Recap / The Hardy Boys 2020 Season 2

Episode titles:

1. A Disappearance
2. Conflicting Reports
3. The Missing Camera
4. A Clue on Film
5. Heading for Destruction
6. Hunting an Intruder
7. The Doctor's Orders
8. A Midnight Scare
9. Captured!
10. An Unexpected Return

This season contains examples of:

• Aborted Arc:
  • Most of the Sequel Hooks of the previous season get their proper follow-up here, with one exception: Stacy Nabokov does not appear again at all. A line of dialogue from Fenton about how the Nabokovs and Khans "closed ranks" within their own families implies that she, like Kanika Khan from the previous season, decided to just leave Bridgeport for good and rid herself of the Circle conspiracy altogether, at least for now. She ultimately does come back in Season 3, though.
  • Callie's plans to go to prep school, and trying to figure out why she was blacklisted from every prep school in the country and who spread rumors of her cheating on her entrance exam, serves as her main subplot for the first few episodes of the season, before it's almost entirely dropped in favor of other characters' arcs. We never find out who falsely reported her for cheating, or if the situation ever got resolved and she was able to get back into Woodson Academy.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: Brian Conrad in the Hardy Boys: Undercover Brothers books is Belinda's juvenile delinquent older brother, who is The Bully in school and has a particular hatred for Frank because of Belinda's crush on him. In this series, Brian is instead Belinda's father, and while he has some Boyfriend-Blocking Dad moments in regards to Chet (who is her Love Interest here instead of Frank), he's a far better and kinder person who is certainly not a bully. He has been involved in criminal activity in the past, but by accident, and turned whistleblower because his conscience got the better of him, and in the penultimate episode, he brings Chet with him to pull a Big Damn Heroes moment for the Hardys and JB.
• Adaptational Villainy: In the Hardy Boys Casefiles spinoff, Vanessa Bender is one of the True Companions and Joe's girlfriend for the latter half of the series. Here, she's an unstable teen who's behind a bombing at Wilt's Deli and helped kidnap Dennis.
• Aesop Amnesia:
  • Frank briefly considered using the Eye in the previous season to see and talk to Laura again, but Joe eventually got him to see that they were better off without it and he, too, decided to destroy it. As the season goes on and Frank falls deeper and deeper into its power to get "the thing he wants the most", said thing is revealed to be getting their mom back. To be fair, it's made pretty clear that the Eye is The Corruptor, so Frank having it inside him brought him back to a mindset he probably otherwise would have avoided.
  • Previously, Joe was one of the first people who wanted to destroy/get rid of the Eye, insisting that they didn't need it and could solve the case without it. But when he learns here that Frank has the entire Eye inside of him, his initial response is to consider this to be awesome and encourage him to try to figure out what his "superpowers" are, while Frank is far more cautious about using a power he doesn't understand. This is a bit mitigated, though, by that fact that their roles pretty quickly swap and Joe remembers exactly why he wanted to get rid of it in the first place, and once again returns steadfastly to this viewpoint when he sees how much danger the Eye is putting Frank in. Though he does secretly keep it at the end of the season, for as-yet-unexplained reasons....
  • Similarly, Frank noted to Callie during his Parting-Words Regret after Joe and Biff went missing in "No Getting Out" that his brother tends to do stupid things when Frank doesn't listen to him properly. Indeed, this once again happens several times in this season where he's too dismissive of Joe's concerns and feelings, the latter reacts impulsively in response, and Frank doesn't seem to see this coming and only finds out and gets involved after Joe is already in trouble or doing something dangerous.
• Ambiguous Syntax: At the start of the season, the Eye gives Frank a vision of his mother, Laura, having him play a video game to try to find "one very special" gem, but warns him, "Be careful, or you'll lose everything, like your brother here"—meaning Joe, who's silently standing next to them. Frank, and likely the audience, interpret the final part of her sentence to mean that Joe already played the game and lost (as in, "you'll lose everything like your brother here did"), and it doesn't get much focus. By the end of the season, it's clear in hindsight that what she really meant is "you'll lose everything, including your brother here;" Frank isn't careful enough and lets himself be manipulated by the Eye, which leads to him being trapped inside the Crystal while George steals his body, so he really has lost everything and everyone important to him, most notably Joe.
