Recap / The Hardy Boys 2020 Season 3

Episode titles:

1. A Strange Inheritance
2. A Vanishing Act
3. A Promise of Trouble
4. The Crash
5. Revelation
6. The Spider's Net
7. At the Old House
8. A Wild Ride

Warning: All spoilers for Seasons 1 and 2 are unmarked.

• Aborted Arc: Joe's growing romance with Lucy was one of his bigger subplots last season, but Lucy doesn't appear at all here, nor is she even mentioned or alluded to in any form, even after the case is solved and Joe has more time for a personal life.
• And Starring: "and Bailee Madison as Drew Darrow". Also an example of Evolving Credits; once Drew's real full name is revealed, this changes to say "and Bailee Madison as Drew Sparewell".
• Brainwashed and Crazy: This is what Fenton thinks happened to Laura, that she was still alive but was brainwashed by Sparewell. Ultimately, this is revealed to just be a simulation that Drew put him in.
• Character Death: The final season ups the ante more than ever with the most character deaths of any season, in addition to finding out about a Bus Crash and several characters being subjected to a functionally-similar Fate Worse than Death.
  • There are five proper deaths: Stacy Nabokov, Kanika Khan, Cadmus Quill, JB Cox, and Olivia Sparewell.
  • Anya Kowalsky plays with this: she's actually a Bus Crash example who passed away of natural causes in the six-month Time Skip between the first two seasons, but the characters and audience only learn about it in "The Spider's Net".
  • Four more characters have their minds/consciousnesses trapped "in limbo" for good, meaning they're technically alive but functionally dead for all intents and purposes. Aaron Munder is confirmed to have been trapped inside the Crystal for 10 years, and this becomes permanent when his brother Adrian and George Estabrook both join him there with no way for any of them to escape this time. Drew Sparewell, meanwhile, experiences a glitch when the DSA tries to bring her out of the simulation that leaves her stuck in between somewhere, no longer in it but not awake in the real world either. Drew's and Adrian's bodies are subsequently rendered catatonic Empty Shells like Aaron's already was, and in George's case, his original body is long dead and decayed.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • The Hardys and co. learned about two different victims of Project Midnight in the previous season: Patient A, who died on the spot and his death was covered up as an aneurysm, and Patient B, who was left catatonic. Patient B turned out to be Aaron Munder and was very important to the Shadow Man's motivations. In the second episode of this season, Patient A becomes relevant when Callie realizes from Drew's description that he was her older brother, Orrin, and avenging his death by bringing down Rosegrave is the real reason she came there. Subverted, though, when it turns out this was all a lie to give Drew an excuse to insert herself into the investigation, and she doesn't even have a brother.
  • Frank's flashback-vision of George first finding the Crystal on the beach back in "Hunting an Intruder" showed one of his employees there with him, identified by the subtitles as his chauffeur. This season, we learn this man's name (William Vogel), and he becomes plot-relevant.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Hurd Sparewell, owner of Sparewell Technology, is a textbook example, planning to use the Core for his own agenda to "change the world". Though this is actually a complete subversion, as while he's rather cold and withdrawn towards everyone, he's not actually evil; his daughters are the real culprits and are framing him.
• Disowned Parent: Played straight with Drew, who hates her abusive father Hurd Sparewell, doesn't consider him or her older sister Olivia family (hence using the alias "Drew Darrow"), and wants to bring Sparewell Technology down. While some of this does appear to be true, like Hurd having sent their chauffeur William (Drew's Only Friend) away and shipped her off to boarding school, it was actually in response to her manipulative, troubled behavior. In reality, Drew is the real mastermind of the operation, and she and Olivia are more than happy to frame their dad for their crimes.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Since JB was hired to steal only two scrolls, he speculates that some of the others racing to get them, such as Olivia, might not know there are actually four. In reality, she is working with the same group who hired him—Sparewell Technology—and at the time JB was hired, already had (or at least was about to get) two of the scrolls herself, the ones that Fenton later confiscated and had Trudy hide, meaning that Sparewell only needed JB to find the remaining two.
