Recap / The Hardy Boys 2020 Season 1

Episode titles:

1. Welcome to Your Life
2. Where the Light Can't Find You
3. Of Freedom and Pleasure
4. Secrets and Lies
5. The Drop
6. In Plain Sight
7. A Figure in Hiding
8. What Happened in Bridgeport
9. The Key
10. The Secret Room
11. No Getting Out
12. Eye to Eye
13. While the Clock Ticked

Tropes present in Season 1:

• Adaptational Villainy: Chief Ezra Collig is a grump in some of the book series, but also always a Reasonable Authority Figure and honest cop who acts as a Friend on the Force for the boys. Here, he turns out to be in on the corruption going on in the town and is secretly working for Gloria. He gets arrested and removed from his position at the end of the season.
• Artifact of Attraction: The Eye is hinted to have this effect on everyone who comes into contact with it, giving them some combination of being Drunk on the Dark Side and having a Power High:
  • The original three men who found the Eye—George, Ahmed, and Sergei—used it to become wealthy and powerful, becoming more and more corrupt along the way. Even after George had a change of heart and split the Eye into three pieces to divide and limit its power, there was still a part of him that was tempted to reassemble and use it and felt "blind without it", his description sounding like an addict having withdrawal symptoms while trying to get clean.
  • In the present day, the heads of all the families, but especially Gloria and Stacy, want to reassemble it for their own power as well. Gloria's description of what the whole Eye can do, in particular, sounds almost awed and worshipful.
  • When JB steals the Khan piece for Gloria and experiences the good luck that even one fraction of it can bring, he starts to have a Power High from it and wants to put the whole thing together to be even luckier, unaware of the full scope of what the Eye can do when it's fully assembled. It takes him picking a fight with Stacy to steal her piece, losing, being beaten up, and having his own piece stolen for him to come down from it and realize, like Joe has (see below), that the Eye is dangerous and he wants nothing more to do with it.
  • Even Frank, after learning about the Eye's true power, briefly has a phase of considering using it to see Laura's spirit and be able to talk to her. It's only after an argument with Joe that results in the latter attempting to destroy it on his own and nearly dying in a mine shaft that Frank snaps out of it and also recognizes that they're better off without it.
  • Joe is the one person who uses part of the Eye's power who is able to resist its attraction. While he does enjoy the luck that the Estabrook piece he found gives him at the carnival, once he and Frank learn just what his "lucky charm" is, it doesn't take long for him to decide they should just destroy it. Even after using his piece once again to help him and Biff find their way through the mine, he still doesn't waver about wanting to get rid of it, not liking the weird power it gives off.
• Artifact of Power: The Eye, which allows its user to see the outcome of events, and use this knowledge to change or influence the world. The three men who found it—George Estabrook, Ahmed Khan, and Sergei Nabokov—used it to become three of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the world, together known as the Circle of the Eye. After some unspecified event occurred that resulted in the deaths of 4,000 people, which the Circle apparently caused or at least did nothing to prevent, George came to believe that No Man Should Have This Power and decided to break the Eye into three pieces, with each family keeping one, and flee with his piece to make sure it was lost forever so the Eye could never be fully assembled again. Ahmed and Sergei are implied to have had him murdered by causing his plane to crash, allowing his daughter Gloria (who shared their desire to reassemble the Eye) to take over the family.
• Bad Boss: Anastasia Nabokov. The fact that her counterparts in the other families, Gloria and Kanika, are much more in the vein of Benevolent Bosses sets up the eventual reveal that she's actually even more evil than they are. Her "aunt and uncle", who are really bodyguards her father hired for her before he died, act far more robotic and emotionless than the genuine loyalty that Stefan and Nigel show to their employers, and at different points, she's seen bossing them around and obviously treating them like servants, snapping at them, screaming at them, and slapping them across the face. She also pulls a You Have Failed Me on the Tall Man by hitting and killing him with her car, while using a Wounded Gazelle Gambit immediately afterwards to convince everyone else it was an accident.
• Benevolent Boss: Both Gloria Estabrook and Kanika Khan appear to be this. It contrasts them with their Nabokov counterpart, Stacy, who is definitely a Bad Boss.
  • Gloria's shown multiple times giving polite thank-yous to her staff and treating them graciously, such as Sonya and Stefan, and appears to have considered the latter like family for many years, so much so that he developed Undying Loyalty to her and murdered her own estranged daughter in a highly misguided attempt to protect her interests. She also gives JB multiple second chances despite him repeatedly failing to bring her the pieces of the Eye she hires him to steal, and even after he tries to betray her at one point by taking the pieces for himself; when he finally does deliver it, she pays him as promised with a curt thanks and dismisses him, not having any intentions of double-crossing him.