• And Then What?: Joe is often on the receiving end of this due to his tendency of not looking before he leaps.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: Inverted; Phil seems to see his older sister Tiffany this way, like when she teases him a bit about his crush on Biff, and they appear to bicker frequently. So it may be played straight for Tiff, who calls her younger brother silly.
• Artifact of Power: This season reveals that more of them besides the Eye exist in this world:
  • The Crystal, which George found when lightning struck the beach near his home^note (It's not made clear if this actually created the Crystal, or if lightning was striking the beach at that location because it was already buried there); he later had it sent after his faked death to Gloria, who hung it on the chandelier outside the study. It's stolen by the Shadow Man halfway through the season, and is eventually revealed to have been used in the Project Midnight tests on Rosegrave students; it acts as a "waystation" to store a person's consciousness, and the experiments attempted to transfer them into different bodies. The Shadow Man wants it because he believes it contains the mind of his twin brother, one of the victims of Project Midnight who was rendered catatonic when the tests failed, but the big twist of the season reveals that there is no sign of said brother in the realm of the Crystal, which instead contains the consciousness of George Estabrook himself, who manages to transfer his mind into Frank's body while leaving him trapped there instead.
  • Olivia tells Fenton at the end of the season that there are more relics out there. She's likely counting the Crystal as one of them, and another one or more appear to relate to several different scrolls that Fenton, Trudy, and JB have, and that George is apparently determined to get back.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: When Joe first learns about Frank having the Eye in him, he regards it the way you'd expect from a tween boy learning that his older brother just got superpowers: eagerly encouraging him to experiment and figure out what he can do, seeming excited to hear about his visions, and just generally regarding the whole thing as cool. It doesn't take Joe too long to become very wary of it, though, thanks to numerous different factors—seeing how much the Eye is corrupting Frank and changing his personality, how he's becoming over-reliant on it and dismissive of Joe's attempts to keep him in check, how the visions are causing him increasing amounts of physical pain, and how he becomes a Living MacGuffin for multiple bad guys because of it—and starts actively plotting behind Frank's back to get the Eye out of him for his own safety.
• Big Bad Ensemble: It eventually turns out that, like last season, multiple different parties are at play and responsible for different events throughout. Of the three major murders that occur this season, each one is committed by a different member of the ensemble.
  • Stratemeyer Global is actually a group run by Gloria even from prison, but some agents have gone rogue and decided to steal the Eye for themselves to sell to the highest bidder, targeting Frank and Joe after figuring out that they still have it. This group is led by Angela Todd, with Mack Malone acting as her partner/second-in-command until she betrays and kills him.
  • Everything that happens to Dennis, as well as the bombing at Wilt's and the death of Dr. Vivian Burelli, is done by the Shadow Man, someone who was wronged by Project Midnight's and Burelli's failed tests on Rosegrave students. His twin brother was a failed test subject who was rendered catatonic, and his ultimate goal is to transfer his brother's mind—which he believes is trapped inside the Crystal—into another body.
  • Olivia Kowalski turns out to be the main villain of Fenton's story arc; while she is also trying to bring down the last remnants of the Circle like he is, her methods are much more violent. She kills Paul McFarlane and ends up trying to frame Fenton for other murders that she committed, after lying to him about having information about Laura's death to set a trap for him.
• Call-Back: Biff brought up to Joe last season that she was adopted and that she learned things about her biological parents that she didn't like, but didn't elaborate on it any more since they had bigger issues to worry about. This is her main arc for the season, starting off with Joe trying to get her to tell him what she knows in his desperation for some kind of mystery to solve. It's soon revealed that her birth father is dead, while she continues to search for her birth mother.
• Cassandra Truth: As the season goes on and Joe sees what a Toxic Friend Influence the Eye is becoming to Frank, he repeatedly tries to dissuade him from continuing to use it, warning him that it's dangerous (especially now that they know Stratemeyer can track it) and pointing out that they didn't need it to solve their previous case. Frank doesn't listen well enough and keeps falling back on the Eye, and it ends up completely screwing him over, setting him up to get body-snatched by George and trapped inside the Crystal forever.