• Evil Counterpart: The Sparewell Girls are the evil Sibling Team counterpart to the Hardy Boys. While they're also very intelligent (Drew in particular being even more of a Teen Genius than either of them) and supposedly close, too—according to Hurd, Olivia was the only one who ever tried to understand Drew, and was in turn the only person Drew considered to be worth her time—the differences between the two pairs of siblings is what causes the sisters' relationship to fall apart. While older brother Frank always has his younger brother Joe's back and is incredibly protective of him, older sister Olivia apparently (at least according to Drew's accusations) didn't stick up for her when their father sent Drew's Only Friend William away and shipped her off to boarding school; and while Joe puts his life and mind at risk just to rescue Frank and bring him back, and they ultimately talk out and work through any issues they have, Drew lets her resentment fester and eventually turns on and murders her own sister, refusing to listen when Olivia tries to reason with her.
• Evil Redhead: Double subverted with Olivia. After she was the Big Bad of Fenton's storyline in the previous season, killing members of the Circle and framing him for it, it's apparently subverted at the start of the season when she drops the Undercover Cop Reveal that she was a DSA agent the whole time. But then it's later shown that this was a lie, as was her claim that she's Olivia Kowalsky, Anya's daughter; Anya never had kids, her true name is Olivia Sparewell, and she's The Dragon to the Big Bad.
• Evil vs. Evil: Olivia's rampage against remnants of the Circle in the previous season was already this, but when she was believed to be Anya's daughter taking revenge for her family, it at least painted her as the Lesser of Two Evils. But with the reveal here that her name is actually Olivia Sparewell, it becomes a more clear-cut case, especially as the Circle vs. Sparewell feud continues into this season. Both sides want the relics for very different reasons that are still malevolent in either case, and both groups are more than willing to commit murder to get what they want, including of the Hardys and their friends.
• Faking the Dead:
  • George did this by letting others think he was fleeing to his private island on his plane, only to give the pilot the idol to take there without him, then sabotage the plane so it went down, the piece of the Eye was lost, and everyone believed he died in the crash. Then he had William help him upload his brain into the Crystal to wait it out until Frank arrives two decades later.
  • Most of the season makes it look like Laura was a case of Death Faked for You: that Sparewell Technology actually captured her, faked her death in the car crash, and put a microchip in her brain to make her their Brainwashed and Crazy assassin. But "At the Old House" finally subverts it with the reveal that all of Fenton's sightings of her occurred while he was trapped in Drew's Lotus-Eater Machine all season, the photo of her that's shown to the boys is likewise a fake, and Laura truly is dead.
• Foreshadowing: Mountains of it once again, including Five-Second Foreshadowing, found on its own page.
• Friend on the Force: Agent Driscoll at first seems like something of a government pencil-pusher and overly-straight-laced By-the-Book Cop, but he ultimately grows into this role, providing the Hardy Gang some vital information for the case, letting Chet and Belinda go through his files on Olivia because it also gives him some extra sets of eyes on them, and even ends up Taking the Bullet to protect them from Olivia (though luckily for him, unlike JB, he doesn't die from it).
• Halfway Plot Switch: The first three episodes of the season are all about the drama of Frank's body having been hijacked by George, with Joe and their friends figuring this out and trying to find a way to bring Frank back. Once they succeed at this and defeat George by the end of "A Promise of Trouble", the remaining five episodes instead focus on the boys bringing down Sparewell Technology, the bad guys who get the final relic, the Core, and plan to use it for their own ends, as well as finding out what Sparewell actually knows about Laura.
• Hidden Villain: Despite the beginning of the season heavily setting up George Estabrook ascending to become the final Big Bad after previously being revealed as the Greater-Scope Villain of the series, he turns out to be a Disc-One Final Boss. Then the new bad guy appears to be Hurd Sparewell, the head of Sparewell Technology, whom Drew claims is an abusive father who's trying to use the Core for his own purposes. It's not until late "The Spider's Net" that they discover the real ringleader of the Sparewell villains is Drew herself, with Olivia, her older sister, as The Dragon.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: The Circle of the Eye, as a whole, finally gets its proper comeuppance for good.
