Consider this: a woman finds out that her husband is a serial murderer and decides to confront him about his actions. She is aware that he might harm her eventually, so she preemptively switches out his weapon with a fake. Even so, when things escalate, she has to shoot him in self-defense and cover up the murder as a night-time robbery. The only problem is that a bystander witnesses these events and eventually tells the police the truth, implicating her in her husband’s murder weeks later.
While such a premise would have worked when executed carefully, “Fool Me Once” squanders this potential by firmly rooting us in Maya’s perspective. We follow her closely throughout the series and are even privy to her innermost thoughts, her latent traumas, and her dogged determination to solve the case. The issue, however, is that she is already aware of the truth, which makes her arc redundant and makes us question her narrative reliability throughout. The unreliable narrator/protagonist can be a brilliant device when done well, but in Maya’s case, it simply does not work. Surely, an intelligent ex-officer like her understands that delving into a case about her dead husband will only implicate her further and defeat the very purpose of her master plan? More importantly, while pursuing these leads, Maya unnecessarily endangers her daughter, Lily, who also gets neglected in the process.
As for the nanny footage that started it all, it was a deep fake of Joe, implanted deliberately by his mother to distress Maya enough to make her confess the truth. Apart from making very little sense, this complicates motivations for no good reason, as it involves too many factors that do not add up or pay off by the end.