• Character Death: Four major ones: Paul McFarlane in "Heading for Destruction", Dr. Vivian Burelli and Mack Malone in "A Midnight Scare", and Gloria Estabrook in "An Unexpected Return".
• Character Focus: Though it was downplayed, Chet and especially Phil played a somewhat smaller role in solving the case in the first season compared to Callie and Biff. Both of them play much larger parts this season, with Chet getting a Love Interest in Belinda (who joins the True Companions), Phil implied to have growing feelings for Biff and helping her in her efforts to find her birth family, and both of them making numerous helpful and important discoveries in the investigation.
• Composite Character: A minor version with Belinda Conrad, who combines aspects of book-Belinda and her brother Brian (who is instead Belinda's father in this series). Brian of the books was The Bully and an actual criminal delinquent, while Belinda was the straight-arrow Nice Girl type. Here, Belinda has some "bad girl" traits like regularly getting detention, liking to go to places where she's not allowed to be (like the roof of a building), and outright states that she "lives for trouble", but is ultimately a Good Bad Girl, as she's still a good-hearted and heroic person and is loyal to her friends and loved ones.
• Continuity Nod: In the first season, when the True Companions were talking about school starting soon, Phil encouraged the others to join the AV Club. In this season, his involvement with the AV Club is the impetus of the whole plot, as his fellow member and rival in the club, Dennis Gilroy, becomes a Distressed Dude while trying to film footage of the Bridgeport Demon. Phil's membership with the Sea Cadets also comes back into play when he uses his nautical maps to pinpoint a set of coordinates that Frank found.
• The Corruptor: The Eye to Frank, now that its energy has transferred into him. At first, he recognizes that there are problems with relying on it too much, and tasks Joe with keeping him in check to make sure he doesn't do so. Gradually, though, he becomes more and more dependent on the Eye, feeling like he's completely lost without it (not unlike its original founders), and stops listening to Joe when the latter tries to check him. The visions gradually become more and more painful and cause Frank to act paranoid towards his True Companions, to the point that everyone does start conspiring to remove the Eye from him—not out of a lust for power as it suggests, but instead to save him from it.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Once Joe discovers Frank has "superpowers", he lightly smacks him in the back of the head at one point and states that, since Frank didn't predict this, seeing the future is not one of his abilities. However, it later turns out Frank is occasionally psychic, but only when his and Joe's lives are in danger.
• Episode Title Card: This season begins using them for each episode, and the next season follows suit.
• Evil Teacher: One member of the Big Bad Ensemble, the Shadow Man, turns out to be Adrian Munder, the programming and detention teacher and head of the AV Club at Bridgeport School. He's actually the most sympathetic member of the ensemble in terms of Freudian Excuse, but is still a textbook case of Love Makes You Evil who's gone to absolutely horrific methods to try to bring back his beloved twin.
• Five Stages of Grief: Joe is in the Acceptance stage when it comes to Laura's death, and has been for a long time now. Unfortunately, thanks to the Eye, Frank spends most of the season firmly in the Bargaining stage, wanting to use its power to see her again and essentially get her back. It takes a major fight with Joe to snap him out of it, just like when a milder version of the same fight happened in the first season.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: The Eye often communicates with Frank in its visions by taking the form of people who are related to him: most commonly as a younger version of his great-grandfather George Estabrook, but also occasionally as his deceased mom Laura, and even Joe a couple of times.
• Gambit Pileup: There are numerous different groups on their own sides who all clash with the Hardy Boys and friends, and sometimes with each other as well, throughout the season: JB, Stratemeyer Global, and the Shadow Man. And then there's everything happening with Fenton's case.
  • JB starts off being forced to spy on the brothers by Stratemeyer, but later escapes and works on other thefts for the rest of the season, sometimes working with the boys and sometimes against them. His new job and buyer become important in Season 3.
  • Rogue agents from Stratemeyer are trying to find the Eye and sell it to the highest bidder, and resort to kidnapping and threats of violence (including against the teenage Hardy Boys) to get it. Notably, they're so menacing and violent, and so clearly up to something in the middle of the woods, that the True Companions spend a good chunk of time believing that Stratemeyer is behind everything, and don't discover until later that someone else is responsible for the bombing at Wilt's and all that happens with Dennis.