  • Kanika is likewise only ever shown being courteous and respectful to her own butler, Nigel, who in turn seems to have similar care and loyalty for her that Stefan does for Gloria.
• Betty and Veronica: Though Frank and Callie end up becoming the Official Couple for the show, each of them has one of these, and interestingly, play opposite roles in each other's Love Triangles:
  • Callie (Archie) starts off dating good-natured Chet, who's lived in Bridgeport his whole life like her, is her Best Friend, and comes from a working-class family of farmers (Betty). Then she meets polite-but-brooding Frank (Veronica), the new kid in town from the big city who gets her involved with his and Joe's investigation, and who's also the grandson of Callie's mentor, one of the richest and most powerful people in the world. In this case, Veronica wins, as Chet and Callie break up and she gets together with Frank by the end of the season.
  • On the flipside, Frank (Archie) gets attention from both Callie and Stacy. Callie is his friend and fellow academic, likewise from a working-class family who has to worry about costs of prep school, dresses fashionably but not flashy, and acts as his confidant and investigating partner (Betty). Stacy, meanwhile, is the mysterious new girl who makes a big entrance into town by hitting the Tall Man with her car, is later revealed to be the heiress and new leader of the also-powerful Nabokov family, "dresses like a pop star", and is much more aggressive and forward in pursuing her attraction to Frank and trying to get him to work with her (Veronica). On this side of the Love Triangle, Betty wins, as Frank rejects Stacy and starts a relationship with Callie.
• Big Bad Ensemble: The current leaders/heirs of the Circle of the Eye act as this for the first season:
  • Kanika Khan tried to have her nephew Rupert, who was investigating the Circle along with Laura Hardy, killed, and then hires Fenton Hardy to find him in order to get Fenton to leave town so he won't threaten the Circle, hoping that both men would die. When this fails and her piece of the Eye is stolen, she drops out of the ensemble, getting the evidence Fenton and Rupert need to get Gloria arrested and promising to leave Bridgeport and the Circle behind forever in exchange for them not turning Kanika over to the cops.
  • Anastasia Nabokov wants to destroy the Circle because she (correctly) believes someone in it murdered her father. She initially tries to work together with Frank, but he later realizes that she plans to take the Eye for herself rather than destroying it and rebuffs her. She responds by trying to use Callie as a hostage to get the final piece of the Eye.
  • Gloria Estabrook betrayed her father, George, to his partners when he tried to flee with his piece of the Eye, resulting in his death. More recently, she murdered Viktor Nabokov when he tried to get her piece, and hires JB to steal the Khans' piece from Kanika and her own piece from her own grandsons, wanting to assemble the Eye herself. She claims she wants to use it for better things than the three original Circle founders did, but it's pretty clear what she really wants is the power she'll get from having the entire Eye.
  • Interestingly, though, while Gloria killed Viktor, none of the above murdered Laura, despite most characters believing that Viktor and Laura were killed by the same person. Stefan, Gloria's Dragon, did that without her knowledge or consent.
• Birds of a Feather: It's implied this is why Joe and Biff become such fast, close friends despite initially finding each other weird. They're both hinted to have had Friendless Backgrounds, with Joe being victimized by bullies and Biff apparently seen by other kids as a know-it-all loner weirdo. They also both have a cop for a parent and are Constantly Curious.
• Children Are Innocent:
  • For a given definition of innocent, since Joe is still a snarky, mischievous Kid Detective. Still, of the many different people in the season who use the Eye or a piece of it, he's both the youngest person to do so and the least drawn to its power; once he realizes what the Eye is capable of, even after wielding a piece of it multiple times and seeing what it can do, he's still adamant about wanting to destroy it and never becomes greedy for its power like everyone else who's had it.
  • This extends to Biff as well, who is a similar age and knows almost as much about the Eye as Joe does, and is likewise wary of and not tempted by its power. The one time she held it (while moving it to a new hiding place), she didn't like the odd feeling it gave her, and also dislikes that it seems to have its own "wants".
• Crusading Widower: Fenton becomes this after his wife Laura, the love of his life, is killed in a car crash that is likely not an accident, leaving his sons with his sister for the summer so he can investigate her death. Frank and Trudy eventually call him out on it; see Parents as People.
