Anna Pigeon Season 1 Episode 8 ended on a major cliffhanger after Jesse was hunted and shot while testing the toxic river water.

The penultimate episode, Anna Pigeon Season 1 Episode 9, wasted no time addressing the shooting, though it didn’t pan out the way I expected it to.

I assumed Jesse’s shooting would tie into the nefarious moves of Jeremiah Paulson, who’s been teased as this season’s villain and Anna’s nemesis, though not much has come of it aside from the whole Bethany thing, which has been pushed to the back burner for now! 

When the episode confirmed that he’s been polluting the water for his developments, it naturally made sense to connect Jesse’s shooting to Jeremiah; however, the series took a different route. 

Instead, the person responsible for shooting Jesse was connected to his past—a past we were learning about in real time alongside Anna. 

Jesse’s shooting made it abundantly clear that Anna doesn’t know much about him, which makes her decision to not move in with him pretty logical. How can you move in with someone you don’t know anything about? 

It also proves that you don’t really have to know someone well to develop feelings for them, though Anna’s affection for Jesse remains very surface-level, which doesn’t bode well for them in the future. Jesse’s the guy who is helping Anna get over her husband before committing to someone she sees a future with—but I don’t think he’s the future. 

Digging into his past had potential, but it mostly fell pretty flat, as we ended up right back at square one. 

Upon getting shot, Jesse made his way to Anna’s place to get stitched up because going to the hospital wasn’t an option. He claimed it was because he didn’t have health insurance, but once his health began to decline and his wound became infected, we learned it was because there was a warrant out for his arrest. 

A bad boy?! Sort of, kind of. 

It explains why Jesse chose to abandon his geological degree and took up bartending—choosing to live under the radar. He also changed his name, a revelation that took Anna by surprise, along with the fact that he has a whole ex-girlfriend that she’s never heard about before.

Meeting “the other woman” forced Anna to put her defenses up—and the jealousy began to peek through—proving that yeah, despite her efforts to brush off the relationship, Anna does care about him.

She then made it her mission to get to the bottom of what happened to Jesse—who shot him?

Her sister, Molly, just so happened to be in town, so she got wrapped up in the case, against her will, as Anna turned over every leaf to find out the truth. Part of it had to do with her affection for Jesse, but mostly, she just can’t resist a good case. 

Again, instead of the trail leading back to Jeremiah, it led to a man who worked at the same company as Jesse’s ex. When he submitted the river samples for testing, he put a target on his back with a man who wanted revenge, blaming Jesse for his father’s death. 

In short, the man and his brother thought that Jesse was responsible for shutting off valves that led to an explosion that killed his father, though, as Jesse later revealed, he would never do such a thing, and it was actually his corrupt boss who did it on purpose to collect the insurance money. 

I’ll be honest, the storyline didn’t really change anything about Jesse, nor did it give us much to work with. He’s still just Jesse.

And despite how much he clearly cares for her, I still don’t think he’s good for Anna. They make sense as friends with benefits, but that’s kind of the extent of their dynamic.

He doesn’t challenge her or add anything meaningful to her life, aside from pushing her to the realization that she needs to let someone in eventually.

The fact that he was simply eager to go back to how things were before he asked her to move in proves to me that he’s not the man she needs right now, as he’ll let her dictate their relationship in a way that feels comfortable for her simply so he can be with her. 

Again, Jesse’s shooting would’ve been more impactful if it connected to the shady dealings of Jeremiah, because it makes sense that he’d want to stop someone from investigating the toxic runoff that his development is responsible for. 

However, I did find it interesting that Jeremiah and Molly connected on a romantic level because, honestly, that’s probably the worst possible outcome for Anna. It seems as though Jeremiah had no idea he was flirting it up with Anna’s sister, though you never know with that man—he could’ve been playing that to his advantage, as Molly did open up about her fractured relationship with Anna. 

Anna’s frustrations upon finding out about Molly’s chat with Jeremiah were valid, but it wasn’t fair to hold it against Molly, who had absolutely no idea that Anna despised that man or that he had it out for her. Anna hasn’t communicated any of that to Molly, so she wasn’t the wiser.  That’s solely Anna’s fault for not giving her a heads-up. 