  • This someone else—whom they nickname "the Shadow Man" based on his appearance in Frank's visions—pays two high school kids to kidnap Dennis for him and to plant a bomb at Wilt's so it will damage the security shop next door and deactivate the alarm at Gloria's house, allowing him to break in. His goal in doing so is to steal the Crystal from her chandelier, which he believes houses the soul of his twin brother, and he hopes to bring said brother back by transferring his mind into another body.
  • There's also Brian Conrad, who is Angela's and Mack's boss, but also secretly a Double Agent trying to bring all of Stratemeyer down.
  • Fenton Hardy and Olivia Kowalski are both working to take down the remnants of the Circle, but are very much not on the same side, since Olivia is actively killing these people and briefly abducts Fenton, while he wants to bring them to justice the proper way.
• Good Bad Girl: Belinda is a PG version. She's a regular in detention, encourages Chet to join her doing things that are harmless but technically not legal (like climbing up to the rooves of buildings they're not supposed to be on), and generally likes to walk a bit on the wild side, but doesn't do anything destructive or harmful or worse than the rest of her friends do (considering how many times the gang straight-up breaks into places), proves to be a loyal friend and competent member of the investigating team when she joins the True Companions, and is completely disgusted when she briefly believes her father to be a criminal before he reveals he's The Mole, and still calls him out on the unsavory things he did before he turned whistleblower.
• Helpful Hallucination: Frank receives many of these throughout the season, courtesy of the Eye. Notably, though, while they are helpful, they're in the form of codes that the boys must decipher. The finale reveals that the Eye had a specific agenda for providing these visions: setting Frank up so George could steal his body to resurrect himself.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • Joe discusses his status as this with a few other characters, particularly Lucy, outright admitting that he can be really pushy, aggressive, and insensitive while questioning suspects. However, he clarifies that this is only because he needs to get the truth to prevent people from getting hurt; he knows what it's like to lose someone and doesn't want anyone else to have to go through that too. It's also very clear that he cares a lot about his friends and family, and if he accidentally genuinely upsets them, does his best to make it right.
  • JB remains a primarily-self-motivated thief who's still willing to steal from the boys if they have something he's being paid to get, bugs their house for Stratemeyer Global, and gives the latter information about them, but he makes it clear that this is not personal; he only works for Stratemeyer for a time because they threaten his life, and immediately dissuades them from targeting the Hardys directly for the Eye and warns the brothers of the threat multiple times. He also has a Thou Shalt Not Kill rule, honors the deal he made with Joe, and insists that, whatever else he may be, he would never harm Joe.
• Keeping Secrets Sucks: Frank and Callie experience this firsthand; Frank spends the entire first half of the season concealing from everyone except Joe that he's absorbed the Eye's power and is seeing visions as a result, and Callie, for a bit, hides from him that she went to see Gloria in prison. This briefly drives a wedge between them mid-season before they make up and vow not to keep secrets from each other anymore, and this seems to be what prompts Frank to tell their friends about having the Eye in "Hunting an Intruder" while Joe wants to continue hiding it.
• Knight of Cerebus: Angela and Mack may get a few mildly humorous moments, but considering the latter is Obviously Evil and quick to pull out his knife for any reason while the former is genuinely The Sociopath and a Soft-Spoken Sadist, it's little wonder they're this. Much of their screentime consists of them capturing JB and/or the Hardys; holding them prisoner, interrogating them, and threatening to hurt, maim, or kill them for the Eye; or threatening other characters with hurting one or both of the Hardys. Angela also murders Mack as soon as he outlives his usefulness to her, and in one of the Eye's visions, is quick to shoot Joe when Frank struggles to give up its power.
• Living MacGuffin: Frank becomes this to multiple different members of the Big Bad Ensemble who discover that he's the Eye's new vessel.
• Love-Interest Traitor: Subverted. It looks like Angela is being set up as this for Brian, but it's later revealed that not only were they never actually dating in the first place, as this was a cover story that he gave Belinda and Chet when they saw them together, but he's well aware that she's the bad guy. In fact, he's her boss at Stratemeyer Global, though he's actually a Mole in Charge who's working to bring her down.
