The BBC’s crime drama series “You Don’t Know Me” presents a gripping tale of love and emotion through a court hearing for the murder of a man in London. With its premise based on recounting personal accounts of reality, the four-episode long show has an overall slow pace of development, which can work a treat for those in favor of such craft. However, the inconclusive ending and the overall narrative might leave viewers a bit dissatisfied, despite being pleasantly interesting for the most part.
‘You Don’t Know Me’ Season 1: Plot Summary
Hero is a man in his late twenties or maybe early thirties living in London but in a ghastly situation at present. He is charged with the murder of a man known to him, Jamil Issa, and faces a court trial with all the evidence overwhelmingly suggesting that it was he who committed the crime. Mobile company records place Hero at the scene of the murder at that exact time. CCTV footage shows him driving rashly towards the location a few moments before the incident. Traces of Jamil’s blood have been found in Hero’s fingernails. Strands of his hair were found in Jamil’s car, suggesting that the two knew each other well enough; the gun with which the murder was committed was recovered from his flat the morning after, with gunpowder residue found on his clothes. With all these incriminating factors against Hero, there is hardly any way for the man to survive as the prosecution closes in on the case. However, in a strange turn of events, Hero gets rid of his defendant lawyer so that he himself is given a chance to speak in court, in front of the twelve jury members about to decide his fate, and the man claims to present the real truth. Always maintaining that he did not kill Jamil Issa and that he was set up by someone else, Hero claims that he has arguments against each of the pieces of evidence produced by the prosecutor. In an attempt to defend his claims, Hero now sets about to tell a long and complex tale of his life, family, and blind love for his girlfriend, Kyra.
Spoilers Ahead
What Narrative Does Hero Present In Court?
Standing at trial, Hero starts to recount his story from a few years back, when he met Kyra for the first time. A car salesman by profession, Hero, was attracted to a young woman he met on the bus and started pursuing her for a date. Despite being apprehensive at first, the woman, Kyra, was charmed by the likable and sincere man, and the two soon started a romantic relationship. Hero’s mother, Abebi, and his younger sister, Bless, were also instantly impressed by Kyra, and they readily accepted her into the loving and close-knit family. Six months or so later, Kyra moved into Hero’s apartment as the couple started living together. Although their love and proximity kept growing, Kyra still never mentioned anything about her family or her parental home, and Hero did not seem to find it too unusual either. However, this quickly became a difficulty when Kyra one day did not return home, and no trace of her could be found. Hero looked in her old apartment and neighborhood, and also spoke with her only two friends, but nobody seemed to know where the woman had vanished. Since much earlier, Hero had little acquaintance with a younger man in Kyra’s old building block, named Jamil Issa, and Issa had suddenly grown extremely wealthy with a flashy lifestyle. Knowing that the young man was almost certainly involved in drug dealing, Hero maintained a distance from him, but he had also had an altercation with him only a few days back. Jamal had visited the car dealership Hero worked at, and had made a crude joke about Kyra, which enraged the boyfriend. After some heated exchanges, Jamil left the shop with his two henchmen, and his relationship with Hero had turned sour. With Kyra still missing, Hero tried to seek the police’s help as well, but he was not taken seriously as authorities thought it to be just a case of a bad breakup. Jamil offered to help the man, saying that he could use his network of drug peddlers to find some information about her, but only if Hero hid some drugs for him in exchange, which the simple and straightforward man immediately declined. Soon, Hero receives a tip from an unknown man (Hero had put up missing posters with Kyra’s photo and his own phone number all over the neighborhood) who claims to have seen his girlfriend on the other side of town, in North London’s Camden area. Hero immediately drives over and finally catches a glimpse of Kyra, but what he sees makes him throw up in shock. The introverted and engrossed-with-her-books Kyra now seemed to be working as a sex worker on the streets of Camden.