• Dirty Cop: Some of the Bridgeport police are in on the corruption of Bridgeport and are actually doing dirty work for Gloria, who secretly runs the town—up to and including Chief Collig. Joe and Biff discover this about halfway through the season and fill the others in, and then Biff tells her mom, who in turn tells Aunt Trudy, prompting Jesse and Trudy to start doing their own investigating.
• Distressed Dude: Since Joe is just a small pre-teen boy in this adaptation, he's pretty prone to this. Over the course of the season, he gets taken hostage twice, is targeted/chased/cornered by an assassin and forced to flee for his life on several occasions (sometimes with Frank or with Biff as well), and falls down a mine shaft (also with Biff) and needs his brother and the other kids to find them.
• The Dragon: Stefan for Gloria and Nigel for Kanika, while Stacy's fake aunt and uncle (actually her bodyguards) are Co-Dragons for her.
• Dramatic Irony: The audience knows right from the start that Kanika's piece of the Eye is stolen by JB at Gloria's behest, but the Hardy Boys only find out JB has it the following episode, and it takes a couple more for it to come out to Kanika that it was on Gloria's orders.
• The Dreaded: The Tall Man. Ern is terrified of him because he's the Sole Survivor of the man's massacre on the Astghik; JB fears him because he stole the idol from him and knows the Tall Man will kill him for it; and the Hardys are already scared of him because of the Astghik as well, but then more so once he starts targeting them directly for Joe's piece of the Eye. Being a seven-foot-tall Implacable Man who survives enough electricity to power a carnival, breaks out of jail, and chases after the Hardy Boys and their friends with a knife several times will do that for you.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Season 1 does not utilize Episode Title Cards like the next two do.
  • Joe comments in the second episode about Phil being a year older than him, and Phil's not shown in any of Joe's and Biff's classes in this season once school resumes, as you'd expect from someone who's probably a grade above them. The next two seasons do away with this and Phil is implied there to be roughly the same age as Joe and Biff, sharing most classes with one or both of them.
  • The Hardy Boys do a lot of their investigating separate from each other in this season and share their findings later, with Joe usually pairing up with Biff, Frank in a group with Callie and often Chet too, and Phil, when present, fluctuating whom he's with. Phil also appears in several episodes fewer than the other True Companions. The next two seasons have Frank and Joe teaming up with each other much more often to investigate, Biff and Phil usually being the ones to pair off anytime it's not all three younger kids together, and mixing the friends up between age groups more often, and all of the kids appear in every episode of Season 2 and all but one from 3.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • JB isn't evil, but he is a criminal who's Only in It for the Money; nonetheless, there are plenty of lines he won't cross. After he "kidnaps" Joe to use him against Gloria, he's dismayed when Joe mistakenly fears that JB plans to kill him, insisting that he's never killed anyone in his line of work. It also seems that he Wouldn't Hurt a Child, since he promises not to hurt him while using him as leverage and apologizes for accidentally gripping him too tightly at one point. JB is incredulous about the fact that Gloria wants him to steal something from her own grandsons for her, and while he does do it, he feels bad enough about it to claim that he owes Joe a favor afterwards.
  • Kanika tries to have her nephew killed and sends Fenton into a dangerous situation as well, but implies that she, too, wouldn't target children. After Gloria accuses her of being the one who hired the Tall Man and states that he went after her grandsons, Kanika is quick to say that someone like that definitely wouldn't be one of her people.
  • Gloria may be corrupt, rude and passive-aggressive to her in-laws, and willing to kill her enemies who make moves against her, like Viktor, but she does have some redeeming qualities. She wouldn't dream of harming her descendants or ordering someone to do so, not even when her daughter was threatening to expose all her secrets, and is appalled that her manservant, Stefan, murdered Laura and claimed it was for her sake. She also appears to be a relatively Benevolent Boss; see above.
• Evil Matriarch:
  • Gloria Estabrook, Laura's mother and the Hardy Boys' grandmother, who is a Well-Intentioned Extremist at best, has never been very nice to her son-in-law Fenton and his sister Trudy, and controls the entire town of Bridgeport, with the chief of police on her payroll. Nevertheless, she gets several humanizing moments, such as being sincerely heartbroken and regretful about Laura's death, and truly caring for her grandsons and wanting to be a better grandma to them than she was a mother to Laura.
  • Kanika Khan, leader of the Khan family side of the Circle, who tries to have her nephew Rupert killed and apparently forced her brother, his father, out of the family and his rightful inheritance.