• The Main Characters Do Everything:
  • Downplayed for the Hardy Boys specifically; they are still the main detectives of the group who do the most investigating and deducing, but their True Companions play even more vital roles in bringing down the bad guys than they did last season. "Heading for Destruction" is a major example, since the boys spend most of it as Distressed Dudes, so their friends are the ones who figure out who the bombers are and where the bomb is hidden. What's more, Frank and Joe aren't even the ones who defeat Stratemeyer Global in the end; much of this is accomplished through infighting and having a Mole in Charge, but Belinda and Chet play the biggest role in bringing them down.
  • However, played entirely straight for the main cast as a whole, especially since the most competent member of the police force, Jesse Hooper, is hospitalized and out of commission for the whole second half of the season. Deputy Riley does help a little, but she and the rest of the force are mainly there to do the cleanup work of arresting the bad guys after the Hardys and friends have already stopped them.
• The Man Behind the Man: Subverted. Fenton tells his sons that Stefan wasn't acting alone when he killed Laura (despite the previous season implying that he was) and was following orders from someone else, because Olivia told him she has information about who ordered Laura's death. However, he eventually finds out she lied about it, making it ambiguous if this was the case or not, which isn't answered for sure until Season 3.
• Mayor Pain: Though Mayor Krassner isn't shown to be doing illegal things himself, he's a definite Slave to PR who's willing to suppress information that would make the town look bad from going public and cares far more about his reputation than actually seeing justice served. He's also a pretty Horrible Judge of Character who doesn't keep good track of what's happening in his town, considering how much crap Stratemeyer gets away with throughout the season while he defends their presence as "creating jobs" in Bridgeport.
• Morality Pet:
  • Frank assigns Joe the task of keeping him in check with his use of the Eye, and even as he becomes progressively more compromised by it and stops listening to him as much as he should, his Big Brother Instinct for Joe remains very intact. When Frank and Joe have a massive fight that results in a Kick the Morality Pet moment, Frank is so shaken and horrified by it that he immediately steps back from the edge of his sanity that the Eye has brought him to and finally agrees to return the Eye to the relic.
  • JB still primarily looks after number one and steals from the Hardys a few times, but Joe remains this for him as well. He noticeably tries to keep the Stratemeyer thugs who threaten him from directly going after the Hardy Boys when they're prepared to do so by quickly stating that they don't have the Eye on them and have stashed it elsewhere, and warns them multiple times that Stratemeyer out to get them. After Joe cashes in on the favor JB owes him, he shows up as soon as he gets the message and does his best to follow through on it (only bailing at the end when things go completely south, and apologizing to Joe before stealing the (actually-fake) relic from him). Most notably, when Frank briefly suspects him of being the Shadow Man and accuses him of trying to run down Joe with a car (among other things), JB takes particular offense and furiously states that he would never hurt Joe. It's obvious enough that even the villains notice it, since Angela remarks to Joe while holding the brothers captive, "I can see why JB likes you."
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Angela betrays her very capable Dragon Mack Malone to keep him from reporting to their boss that Frank has become the Eye's new host, and her killing Mack once she feels that he's outlived his usefulness ends up being her downfall. Much of the rogue Stratemeyer group's prior criminal activities were hard to prove, but this murder is what gets her arrested at the end of the season; between Chet and Belinda recording her Just Between You and Me confession and Brian Framing the Guilty Party by planting her gun (the murder weapon) at the scene of the crime, the authorities have more than enough evidence to indict her for it.
• No Honor Among Thieves: One of the major reasons Stratemeyer Global gets taken down by the end is that more and more major players go against each other. Despite Gloria being the leader of the whole company, Angela and her cronies are a rogue group going into business for themselves. Once Angela and Mack discover that Frank has the power of the Eye in him, Mack wants to report it to their boss, but Angela promptly betrays him and knocks him out to make a play for herself, keeps Mack prisoner in her motel bathroom, and later murders him. And then it turns out that said boss, Brian Conrad, has been a Mole in Charge at Stratemeyer all along, working as a whistleblower to bring the whole organization down, and pulls a Framing the Guilty Party on Angela to get her arrested at the end of the season.