Although Hero was quick to take a judgmental position over the matter, forcing himself to accept that Kyra never loved him and trying to stay away from the situation, his sister Bless insisted that Kyra might actually be in some trouble, and Hero should actually help her out. Asking around in the Camden neighborhood, Hero then got to know that Kyra and other women were all controlled by a vicious gang called the Glocks, whose members regularly carry guns with them. Judging the danger of the situation but also desperate to help his girlfriend, Hero approached Jamil once again, this time asking to buy a gun. Jamil led him to an illegal gun dealer, but also in the exchange of a favor, although one far less unlawful—Hero now had to write Jamil’s school essays and papers for him. Finally, with his courage built up and a gun in his pocket, Hero went back to Camden and rescued Kyra by shooting the pimp and then also hitting him with his car. Kyra, however, kept complaining throughout the drive and remained silent and by herself for the next many days. In order to bring her books, Hero visited her old apartment, where some gang members arrived, and he barely escaped. From these gangsters, he heard the name of a certain Spooks, and when he tells this to Kyra, it is shockingly revealed that Spooks is Kyra’s own brother. The woman then explains that Spooks was heavily involved with the Glocks before he was arrested, and then he had given all their information to the police. Infuriated by this betrayal, and yet unable to do anything to Spooks as he was still in prison, they decided to hurt him by hurting his sister Kyra. While the reunited couple now started to gradually return to normalcy, the Glocks began looking for them all over London, and in the process, started harassing Jamil as he seemed to have some drug-related rivalry with them. Jamil kept pestering Hero about stopping to look for Kyra (Hero had not revealed to him that he had brought his girlfriend back), and also to return the woman to the Glocks if he did find her, because Jamil did not want the gang in his neighborhood. Out of frustration and anger, Hero now played his own trick—he visited Spooks in prison, and told him that a man named Jamil Issa now had possession of Kyra. Spooks, unable to control any of the situation, had agreed to again help the Glocks because they had promised to let him and his sister alone if he did so, and Hero was aware of this. Soon, a car with Glock gangsters arrived at Hero’s neighborhood, and after hearing gunshots, he was sure that Jamil had been killed by the gang.
However, Jamil was quite prepared for such an attack, and he managed to survive it. Immediately visiting Hero’s apartment, he and his henchmen abducted the man and took him to his club. Here, Jamil’s superior in his gang, a vicious and violent man named Face, made an appearance, and he directly threatened Hero to pay him ten thousand pounds within a week or face his wrath. This money was actually owed to Face by Jamil, but now the latter had to stop his drug dealing because Glocks were looking for him on the streets, and so Face ordered Hero to pay up. With Jamil and Face now directly against him, Hero was in a total mess as the Glocks were also still looking for him, and the situation further escalated when Hero managed to steal some money from a Glock drug dealer’s house. Unable to think up how he would manage such a large amount of money in such a few days, the emergence of an old friend called Curt brought some hope to him. Curt was very close to Hero and his family in high school, but had gotten out of touch when he moved from the neighborhood. He now returns to Hero and Kyra, revealing that he himself worked for the Glocks, and was aware that the gang was vehemently looking for the couple. With time gradually running out, Curt presented a plan to Hero to get some fast cash—Curt would pose as a cocaine dealer selling his drugs for cheap, and Hero would have to arrange a meeting between him and Jamil where the latter would arrive with twenty thousand pounds to buy the drugs with. After the deal would go through, though, Curt would rob the drug from Jamil and keep the money, leading Jamil into even more debt, which would probably force him to evade London. Hero has no option but to agree to this, and Kyra and Bless also want to help with the plan when they hear of it. Finally, an apartment is made to look like a dealer scene, where the two women, masked up, would pose to be workers making narcotics, and Curt would make the exchange while Hero hid himself in a back room. This entire plan went haywire, though, as Jamil himself tried to rob Curt, holding a gun to his head, and major chaos and fistfights ensued. In the end, Jamil had seen Hero’s Face and understood what was going on, but the man was shot by Kyra. Hero and his friends thought that Jamil was dead, and had dumped his body inside a garbage bin somewhere in London before trying to fly away from the country. But, out of guilt and his apparent underlying good-nature, Hero had called up Jamil’s parents and told them of the location of their son’s body. What he did not expect was that Jamil would be saved by his parents and a rushing ambulance just in time, and the man soon called Hero up while he was about to leave England. With Jamil now threatening and promising to exact revenge on him and his entire family, Hero could not ultimately leave London.
