The first season of Hello Tomorrow!, the Apple TV+ show about men selling lunar dreams and lies, comes to a close this week in high style.
Jack needs to tie up some loose ends, and he has no plan for what happens when his clients finally get to the moon. His son Joey must figure out who to honor, his mother or his father. Eddie has butterfingers and Shirley has to pay for it. And someone is, at long last, awake.
The season finale, entitled “What Could Be Better?,” is a great conclusion to a great season.
Hello Tomorrow! recap: ‘What Could Be Better?’
Season 1, episode 10: Though he got his father, crooked salesman Jack Billings (played by Billy Crudup), to admit he’s a fraud on a wire, Joey Shorter (Nicholas Podany) doesn’t have the heart to hand in the tape to his government contact, Lester Costopoulos (Matthew Maher).
He’s not the only one conflicted about Jack. His former salespeople, Shirley (Haneefah Wood) and Eddie (Hank Azaria), came crawling back after a disastrous showing at the poker table led to Eddie losing his hand to a loan shark Big Fred (W. Earl Brown). Jack buys Eddie a robotic hand and covers the debt, feeling guilty about everything.
Shirley only left Jack’s company Brightside because she found out he was lying about the moon property he was selling people. Specifically, that it existed at all. When the leg-breaking bookie comes back for his money, Eddie accidentally kills the guy with his new robotic arm. That complicates things.
As Jack’s new lover and financier Elle (Dagmara Dominczyk) prepares to split with the money, he goes over details with his dad’s old friend, Walt (Michael Paul Chan), who watched Jack’s dad die on a similar mission to the moon. The whole thing is making Jack and Walt very uncomfortable, though they can’t precisely articulate it.
Blastoff in 10 … 9 … 8 …
Joey comes to the launch site to beg Jack one last time not to send people to the moon. Lester shows up at the launch with a cease-and-desist order, and plans to arrest Jack, but Jack outfoxes him. He offers to go to the moon with the rest of the schlubs and then says that Joey’s going with him.
This takes the wind out of Lester’s sails, but not more than when Myrtle (Alison Pill) shows up and demands he confess his love to her. Oblivious, he does not do the gallant thing, and she leaves, furious with him. Lester makes it to the parking lot before he realizes he made a mistake and tries to run back to declare his love.
Shirley and Eddie show up with Big Fred’s big dead body to put it on the spaceship, and Herb (Dewshane Williams) and Betty (Susan Heyward), also oblivious, load up the corpse without question. They’re too busy big-timing Eddie to hear his stories about how the moon is not real.
Jack, terrified, quickly invents an excuse to get the passengers to disembark from the spacecraft, then traps them in an elevator. He’s going to keep them there, launch the rocket without them on board, promise them another launch later, and keep making money enough to actually build the houses on the moon these people all think they’re about to go live in.
So much for family history
Meanwhile, Joey’s mom, Nancy (Frances Eve), finally wakes up from her coma just in time for the launch. Jack’s mom, Barbara (Jacki Weaver), calls to tell Jack and Joey the news, and they give Elle the launch remote and head to the hospital. It turns out that on one of her trips to the hospital, Barbara left a picture of Jack on Nancy’s bedside table. So when Nancy wakes up, she wants to talk to him.
Nancy has lost her memory, at least temporarily, so she doesn’t remember much of her family history — including the fact that Jack abandoned her, or even much of her life with Joey.
Jack isn’t around when Lester goes up to the launch pad to tell Myrtle he loves her, hears the screaming from inside the elevator, frees the passengers, and then accompanies them onto the ship. Jack thinks he got out of swindling them, but now he has to live with having done it by accident.
We weren’t really that happy, were we?
Photo: Apple TV+
The thrill that Joey feels lying to the passengers — and then to his own mother — when explaining that before the accident, he, Jack, and Nancy were all living happily together is a great thing to witness. He sees now why his dad is the way he is. Because when you pull off something like that, you feel like God.
It’s very strong work from the Hello Tomorrow! writers, as well as from Crudup and Podany selling this bunch of crooks becoming a warped family. I’m so excited to see where this goes next season. The idea of a show where Matt Maher, Dewshane Williams, Michael Harney and W. Earl Brown are trapped on the moon together is too tantalizing for me not to openly wish for the show’s renewal.
If we get a second season of Hello Tomorrow!, we will see exciting things on the moon.
★★★★☆
Watch Hello Tomorrow! on Apple TV+
You can now watch the entire first season of Hello Tomorrow! on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