• Official Couple: Chet and Belinda are implied to get a Relationship Upgrade midway through the season, which is confirmed by the end of it, and become the show's Beta Couple.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • Throughout the season, Frank has many visions from the Eye, some of which are legitimately Helpful Hallucinations while others are much more cryptic, confusing, or downright misleading. The nature of which ones are which become clearer after the Cruel Twist Ending of the season: some of the hallucinations related to Dennis and the Shadow Man are helpful because they allow the boys to progress in solving the mystery, but the misleading ones are meant to keep them from finding out certain things or lure them somewhere. Most notably, the vision of the Shadow Man attacking the school dance and taking Lucy, which Frank sees right as he's about to return the Eye's power to the relic, prevents him from doing so and brings Frank, Joe, and Chet to the dance, only for it to turn out to be totally false, with it having lured Frank there so he can be kidnapped by Munder to kick off George's and the Eye's plan of letting George steal his body. However, the visions of the rogue Stratemeyer operatives' attempts to hurt or capture him and Joe are helpful, because they want to steal the Eye from Frank to use for their own purposes, which would ruin George's plan if they succeed, so the Eye is actively trying to help Frank avoid this.
  • One that is only fully understood after watching Season 3: once Olivia has kidnapped Fenton and briefly leaves him alone in the car, she comes back with some kind of gold tube-shaped capsule before they have to flee the scene. This was her stealing the first of George's four codexes, which Gloria uses her video will to secretly tell viewers the locations of. More specifically, this is the one from George's "first apartment in Dixon City," while the codex that Olivia finds in the Season Finale before Fenton confronts her and confiscates both of them is the one from George's shipping warehouse.
• Ship Tease:
  • Belinda and Chet get huge amounts pretty much as soon as they meet, culminating in a Relationship Upgrade halfway through the season.
  • Very notably averted for Joe and Biff, who, in addition to being inseparable best friends, had quite a bit of this in the first season. This time around, though, Joe and Biff actually share far less one-on-one screentime together and have next-to-no teasing; in fact, each of them receives ship tease with someone else instead:
    • Joe has a crush on Lucy Wayne, Dennis Gilroy's girlfriend; once she reveals in "A Clue on Film" that she and Dennis actually broke up, she begins to return Joe's feelings, and they kiss at the school dance.
    • Biff, meanwhile, gets teased with Phil, although it's mostly one-sided on his part. A line of dialogue from Phil's sister Tiffany suggests that he's had a crush on her for a while, even though they had no romantic tension whatsoever in the first season.
• Sixth Ranger:
  • Belinda Conrad, the new girl at school, joins the main cast and pretty quickly graduates to the seventh member of the True Companions.
  • Lucy Wayne, Dennis's girlfriend (or actually ex-girlfriend) and Joe's crush; she's not part of the Hardy Boys' main friend group and doesn't know nearly as much about the case as the rest of them do, but does tag along to help a few different times during the season.
• The Sociopath: Angela Todd is the best example in the series. She comes across as witty and charming when she wants to, with big, bright smiles and a fairly even temper, but this facade hides a Soft-Spoken Sadist who has no qualms with ordering her subordinates to kill or horribly maim someone just for not giving her what she wants the minute she tells them to. She absolutely does not care how young or old that "someone" is; if she decides you're more useful to her dead, she'll kill you in a heartbeat with zero remorse, as seen with her own work partner Mack and with Joe in one of Frank's visions. And unlike every other near-example in the series, Angela truly doesn't care about anyone at all besides herself; despite her relentless pursuit of the Eye, she's Only in It for the Money she'll get from selling it to the highest bidder, no matter how evil they may be, and is not shown to have a single sincere bond with or fondness for another character at any point.
• Stable Time Loop: The Eye creates one by giving Frank a vision that causes him to physically appear in the past to George (when he was still old, but before he tried to leave the Circle), who can actually see him (unlike his other visions) and thus learn of Frank's future existence before he's even born at that point in time. Because George knows this, when he seemingly left Gloria and the Circle behind, he really put his consciousness into the Crystal (and thus didn't truly die) to wait for the Eye to bring Frank into it as well someday so he can steal his body for himself.