  • The innermost ring of the Circle is permanently dissolved, as all of its would-be leaders (Gloria and George Estabrook; Stacy, Viktor, and Sergei Nabokov; and Kanika and Ahmed Khan) are dead (or might as well be) by the halfway point of the season. The only surviving members of their bloodlines—the Hardy Boys and Rupert Khan—have no interest in carrying on the Circle's legacy, and have in fact actively worked to put an end to it.
  • Hammered home even harder in the Series Finale, when Callie takes advantage of the advance of the internet to share Drew's intel about all of the Circle's remaining secrets online with the world, ensuring that the lesser rings of the Circle will be exposed and brought down soon enough.
• Make Way for the New Villains: The various leaders of the Circle of the Eye were the central bad guys of the first season, and the remnants of the organization and people who were wronged by their actions were the main antagonists of Season 2. By three episodes into this season, all of the still-surviving antagonists from the original three Circle families—George and Gloria Estabrook, Kanika Khan, and Stacy Nabokov—have been killed off (or close enough), and the final villains of the series are Sparewell Technology, who're not related to the Circle, and are in fact their rivals in trying to collect and make use of the relics.
• Morality Pet:
  • Downplayed: George truly did love his daughter Gloria, and she's the only person he seems to have ever genuinely cared about at all. He planned for her to be the only person alive to know he faked his death and intended to resurrect himself one day, and is shown crying before heading to her funeral. That being said, he had no problem with manipulating her and using her strong desire for his approval to his own advantage, didn't trust even her with everything he did, and didn't plan to let her have access to the actual magic of the relics.
  • Joe for JB as always, and more clearly Frank now too. JB insists to Joe when they meet again that he only stole the relic from him during their previous heist to Draw Aggro from Angela and keep bad people from coming after and potentially killing Joe to get it, and we never see anything that implies otherwise. And when it becomes clear that his buyer for the scrolls is planning to target the Hardy Boys, JB immediately threatens to burn the map if they're put into any danger and tries to warn them that his client knows who they are. He also hides them in his safe room when Quill and his men come calling, and once again draws aggro at the quarry site to lead the bad guys away from the boys and their friends. He outright tells Joe why he likes him and that he truly wants the best for him, and ends up Taking the Bullet and dying while saving Joe's and Frank's lives from the woman in the hooded coat.
• Murder in the Family: Though George Estabrook claims he didn't want to have to do it, he ultimately has no qualms about trying to murder his own great-grandson Joe—the younger brother of the person whom he body-snatched—once George realizes He Knows Too Much. He also seems perfectly unbothered to leave his other great-grandson Frank to A Fate Worse Than Death by leaving him trapped in the Crystal forever so he can use his body, and once George is sent back there again along with Joe, plans to make sure neither of the boys can ever leave.
• Never Trust a Trailer:
  • The trailer for the season plays up George Estabrook heavily, hinting that he'll be the show's final Big Bad, but he ends up being a Disc-One Final Boss who's defeated for good in only the third episode, with the real villains being a completely different group.
  • However, the use of this trope also allows the season to completely avoid Trailers Always Spoil; the trailer and all promotions for the season advertise Drew Darrow as being a "fun but frustrating" new ally to the Hardys and heavily hint that she'll be the show's incarnation of Nancy Drew, only for her to turn out to be a Big Bad Friend (whose real name is "Drew Sparewell", not Nancy Drew).
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Interestingly downplayed for George.
  • Despite being a chronologically-hundred-year-old white man who lived in the early and mid 1900's, he doesn't make overtly racist remarks about the Hardys' friends, most of whom are people of color. He also gives no indication that he's bothered by Trudy's and Jessie's interracial same-sex relationship, which would have been incredibly taboo in his heyday. Still, he does show prejudice against non-nuclear families by assuming that Belinda's and Biff's one-parent households, which had more stigma around them during the prime of his life, must be "broken homes", prompting Belinda to snap at him that it's not "19-dickity" anymore.