• Evil Mentor: Gloria turns out to be this to Callie, whom she's been mentoring for quite a while to help her get into Rosegrave Academy, the prep school founded by Gloria's father, which turns out to be a front for a secret society running Bridgeport. She's only ever been good to Callie, but Frank guesses it's because she has plans for her, which is proven to be correct in the following season. She also shows a rather cold lack of concern for her protegee when Stacy kidnaps Callie and holds her hostage for the piece of the Eye, to the boys' disgust.
• Femme Fatale: Anastasia "Stacy" Nabokov is a classic example, wanting to bring down the Circle to avenge her murdered father and to take the Eye for herself, and is willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish her goals, including kidnapping and murder. She also pretends to be The Ingenue to win Frank's trust and get him to tell her what he knows, and once he figures out her real identity, acts aggressively forward and seductive with Frank to try to get him to work together with her, later becoming a Woman Scorned after he rejects her.
• Foreshadowing: The series as a whole has its own page.
• Free-Range Children:
  • All of the kids, but especially Joe and Biff, who are only 12 or 13 and yet often wander around town, in the woods, and/or at night on their own, and also frequently talk to strangers and get into trouble. It's somewhat understandable since the first half of the season takes place in summer while school isn't in session, and Frank, Callie, and Chet are at least of driving age. Even so, this still continues during the second half once the school day is done.
  • It also gets deconstructed more and more. Fenton Hardy isn't around to properly parent Frank and Joe because he's off elsewhere investigating their mom's murder, and they're frustrated at being left behind and attempt to do their own sleuthing rather than just sit around and do nothing. Aunt Trudy, their guardian while Fenton is away, eventually has to put her foot down after the boys end up in trouble a few too many times because of it. Joe and Biff wandering in the woods alone at night to investigate leads to both of them falling down a mine shaft, while no one else has any idea where they've gone.
• The Heavy: The Tall Man, the big assassin who pursues the Hardys several times to steal their piece of the Eye and is working on behalf of a mysterious woman (Anastasia Nabokov), acts as this for the first half of the season, until he's killed off by Stacy hitting him with her car.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Downplayed with JB Cox, who is a primarily self-motivated thief-for-hire throughout who nonetheless sympathizes with the Hardy Boys for their mother's murder:
  • He starts as an Anti-Hero who pays Joe and Biff to help him a couple of times, rescues Joe from the Tall Man, and tries to warn the boys off the case for their own safety.
  • He dabbles in being an Anti-Villain later as he uses Joe as leverage against Gloria (though he does promise not to actually hurt him), briefly goes on a Power High when he gets his hands on one of the pieces of the Eye and considers stealing and assembling them all, and steals Joe's piece for Gloria after she pays him to do so.
  • He ultimately goes back to being more of an Anti-Hero by the end: he gets beaten up when trying to steal the other pieces of the Eye and comes to the same conclusion as the Hardys of wanting nothing to do with it, and sincerely feels bad about betraying Joe by stealing his piece. To make up for this, JB gives the authorities a signed confession implicating Gloria and Collig, and sends Joe a letter at the end of the season promising that he can call in a favor with him if he ever needs anything stolen.
• Implacable Man: The Tall Man, once he realizes that the Hardys have the piece of the Eye that he stole and was later stolen from him, is relentless in pursuing them to get it back. He stalks and attacks Joe at the carnival and is only prevented from harming him by JB's intervention, survives being electrocuted by JB, tracks the Hardys to the abandoned factory and the Morton farm, escapes from lockup at the Bayport PD, follows and chases after Joe and Biff, and corners and attacks Frank and Joe once more, before he's finally killed off when Stacy hits him with her car.
• Intrafamilial Class Conflict: An in-laws version between the adult Hardys and Gloria Estabrook, who are connected via Fenton's and Laura's marriage. Laura, out of disgust for the Circle's evil, power-hungry ways, abandoned the life of privilege she was born into in favor of the middle-class lifestyle she has with her husband and sons at the series' outset. Fenton and especially Trudy are deeply resentful of how unkind Gloria has always been to them and their parents simply because the Hardys aren't wealthy and well-connected like she is, Joe half-jokingly asks if she's "the queen of Bridgeport", and Frank is unimpressed and uncomfortable by the elitist attitudes of the students and faculty at Rosegrave, which his own great-grandfather founded and where Gloria wants him to attend.