• String Theory: The Hardys once again make one of these for their new case, though they don't bother to conceal it this time since their investigation isn't a secret from their family.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Joe's impulsiveness and constant lack of planning for most of the things he does, which boils down to "come up with basic starting point for a plan, figure the rest out once we get there", is called out numerous times by most of his friends as being reckless and a bad idea, and it's pointed out that the majority of the time that this approach actually does succeed, it's mostly just luck.
• Touched by Vorlons: After Frank touched the Eye while it was reforging in the Season 1 finale, this season reveals that the Eye's energy transferred from the relic originally containing it into Frank himself, giving him visions when trying to communicate with him, which Frank is not able to control. Once the villains of the season realize this, he becomes a Living MacGuffin.
• Toxic Friend Influence: The Eye (by taking the form of a younger version of George Estabrook) acts as one for its "vessel", Frank, gradually making him more and more irrational, paranoid, and suspicious of his friends, and bringing him back to the mindset he was briefly in during Season 1 of wanting to use its power to see Laura. It gets to the point that everyone else in the group wants to get the Eye's power out of Frank, believing it's only going to keep getting worse and hurting him.
• Trash the Set: Subverted with Wilt's Deli. A large portion of the wall gets badly damaged from the bombing in "Heading for Destruction" and we get fewer scenes there after, but by the end of this season, which is only about a week later in-universe, it's completely back to normal.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Numerous examples from throughout the season that culminate in the Cruel Twist Ending of the Season Finale:
  • Joe notes in "A Clue on Film" that perhaps the reason Frank's having trouble controlling the Eye's visions is because he's reflexively resisting it, and suggests he try "letting it in." Frank increasingly doing just that causes him to fall further and further under the Eye's Toxic Friend Influence, driving a wedge between the brothers in the process, which sets him up to be kidnapped and body-snatched.
  • When Joe and Frank flee from Angela and Mack in "Hunting an Intruder" and run to the beach, it triggers another vision that essentially causes Frank to undergo Intangible Time Travel, and his great-grandfather George sees him in the past. As a result, George's grand plan to avoid being killed by his partners involves him loading his mind into the Crystal to wait until Frank appears there, so he can hijack his body.
  • Phil asking Mr. Munder for help decoding the writing on the scroll allows him—the Shadow Man—to learn its message along with the Hardy Gang: "The vessel is the power." From this, once he finds out about Frank having the Eye, Munder realizes Frank's the only person strong enough to handle the transfer from the Crystal, and abducts him to use his body as the new host for his brother's consciousness.
  • When Joe, Phil, and Lucy find Mr. Munder, their prime suspect, seemingly catatonic, Joe speaks quietly with Phil about how Frank could have the Eye and still be wrong. It turns out that the real Mr. Munder—the twin of the man they found catatonic—was listening in nearby from hiding, and this is how he discovers Frank has the Eye in him, and starts planning to kidnap him. Joe is distraught when he realizes this, though his friends attempt to reassure him that Munder would have found out anyway. And then the ending reveals Joe still hasn't gotten his brother back....
  • Mr. Munder kidnaps Frank with the intention of bringing his twin brother back by putting Aaron's mind into Frank's body. Frank's consciousness is successfully removed and stored in the Crystal...where the Eye reveals to him that Munder's plan was never going to work, and he was being used. This gives George the opportunity to take over Frank's body, unleashing him back into the world.
• Working the Same Case: Unusually for the Hardy Boys, this is averted. Frank, Joe, and Fenton assume their investigations are connected, but it turns out that the boys are chasing two different culprits—the Shadow Man (who's behind the bombing at Wilt's, the theft at Gloria's, and everything that happens with Dennis) and Stratemeyer Global (including rogue agents who want to steal the Eye and sell it)—and neither of them are directly related to Fenton's case, where Olivia Kowalski is the Big Bad who's trying to bring down the rest of the Circle in the most murder-y way possible.
• Would Hurt a Child: Stratemeyer Global has no problem kidnapping, hurting, torturing, or killing teenagers, as seen with the Hardys and friends.