  • However, there is also some underlying sexism in his assumption that Callie is only helping her friends stop him out of desperate love for and heartbreak over Frank, as opposed to sincerely wanting to save him and stopping George from hurting anybody else ever again.
• Red Herring:
  • The season premiere, which reveals that Laura is seemingly still alive, also hints that Fenton's best friend and former partner Sam may have been involved in faking her death and covering it up; Fenton's not totally convinced, but gets pretty suspicious about it. However, the person who sows this mistrust is Olivia, who's later confirmed to indeed be evil and not a DSA agent, and then the penultimate episode shows that all of this occurred inside a simulation that Fenton has been trapped in since before the start of the season, and Laura truly is dead after all. Sam is indeed the loyal friend he's always seemed to be, and the denouement of the series finale has him bringing Fenton a new case, which he gives to the boys instead.
  • Practically everything about Drew Darrow's portrayal in the trailers for the season and the first few episodes are meant to make the viewer believe that she will be revealed as Nancy Drew: she's from River Heights, and has contacts at the newspaper's office; her surname is indicated to be fake, but "Drew" is not; she's likewise a nosy, snooping teenager who wants to expose Rosegrave's corruption like the True Companions do; and she's shown to be just as snarky as the Hardys and puts Joe in his place at one point when he's rude to her. All of this is a deliberate mislead to hide the fact that she's the Hidden Villain and Big Bad Friend of the season; the fake personality she uses while pretending to be friends with the Hardy Gang is likely inspired by Nancy, but her real name is Drew Sparewell, and she's an original character.
  • The person who blows up the Chamber of the Eye and murders Cadmus Quill and JB Cox (among others) is an unknown woman in a dark coat with the hood pulled low. Since the boys see a recent picture of Laura Hardy looking like this, and the audience sees her this way a few times, the conclusion seems to be that Laura is the culprit, still alive but Brainwashed and Crazy. However, they later learn that Laura wasn't even real, only existing inside Fenton's and later his sons' simulation; Olivia was the woman in the coat all along who killed Quill and JB (with Drew occasionally swapping in for her), and the picture of Laura was faked.
• Rewatch Bonus: Considering the huge twist with Fenton's entire storyline this season that's revealed near the end, there's a lot of this to go around.
  • Pretty much everything Olivia says to the Hardys in "The Crash" while pretending to be a DSA agent comes across as Trouble Entendre knowing that she and Drew currently have Fenton in captivity and inside their Lotus-Eater Machine. She offers to take the boys to their dad (and implicitly, their mom) in Dixon City and states, "After everything you've done to secure the Energy Core, reuniting the Hardy family is the least I can do." She's planning to "reunite" them by putting the boys into the simulation with Fenton too, which later happens after she and Drew kidnap them.
• Sequel Non-Entity: A few significant recurring Bridgeport characters who were introduced in Season 2 do not reappear again here.
  • Deputy Riley, Mayor Krassner, and Dennis Gilroy. This is justified by the fact that Dennis's case was solved in S2 and he doesn't have any more plot significance, and unlike in the previous seasons, the majority of this one takes place outside of Bridgeport, in or near Dixon City instead, so there's naturally not as much reason for them to be around.
  • Though Lucy Wayne also no longer has a role left in the plot, she and Joe had a budding romance throughout the second season. But not only does she never appear in S3, she isn't even mentioned or referenced in any way. Likely because Joe has other, more pressing issues to deal with.
• Sibling Team: Frank and Joe are always this, of course, but it gets highlighted all the more during this season:
  • The fact that George took over the body of someone who has one of these (and a very close bond) with his younger brother is something that he predicts will be a problem from the get-go. He's correct; despite George's attempt to play along and build this with Joe so he can be more believable as "Frank" (and also take advantage of his "brother"'s intelligence for his own ends), the fact that he cares only for himself and has no genuine love for Joe doesn't take long to leak through. Once he abandons him during the museum heist less than a week after taking over Frank's body, the utter lack of any kind of Big Brother Instinct lets Joe easily figure out from there that "Frank" isn't really his brother, and he and his friends together capture George.