• Like Parent, Unlike Child: Multiple instances with the Estabrooks:
  • Played with in George's case. After forming the Circle of the Eye with Ahmed and Sergei, all three of them were equally shady and used the Eye to become rich, powerful, and highly influential, leading the world from the shadows, and Gloria inherited this hunger for power and was eager to succeed him. George, however, eventually had a change of heart after a major My God, What Have I Done? moment, and decided to break up the Circle and ensure the Eye could never be reassembled, even disinheriting Gloria as his heir because he recognized her greed and lust for power. Gloria developed no such scruples, and helped George's partners have him killed, taking over the Estabrook family and becoming just as bad as the rest of them.
  • Laura, unlike Gloria, was disgusted with the family legacy and wanted no part of it, feeling that No Man Should Have This Power just like her grandfather. She rejected the life Gloria wanted for her, refusing to attend the family School for Scheming and marrying someone Gloria didn't approve of, and became an investigative reporter dedicated to, among other things, exposing Gloria's and the Circle's secrets.
• Love Dodecahedron: Callie is dating Chet and Frank is dating Emma, but Frank and Callie are growing increasingly attracted to each other. Then Emma breaks up with Frank at the start of "Secrets and Lies", though Callie doesn't learn this until "In Plain Sight". Things get more complicated when new girl Stacy comes to town and develops a huge crush on Frank, and he seems to appreciate it and like her back. This makes Callie jealous (in addition to being genuinely suspicious of Stacy), which in turn makes Chet jealous, eventually resulting in Chet forcing Callie to recognize her feelings for Frank and breaking up with her, leaving things awkward between the three of them. Then Frank realizes that Callie was right and Stacy is hiding something, and confronts her at Wilt's, only for her to kiss him at one point to try to persuade him to work with her; Callie happens to see this and gets the wrong idea. Frank eventually rejects Stacy, but before he has a chance to properly work things out with Callie, Stacy kidnaps her to use as a Hostage for MacGuffin. It's only resolved at the end of the season finale when Callie and Frank finally become the Official Couple and share The Big Damn Kiss. Then there's Joe and Biff, and Trudy and Jesse, who seem to have their own budding relationships (a Toy Ship, in the former case) on the side, and Frank also meets his Happily Married mom's ex-boyfriend, who still carried a torch for her to the day she died.
• Matriarchy: The Circle of the Eye didn't start off this way, since the trio of people who originally found the Eye and used it to build their empires were male. In the present day, though, the current heads of all three families in the Circle are female.
  • For the Khan branch, Kanika apparently has a brother, Rupert's father, but she took over the Khans instead of him (with Rupert claiming she forced him out of the family) and still carries the Khan name, and also doesn't appear to have ever married.
  • With the Estabrooks, Gloria usurped leadership from the family after her father had a change of heart, and while we know she had some kind of love interest in the past whom she may or may not have married—Laura's father—Gloria kept her own surname regardless. The Hardys even jokingly refer to her as "The Queen of Bridgeport" in the premiere. That being said, she wants her grandson Frank to succeed her.
  • Downplayed with the Nabokovs: their latest heir, Stacy, is also a woman but still a teenager, having inherited due to her father's murder.
• Morality Pet:
  • Frank and Joe to their grandmother, Gloria. She straight-up admits to Trudy that she wasn't a good mother and wants to be a better grandmother, and though she doesn't always go about it in the best way, she sincerely loves her grandsons and doesn't want to see any harm come to them. As she's being arrested at the end of the season for killing Viktor Nabokov—soon after she and the Hardys have all learned that her butler Stefan killed Laura—she apologizes to both boys for everything that happened.
  • Joe becomes this to JB Cox, despite JB claiming to only be out for himself. When he sees the Tall Man steal a photo of Joe and realizes the former is going to hunt down the latter at the carnival, JB catches up to them Just in Time to stop the Tall Man from hurting or killing Joe and draws aggro to give him a chance to get away. He later warns Joe and Frank to stay away from the case so they don't get hurt, and when he takes Joe hostage against Gloria, insists that he'd never actually hurt him. When Gloria hires him to steal Joe's piece of the Eye and bring it to her, Frank reams him out over betraying Joe, and despite JB responding that he was doing the job he was hired to do, does seem to genuinely feel bad about it. The season ends with a voiceover of a note that he wrote to Joe, declaring that JB owes him a favor as repayment for stealing the Eye piece and tells Joe to contact him if he ever needs his assistance.
• Oh, Crap!: This is pretty much everyone's reaction to seeing the Tall Man.
