Season 1, Episode 1:
Welcome to Your Life
Frank and Joe Hardy move to the small town of Bridgeport for the summer and set out to uncover the truth behind a recent family tragedy.This episode contains examples of:
- Awesomeness by Analysis: Within a few seconds of Gloria giving Frank his mother's childhood music box after the funeral, he finds the false bottom in it. Gloria approvingly compares his keen perception to Laura's.
- Big Brother Instinct: The first of many displays of how protective Frank tends to be of Joe. When Ern first grabs his little brother, Frank immediately shouts for him to get off him, and initially refuses to leave him to go get Gloria until Ern pulls out and starts waving around a knife. He then assures Joe that he'll be right back, and takes the first opportunity during the confrontation in the barn to pull his brother away from Ern.
- Character Death: Laura Hardy is killed off before the halfway point of the episode in a brutal car crash, becoming a Missing Mom to her two sons and The Lost Lenore to her husband.
- Debut Queue:
- The Hardy Boys' family. We meet their mother Laura right away and their father Fenton a minute later. After Laura's death, her mother Gloria Estabrook is introduced, and then the boys head to Bridgeport for the summer, where their Aunt Trudy makes her first appearance.
- Once the boys go into town to buy ice cream at Wilt's, they meet the four kids who later become their True Companions within the span of a minute: first Biff Hooper approaches them outside the store, then Callie Shaw notices them after they walk in and figures out who they are, Chet Morton comes up and introduces himself, and he also introduces Phil Cohen, who's busy with the arcade game behind them.
- Distressed Dude: While searching for Peppermint, Joe gets snatched by Ern, subjected to Hand Gagging, and held at knifepoint, then brought to Gloria's stables until Frank brings her there to talk. Ern doesn't really want to hurt him and is just shaken up by what happened on the Astghik (as Frank lampshades), and this is the only way he can think of to make Gloria talk to him and find out if it was on her orders. Joe gets away by kicking him in the shin as Stefan jumps him from the side, and Ern just flees the scene rather than fight back.
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- Gloria has a dog named Peppermint, but he gets out of the house and runs off into the woods—which leads to Joe going to look for him along with the other kids and getting abducted by Ern—and is never seen again. Maybe best not to think about that one too much....
- Joe sees a stuffed boar head on Gloria's wall in her home, and she comments, "That's the beast that got your Uncle Harry," sounding rather blasé about it. "Uncle Harry" is never mentioned again, and neither Gloria nor Laura are ever shown to have had siblings.
- Establishing Character Moment: Quite a few for the Hardy family:
- Frank is portrayed right off the bat at someone who thinks things through before taking action, as he plans and discusses with his brother the best way to win the video game they're playing, in contrast to the more impulsive Joe, who steals the control, jumps right in, and gets a game over, to Frank's exasperation. He also has a very close bond with his mom, who helps him practice for baseball, and despite his moodiness, has no problem being openly affectionate with those he's truly let in, frequently hugging her and engaging in PDA with his girlfriend.
- The boys' bickering dynamic is also shown while debating how to win the game, wrestling with each other over the controller, and calling each other "butthead". But it's also made pretty clear that Frank would never actually cause his brother any serious harm, promising his mom even as he moves to tussle with Joe in annoyance, "I won't hurt him."
- Joe gets quite a bit: showing that he likes to mess with his older brother, but can also be overconfident, during the aforementioned video game scene; portrayed to be street-smart but not interested in school by the fact that he failed math class and has to take summer school largely due to a lack of effort; and also proving that he doesn't take shit from other kids, acting defiant against some bullies and pissing them off further when they insult him, but wins over adults more easily, seen by a woman in the background grinning at his antics.
- The very first shot of Fenton as he gets dressed for work shows a newspaper clipping establishing him as a local hero, and we soon see him bust a criminal deal and slyly trick the crook into implicating himself, proving right from the get-go why he's a famous detective.
- Laura's very few scenes before she dies show her to be a very loving and supportive mother, playfully holding Frank back to give Joe a chance to beat the video game they're playing, and later helping Frank practice his pitching for his baseball games.
- Obnoxious In-Laws: Laura's mother, Gloria Estabrook, is implied to be this to her son-in-law Fenton and his younger sister Trudy, with both sides engaging in some Passive-Aggressive Kombat. This gets more focus as the season continues.
- Plot-Triggering Death: The premise of the whole series is Laura dying in a car crash early in this series premiere, and her family moving to Bridgeport and starting an investigation to figure out who killed her and why, as well as finishing what she started.
- Sole Survivor: After the crew of the Astghik pulls a small chest out of the sea, a seven-foot-tall man comes onboard to meet with the captain, only to start shooting everyone and steal the chest. Ern, who jumps into the ocean to escape, is the only survivor of the crew, as he himself tells Gloria. Unfortunately, this soon puts him in the killer's crosshairs.
- We Hardly Knew Ye: Laura gets less than ten minutes of screentime—enough to establish her as a supportive and loving mom—before her untimely demise.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Or dog, in this case. Gloria's dog, Peppermint, gets out of the house after Joe neglects to properly close the door behind him. The kids get distracted from searching for him by Ern taking Joe hostage, it's never stated if the dog was found or came back or not, and Peppermint is ultimately never seen or mentioned again in the whole series.