Kyra soon managed to convince her boyfriend that the only way out of the situation was to kill Jamil before he could attack them, and Hero and Curt started to scout Jamil’s club to see if he had been released from the hospital yet. For all this while, Bless, without telling Hero about it, had started to visit the drug dealer in the hospital, posing as a volunteer, to get certain information about his release. Finally, getting word of Jamil’s release, Hero and Kyra made a plan to kill him in his club and then flee the country immediately. But much to his shock, Hero woke up that night to see Kyra missing from his apartment along with the cash and flight tickets. Realizing what was up, he rushed to Jamil’s club in his car, where Kyra shot Jamil dead right in front of his eyes. The two then drove back towards Kyra’s old neighborhood, where he dropped her off, and then returned to his own apartment, where both of them were supposed to meet in a short while before fleeing England. However, Kyra never arrived that night, and when the police barged in the next morning, they found the gun with which she had killed Jamil in Hero’s apartment, and he realized that the love of his life had actually painted the blame on him and left. With his story now wrapped up, Hero defends his position by saying that it was not he who had killed Jamil Issa but Kyra, who had then put all the blame on him and left, and had also called the police to give them an anonymous tip about the murder. Hero agrees to being present at the scene of the murder, as the mobile company records show, and also agrees to having driven his car recklessly towards the location, as seen on CCTV footage. He claims that his hair sample, found in Jamil’s car, was from when he was abducted by the drug dealer and taken to meet with Face. He further defends that the gunpowder and blood found on him were also because he was present at the murder scene, but still keeps insisting that he was innocent, as it was Kyra who had killed Jamil. As the court and the jury finished hearing the accused’s account, the session ended for the day as the verdict would be presented only the next day.
‘You Don’t Know Me’ Season 1: Ending Explained – Who Killed Jamil Issa?
Through some scenes shown with conversations between Hero and his sister during the court trial, it was suggested that Hero was not being totally truthful as Bless kept asking him to speak the truth. Although what the truth was never gets presented to the court or the jury, the series reveals it to us, viewers, through a scene soon after Hero was arrested for the murder. Talking with his defendant lawyer, Hero says what had actually happened—when Bless had gone over to the hospital to keep a check on Jamil, he and his gang mates had recognized her and taken her hostage at their club. He then called up Hero that night, informing him of the same and threatening to kill Bless if Hero did not bring all the money and Kyra immediately to him. Ready to do everything to protect his sister, Hero had driven to the club, with Kyra sitting right beside him, and an altercation with Jamil followed. Kyra had been carrying Hero’s gun (the same one that he had bought from Jamil’s source), and when the situation worsened, she was about to use it. Curt soon arrived on the scene and attacked Jamil’s henchman, and in a flurry of sudden actions, Bless picked up the gun and shot Jamil dead. Unwilling to let any harm come his sister’s way, Hero decided to take all the blame on himself, and then Kyra convinced him to frame the whole thing in such a manner that it seemed that he had been duped by her. While Kyra left the country and gave an anonymous tip to the police, Hero put all the evidence in his house in a manner that would give credence to his story of being ultimately betrayed and framed by his girlfriend.
“You Don’t Know Me” Season 1 ends with scenes of the court, as it reopens the next morning to pass the verdict on the case. However, no conclusive end is presented, as the scenes are interjected with the thoughts and imaginations of Hero. The jury is first seen passing a verdict of guilty, with jubilation and celebration by Jamil’s parents, while Hero remains in prison for the rest of his life. The next possibility is then shown, with the jury finding him not guilty, much to the relief of Abebi and Bless, and Hero goes over to a foreign country to reunite with Kyra. What happens, in reality, is then presented, as the judge is heard asking the foreman of the jury whether they have made a verdict, to which the foreman replies, “Yes,” and that is where the episode ends. Why exactly the ending is left inconclusive might be up for debate, but what seems most likely is that the show’s focus was Hero’s love for his girlfriend and his family. Whether he is ultimately able to save them, and also himself walk free is perhaps considered irrelevant, and “You Don’t Know Me” decides to leave us with the intention of the act rather than the actual result.
“You Don’t Know Me” is a 2022 Drama Crime series streaming on Netflix.
