Abhiroop Das
Created by Ken Cuperus, Hallmark’s ‘Mistletoe Murders’ season 2 continues the tale of Fletcher’s Grove, which is once again haunted by new murders. With Emily Lane’s skills proving to be particularly suited to the investigations, Detective Sam Wilner has to reluctantly concede to her help in the cases. Though their relationship still seems to be reeling back from their confrontation in the season 1 finale, the signs of mending surface soon, and Emily begins to display little glimpses of her true self in front of him. However, her past is still a muddled puzzle that Sam and we can hardly make sense of. And with each new piece of revelation, the question of who or what the Chimera is becomes more important. As the ending approaches, everything seems to be building up to a moment that could shatter Emily and Sam’s lives. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Mistletoe Murders Season 2 Plot Recap
‘Mistletoe Murders’ season 2 begins with an eleven-month flashback after Emily and Sam’s awkward breakup, bringing us back to yet another Christmas season. While the entire town comes to life with festivities and spirit, Emily cannot help but feel a sense of gray settling in. Ever since learning about her sealed past, Sam has been extra careful, forbidding Violet from working at Under the Mistletoe for understandable reasons. Somewhere between all of this, however, a new murder mystery begins to develop, this time revolving around Fletcher Grove’s high school. Violet’s crush, Kyle, is a chess prodigy playing for the school under the guidance of Mr. Henley, but when he suddenly disappears from the town, people are left with questions and rumors, particularly about him being replaced by rivals.
While delivering stuff for Christmas at the school, Emily accidentally ends up flexing her chess skills, only to wind up as the interim chess coach for the school team. This serves a dual purpose, however, as her instinct to look into Henley’s death is proven right. His body is ultimately discovered under the school’s newly laid floor, of all places, which places the culprit somewhere within the system. Emily manages to figure out that it was a student, Shane, who was caught selling answer sheets to students, and didn’t wish to derail his own career in chess. Soon after this, the show introduces a second mystery, this time concerning the town’s grand history. The late Angela Wells, a legendary painter, famous recluse, and a former resident of Fletcher’s Grove, turns out to have a living descendant, painter Moira Wells, who claims to have discovered her grandmother’s only existing self-portrait. The finer details of this narrative, however, don’t quite add up.
The case takes on a personal turn when Reed Donley, a former cop and Sam’s mentor-turned night guard for the art museum, is found dead. Despite Sam trying to take the lead, this case gets handed over to Detective Mike Meadows, who doesn’t take Sam’s findings seriously. Desperate for a breakthrough, Sam takes a leave from the job and reunites with Emily to conduct a secret investigation, ultimately learning that not only is Moira a fraud peddling a fake portrait, but that the killer was none other than Detective Mike himself, who wanted to steal the real portrait for himself.
The third mystery of the season turns in a different direction, this time revolving around an up-and-coming luxury restaurant, Corniferous, whose owner, Danny, is found dead in the snow. As Emily digs into the restaurant’s past and observes its eccentric crew, some hidden truths end up coming to light. This is true not just for the restaurant, but also for Emily’s own life, as her years’ worth of research on Chimera seems to have brought up something, just not in a way she might like.
Mistletoe Murders Season 2 Ending: Who is Aaron? Why is He Back?
‘Mistletoe Murders’ season 2 ends with the surprise arrival of Aaron in Fletcher’s Grove, forcefully bridging Emily’s dark past with her blissful present. While the seeds for this moment were laid all the way back in season 1, when she almost located Chimera but got hacked instead, it took Aaron a full year from that point to trace her down. To that end, he likely got help in no small part from Frank, who unknowingly looked up Chimera on Sam’s behalf, allowing the hackers to pinpoint the location and figure out Emily’s whereabouts. However, his reasons for coming here might not necessarily be hostile; on the contrary, Aaron might be here to rebuild from where they parted ways, seeing that their original goals about the world weren’t so different after all.
