Apple TV+’s murder mystery/comedy series The Afterparty concluded its second season in true Hercule Poirot/Knives Out fashion: the almost all-new cast, where anyone can be the murderer, erupts in over-the-top drama with a shocking killer reveal. Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish) and Aniq (Sam Richardson) put their heads together for another exciting story arc; find out all the juicy details and how this season’s ending compares to the previous one below.
Warning: spoilers ahead.
The Afterparty Season 2 Plot
In a modernized twist on Rashomon, The Afterparty uses every episode to tell the story of each suspect from their point of view, framing them as a police interview after the murder. Uniquely, each episode takes on a different genre to match the character’s tale, beginning with the rom-com storyline of Aniq and his developing relationship with Zoë (Zoë Chao). This time, Zoë brings Aniq to her sister’s wedding, and the next day, the wealthy Silicon Valley groom dies. Anyone, even Zoë’s family, could have done it, so Aniq brings back Detective Danner from Season 1 to help solve the murder.
List of The Afterparty Suspects
Both sides of the wedding are flush with suspects. Like Season 1, the cast is stacked with recognizable faces from 21st-century TV and film, with Ken Jeong, Vivian Wu, Poppy Liu, and John Cho playing Zoë’s family and Zach Woods, Anna Konkle, and Elizabeth Perkins playing the groom and his family. Jack Whitehall and Paul Walter Hauser also co-star as the groom’s childhood friend and the bride’s ex-boyfriend.
And the Killer Is…
After an extended run of 10 episodes, with investment into our returning characters and a wide range of diverse suspects, the ending of The Afterparty Season 2 tied up the loose ends perfectly. Following the Agatha Christie style, every interview contained a piece of evidence, this time adding some video evidence that gave things away as well (even if you caught the smoking gun in Feng’s social media video episode, the ending reveal is still a shock. After all, the killer was not trying to murder the groom, and his lack of motive gave him away: John Cho’s passionate, freewheeling uncle character Ulysses aimed to poison Feng, told in a last-minute shocking revelation.
Zoë Chao and Sam Richardson in ‘The Afterparty’
In case you missed it, Ulysses’s big mistake that not even we caught was the wine glass vs. whiskey glass mishap in falsifying his interview. If you saw through that lie, you might have had a shot at predicting the murderer. As in Rian Johnson’s self-aware murder mystery films and TV series, the trick that The Afterparty successfully pulls off again is messing with your expectations, and when a mystery succeeds in this goal, it can be very satisfying. While the first season’s murderer, Yasper (Ben Schwartz, who gets a fitting single-scene cameo in this season), gave himself away through a massive overhaul of deception, Ulysses’s reveal adheres even better to Christie’s famous twists: the other suspects’ glaringly obvious motives distracted from the real murderous undercurrents.
What The Afterparty Season 2 Ending Means for the Future
Due to the ongoing writer’s strike, it is understandable why there is no renewal for the well-received second season of The Afterparty. Though predicting the future of a series is never a solid bet, the streaming numbers alone indicate that this comedy murder-mystery series stands on firm ground for continuation, with show creator Christopher Miller saying he has ideas for when The Afterparty returns. Looking at the quality of the show, it is clear that The Afterparty now knows better what works in its anthology format to bring out the best in new and old characters; the appeal of this style has found its audience, and we can only hope they continue to work as hard and have as much fun with future scenarios as they did in Season 2.
The Afterparty is streaming now on Apple TV+.