  • Notably, once Joe successfully rescues Frank from the Crystal and restores him back to his body, the two of them never split up again for the rest of the season and share every single scene together (or, at least, every "real" one, since they do have separate scenes a couple of times when they're in the simulation), further emphasizing this.
  • The Sparewell sisters are this, too, as well as Evil Counterparts to the Hardy brothers. Younger sister Drew is the Hidden Big Bad, and older sister Olivia is The Dragon. Unlike the Hardys, though, they're a far less stable one, and Drew eventually pulls an I Can Rule Alone, turning on and killing her sister.
• Sixth Ranger: Drew several times during the season, especially during the Sparewell heist for the Core. But while the marketing for the season implies that she'll graduate from this to become the latest member of the True Companions like Belinda did prior, Drew's actually a Big Bad Friend to them, and uses the heist as a way to capture the boys.
• Smug Snake: George Estabrook, full-stop, both when using Frank's body and (more subtly) as himself. He tries to get under all the True Companions' skins with cruel insults and Breaking Speeches, and mockingly tells them many times that they'll fail in their efforts to bring Frank back. But he's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, relying so much on the visions the Eye has shown him that he's overconfident he can't fail, making it all the more satisfying when the boys outsmart him. After decades of planning to house his consciousness in the Crystal until he can steal Frank's body for himself, including spending 20 years waiting in there, he gets all of about a week in said body before his plans are thwarted and he's removed from it and trapped in the Crystal again, this time locked up more tightly and with no escape plan.
• Tap on the Head: Like in the source material, several characters smack someone else in the back of the head to knock them out throughout the season, and it doesn't cause any lasting damage, such as Joe beaning George with the Eye relic, JB pistol-whipping Quill, and Callie hitting Drew with a skull.
• Undercover Cop Reveal: Olivia Kowalsky claims to be an undercover agent with the DSA, the same organization that Brian Conrad works for. Though it's later revealed that not only is this a lie, but she's not actually Anya Kowalsky's daughter either, as Anya never even had children.
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Gal: George explicitly states that Gloria was desperate for his approval, which lines up with how she's been portrayed so far in regards to George, and he exploited this for his own gain on many occasions. In fact, George is so confident of this that he feels certain Gloria would have followed all his instructions for her to the letter, and doesn't anticipate that, unlike him, she's a Benevolent Boss with enough distaste for cold-blooded betrayal and murder of her own subordinates that she chose not to kill William as he ordered and just fire him with severance pay instead.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • George attempts to murder the 13-year-old Joe—his own great-grandson, and the younger brother of the person he's pretending to be—when the latter figures out his identity, first attempting to shoot him and then stab him with a sword. It's also shown that he forcibly trapped Aaron, another teenage boy, deep inside the Crystal realm to prevent him from escaping, and left Frank stranded in there too.
  • Drew, Olivia, and their posse also have no issue with killing any of the members of the gang, and aim to put everyone in the world, including all of its children, into a simulation.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: "A Promise of Trouble" ends with Drew and Donald being knocked out, hit hard enough that they both have blood on their heads, and Drew's custom-made computer being stolen. With The Reveal that Drew is actually the Big Bad, it's clear in hindsight that the woman in the black coat who assaulted them and "stole" her computer was her sister Olivia, The Dragon, most likely to throw the gang off the trail, further trick them into thinking Laura is involved, and stop Donald's attempt to blackmail Drew with her true identity.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In the backstory, George had William Vogel, his loyal chauffeur, kill the three doctors who knew about Project Midnight once they'd done everything he needed for it to succeed, and planned for his daughter Gloria to do this to Vogel, too, after he finished driving her to where she could hide the codexes. However, Gloria, not the type to needlessly murder someone in cold blood, just paid William off and sent him away instead.