Although we still don’t have the full picture of the fallout between Emily and Aaron, or how her life changed in the ten years since, building up to the present, there is still room for speculation. After aligning with the government, Emily likely became a tech operative, and perhaps even a field agent, only to get caught up in a trap set up by Chimera. The memories of the bomb explosion that often keep her awake in the show might be connected to this final showdown, which means that whatever Aaron has to say must be connected to it in some form. With this, we might be getting an explanation that has been a long time in the making, connecting the disparate points in Emily’s mind and life thus far.
Despite Emily being the one who snitched on Chimera and eventually got the group dismantled, it is undeniable that a part of her feels guilty for breaking their trust. Aaron’s presence, then, raises another, larger question about how she feels about the group after all these years. More specifically, do the strong feelings of love she felt for Aaron roughly a decade ago still persist in her heart, or has it been replaced by a sense of rage and vengeance? With his reentry into her life, all the complicated questions that Emily once tried to bury have been brought back to the surface, and any answer she gives not only impacts her own future, but also the futures of new people in her life, the people she truly loves and cares about.
Will Emily and Sam End Up Together For Good?
While the twist about Aaron ends up eclipsing the rest of the episode, the biggest positive development thus far concerns not him, but Emily and Sam’s relationship. In a way, this season finale brings us right back to how things were at the end of season 1. Except this time, both Sam and Emily have a year’s worth of experience, maturity, and unexpressed thoughts and feelings. Despite their attempts to create distance, it has become increasingly clear that what the two feel for each other is love, and it isn’t going away anytime soon. Instead, this increased distance only makes them yearn for each other more, and by the end of the episode, they decide to let go of these invisible barriers and embrace each other once again, this time for good.
Emily and Sam’s passionate kiss aside, the story still leaves a major, formative question answered, as to whether Emily will tell Sam the full truth about her past. While we know that some specific details are held back as per government instructions, most of her avoidance stems from personal feelings of fear and hesitation. This alone managed to hold back this love story for almost a full year, but with everything she’s gone through, Emily might be ready for a change. We see this being conveyed symbolically in the morning after their romantic confession. While Emily is used to waking up to trauma-induced nightmares, this marks the first time she wakes normally, with a smile on her face. At the same time, however, this invocation of the past comes with its own set of questions.
For Emily to ease up and tell Sam everything is one thing, but the question of accountability that follows is entirely in a different ballgame. Not even we know the full extent of what she was embroiled in, and for Sam to hold that much information makes him uniquely vulnerable to external threats. Sam makes many references to how her parents’ deaths had something to do with her personal failures, which led to a belief that making connections is an invitation for tragedy. That said, with Sam and the town simultaneously working their charm on her, Emily will have to be extra vigilant, not just to look out for potential trouble, but to approach the bigger question of whether this cycle can be broken for good.
Who Killed Danny? Why?
The episodic mystery of this two-part finale ends with the revelation that Danny was killed by Carrie, the restaurant’s sommelier, who wanted revenge for being scammed. This, of course, comes with the reveal that Danny had been using his restaurant startup as a scamming platform, taking money from people like Carrie, Ray, and Jason with no hope of paying them back. While his empire of lies eventually toppled during a conversation with Ray, which later turned into a fight, that wasn’t what killed him. When Carrie learned the truth, however, she snapped and locked him in the freezer, leading him to freeze to death. From there, Chef Jean-Marc found the body and dumped it out into the forest, creating a three-part trail that made things incredibly difficult to follow.
While Carrie may be Danny’s murderer, there is a symbolic aspect to how his own crimes and moral failures also play a role in this. It becomes most apparent when we take the freezer itself into account, as its broken lock system was something that he’d never fixed, despite taking the money from Jason. In the end, this comes back to bite him in a rather twisted way. While Emily and company are able to solve the crime, there is still a palpable sense of systemic injustice being carried out here, something that Emily can relate to sorely. While her own life may be built on a similar mountain of lies, the arrival or Aaron promises to stir things up, for better or for worse.
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