• Only Sane Man: Of the different factions fighting over the pieces of the Eye—the three family leaders, JB, and the Hardy Boys—Joe is the only one who, after learning the truth of what it is, wants to destroy it from the start rather than trying to reassemble it. Even Frank briefly considers the idea of assembling it to see and speak with their murdered mom before eventually coming to the same conclusion as Joe.
• Parents as People:
  • Gloria did genuinely love Laura and is truly devastated by her death, and had used her considerable influence to keep her daughter safe throughout her life. She's also power-hungry, and had a very strained relationship with Laura due to the latter's disgust of the family legacy that Gloria perpetuates.
  • Fenton unquestionably loves his sons, and has them stay in Bridgeport with Trudy over the summer with their safety in mind while he goes off to investigate his wife's death and get closure for all of them. This also means that he's leaving behind his two boys, still freshly grieving for their mom, at a time when they really need their dad the most, to go on a dangerous mission that could easily get him killed and leave them orphaned altogether. When he returns to Bridgeport near the end of the season, is dismayed to discover that the boys have been getting into danger while he was gone, and asks Trudy why she allowed it to happen, she even points this out, asking him what else he expected to happen when he left his kids behind despite them needing answers just as much as he does.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Gloria Estabrook can hardly be called a good person, but she truly does love her family, wanting to be a good grandmother to the boys. Additionally, she's been tutoring Callie Shaw for quite some time to get high enough grades to be able to enter Rosegrave Prep, a prestigious prep school founded by her father George, and offers to sponsor her tuition since Callie and her dad could never afford it.
  • JB Cox is pretty blunt that he's not exactly an amazing guy and claims to be Only in It for the Money, but he's genuinely impressed with Joe's intelligence and takes a liking to him. Despite his fear of the Tall Man, who already tried to kill him once, when JB realizes he's going after Joe at the carnival, he follows them there for the sole purpose of protecting Joe from the Tall Man and risks his life fighting the latter so Joe can get away safely.
• Ship Tease:
  • Frank and Callie get steadily mounting heaps of it as the season goes on. Chet, Callie's boyfriend, notices, and is increasingly unhappy about it, eventually breaking up with Callie because he knows she'd rather be with Frank, even if she hasn't admitted it to herself yet.
  • Joe and Biff get several moments of this too, and it's hinted several times that Biff has a crush on Joe and he may reciprocate. It's a Toy Ship due to their young age.
  • Stacy purposely tries to invoke this with Frank, partly to make Callie jealous but more to get information from him, but Frank eventually catches on. There's still some genuine attraction between them, but Frank turns her down when he sees more of what she's really like.
  • There's also quite a bit between Trudy and Jesse; while it's more subtle than the other examples due to Hide Your Lesbians being in play (at least for this season), their season-long arc of becoming closer and confiding in each other certainly reads like a budding relationship.
• Three Lines, Some Waiting: Most episodes have Frank and Joe each pursuing separate avenues of investigation on the case, and the story jumps back and forth between the two of them; on the occasions when they're together, it jumps between them and other characters, sometimes including the villains. There's also Fenton's separate storyline of searching for Rupert, which does not appear in every episode.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Ern, an important supporting character in the first couple of episodes as the Sole Survivor of the Astghik (the ship that the Tall Man blew up), skips town with his girlfriend to escape from the Tall Man and never shows up again for the entire rest of the series.
  • Similarly, Paul McFarlane, the dean of Rosegrave Prep, gets some spotlight when Frank discovers that he had past ties to Laura and knows more of the secrets behind the school than he's letting on. Then he suddenly resigns his post and disappears, leaving only a brief note behind for Frank. He never makes another appearance and we never find out what happened to him (at least until the next season, which takes place six months later, long after this season's case has been solved).
• Working the Same Case:
  • The Hardy Boys and their father, Fenton, as often happens in the books, though here, it's not really any surprise, considering said case is Laura's murder. After Fenton leaves on his mission, the brothers also begin tackling the case from a totally different angle, and between father's and sons' respective investigations, manage to bring down the Circle of the Eye together.
  • That being said, the members of the Big Bad Ensemble who are behind their respective cases differ. Kanika is ultimately responsible for Rupert's kidnapping that Fenton looks into, Stacy is the one who hired the Tall Man who goes after the Hardys (especially Joe), Gloria turns out to have murdered Viktor (whose death is what brings Stacy to Bridgeport to start with), and Stefan is the person who actually killed Laura.
• Would Hurt a Child: The Tall Man when trying to get the piece of the Eye. He goes after Joe, whom he knows has the piece, several times, and some of the other kids as well, manhandling both Joe and Frank and even threatening them with a knife at one point.