to have had something to do with Kacey’s disappearance, but Melissa’s earlier statement made it clear who the real perpetrator behind the murders was. The drug trade happens to be the main reason behind these murders, as the first woman killed, named Taylor, happened to be involved in this trade as well. A man named Jim Scanlon was the last person Taylor was seen with, having a loud argument at a restaurant a few kilometers away from Kensington. When Mickey started looking for Scanlon, she realized that the man had been missing from about the same time as the first murder. While this made it seem like Scanlon was the murderer, his dead body was then found in the nearby river a few weeks later, meaning that he too had been a victim of the serial killer.
The police eventually also found that Scanlon had a secret job as a launch boat captain, and he was regularly making stops at an old abandoned warehouse, where he was actually making drug drops. The drugs were being brought over in the small launch boats, and Scanlon was getting rid of them at the warehouse before driving the boat to the actual pier. As Mickey probes further into this lead, she realizes that her top boss at the police station, Sergeant Kevin Ahearn, and her beat partner at present, Eddie Lafferty, were also directly linked to the drug trade. The three men happened to be batchmates at the same high school, meaning that they were closely associated with each other, although they kept it a secret from the world at present. It was most probably Ahearn and Eddie who hired Scanlon to be their boat driver, as the latter was being paid on a weekly basis, but in recent times, Jim Scanlon was stealing from his business associates, and this was why he was putting together his own drug stash at the abandoned warehouse.
Since Scanlon wanted to sell the stolen drugs by himself, he needed foot peddlers who would take the drugs out on the streets, and this is why he first approached Taylor, as she had known associations with addicts. It is suggested that Taylor worked for Scanlon for some time before she possibly asked for more money for her services and threatened to spill his secret otherwise. This was why Scanlon was seen arguing with Taylor at the restaurant, and following this, the man stopped working for his bosses, and he stopped receiving payment as well, meaning that Taylor must have tipped off Eddie. The police officer, Eddie Lafferty, was already quite notorious among the sex workers, since he used his power and position to coerce them into sleeping with him for free.
When Eddie and Ahearn found out about this development, the police officer first killed Taylor, and when Scanlon started talking with a second woman, he murdered her as well. Both these murders can be linked to the police officer directly because of the suspiciously high amount of prescription insulin found at his apartment, with which he had committed the crimes. A third woman, Paula, told Mickey about the fact that the perpetrator was actually a police officer, which gave the investigation a certain shape, and for this, Paula was killed by Eddie Lafferty as well. He basically tried to get rid of all the women from the same group, as they would have exposed his secret to the world, and so Mickey feels that her own sister, Kacey, might be in trouble as well.
It is also to be mentioned that Eddie did not only kill the women in order to hide his illegal drug business from the world, but also out of an extreme apathy towards them. At the very beginning of Long Bright River, he was heard telling Mickey how he felt that drug-addicted sex workers are stuck in situations that are beneath any sense of dignity and respect, and so their lives are not worth living at all. Eddie was very direct in expressing how he believed that the murderer was basically doing these women a favor by killing them, and this is the mindset that drives his actions throughout the series. He commits the murders out of a twisted superiority complex, which makes him believe that he is relieving the women of their pains and shame by killing them while he is also covering up his drug business. As he often mentions how Kensington used to be a safe neighborhood where he and his friends often played during their childhood days, it is also very likely that Eddie Lafferty believes that he is clearing the ‘filth’ from the streets as well through these murders.
Why does Mickey choose to protect Kacey’s friends?
In Long Bright River’s ending, Mickey goes to an abandoned church in Kensington to confront Eddie Lafferty after learning that he has been operating from there. She finds Dock and Eddie at the place, and although the former did not have anything to do with the murders, Mickey holds both of them at gunpoint. However, in one last twist, Kacey and her friends, led by a woman named Jeannie, also reach the place with a vengeful urge to avenge their friends’ deaths. Most of these women, particularly Jeannie, cannot really look forward to any major change in the condition of their lives, since they are far too addicted to drugs by now. Engulfed by the bleakness of drug abuse and addiction and all the associated vices that come along with it, they do not care about being morally right or wrong, especially in this case.
The hatred, or at least dislike and disdain, that Eddie had for the sex workers is now reflected by the women as well, although they genuinely have a reason to hate him for having killed their friends, while his feelings were born out of moral judgment. Therefore, Jeannie shoots Eddie multiple times and kills him, with a sense of real satisfaction evident on her face. However, Mickey quickly takes the gun, wipes Jeannie’s prints off it, and then shoots Eddie herself to make it seem like it was she who had killed the man. Mickey chooses to protect Kacey’s friends, knowing very well that the world would easily accept her act of having killed a serial killer, and she would even be applauded and praised by the police department for her brave effort. But if Jeannie was revealed as the real killer, society’s morality would hold her and each of the women in her group responsible and subject them to unjust scrutiny and persecution. While Eddie arguably receives a sort of punishment for his crimes, Sergeant Ahearn manages to stay out of trouble for the time being, and Mickey and her associates suspect that he might actually be able to get away with his involvement in the drug trade.
Although Mickey does hamper her life as a police officer by choosing to save the women, she is still able to justify the decision to herself, for she had always wanted to protect the women living on the fringes of society. Having herself experienced the immense difficulties of such a life, through her sister Kacey, Mickey had learned to respect and sympathize with addicts, and therefore she does not mind protecting them. Especially since it is so evident that most members of the police force, and of society, do not care about these helpless citizens, and there is nobody to stand up to them. The protagonist goes through the official procedures for having shot a man dead, but she claims her actions were in self-defense. Thus, Mickey’s name is eventually cleared, and she leaves the police force as well to pursue her life-long ambition of teaching music.