Molly and Anna are proof that siblings fight hard and love even harder, and it was nice to see the two of them finally share a screen. She may not have had good parents growing up, but at least someone cares about what’s going on with Anna in this national park, other than the people she’s met while working here. 

It would be great for Molly to stay a while, especially as it’s clear that while Anna can take care of herself and has people who look out for her, the park presents plenty of dangers, too.

And while we didn’t get a lot of movement on the Zach murder, Frederick is on the case. Like Anna, I have full confidence in him to figure out the truth.

He may be mixing business and pleasure, but he’s also not forced to look into Zach’s case—he simply wants to give Anna closure. And yes, part of that probably has to do with the fact that without closure, Anna still blames herself, which means she can’t officially move on with him… or anyone. 

It’s not entirely selfish on Frederick’s part—he does want this for her—but there are elements of it that benefit him as well.

Anna may not like Frederick more once he solves the mystery, but at least she’ll have answers that allow her to look forward instead of in the rearview. 

At this point, they’ve pieced together that whoever left behind the red coat likely saw something that could move the case forward, and likely left wearing Zach’s coat that evening. But who was it?

Was Molly lying about Anna’s alibi?

Is there something more going on with Zach’s death than we’ve been led to believe? Will Frederick discover that Anna played a larger role in Zach’s death? What did you think of the episode as we near the season 1 finale?

Anna Pigeon Season 1 Episode 5 delivers its most high-stakes episode when Anna wakes up trapped in a cave with no memory of what happened.

The episode shifts from an episodic format to something it hasn’t done before—well, in its first handful of episodes, at least—while breaking it up into a two-parter, leaving audiences on the edge of their seats as they try to piece together what happened to Anna and how she ended up in such a dire situation. 

The audience is purposefully kept in the dark alongside Anna, locked into her perspective and feeling the same disorientation and confusion that she feels.

Experiencing the story in real time with the character means that we’re finding everything out at the same time she is, through her flashbacks, which only amplifies the suspense.

Initially, Anna thinks that falling into the cave was an accident, especially as she experiences memory loss from a concussion. 

However, when someone appears at the top of the cave and throws her a sandwich, it’s evident that this wasn’t an accident—she was intentionally pushed.  

But why?

Anna bends and breaks her mind to find an answer to that question, while also trying to piece together who could have it out for her. 

And from the little we’ve seen on this show, she’s extremely good at making enemies, with one particular one coming to mind—the show’s established villain, Jeremiah. 

We know he’s crossed paths with Anna and even had a tense confrontation, but the rest of what we’ve seen from him and his motivations has been limited. 

And as Anna begins to get flashbacks cluing her into the events that transpired before her fall, it isn’t immediately clear how or why Jeremiah would be involved. 

It actually feels like misdirection on purpose, though it becomes increasingly more probable that whoever was involved had access to Anna’s personal life. 

As bits and pieces unravel, we learn that she was pushed in after witnessing a man climbing out of the cave using a ladder. And before that, she had an encounter with a woman who twisted her ankle, whom she later finds buried in the cave.

It seems as though Anna crossed the wrong person, with the suspect believing that she’d witnessed the murder.

However, Anna’s account of events is also hard to trust, as she’s going in and out of lucidity after drinking water that was drugged in a canteen left behind by the suspect. Not to mention she’s wrestling with her own subconscious, as she sees Zach in the cave, who goes from being a helpful hallucination—telling her it’s okay to remember the bad things—to eventually becoming a dangerous one that blames her for his death. In flashbacks, we see that Anna was so drunk the night of his murder she didn’t even realize he was dead next to her when she went to bed.

Obviously, these are emotions that Anna hasn’t worked through before, but she does get a moment of clarity here too. After Zach’s death, all she wanted to do was “disappear,” hence her decision to move into the woods and become a park ranger, but coming this close to death—without knowing whether anyone was even looking for her as she pushed them all away—made her realize that’s far from the truth. She doesn’t want to disappear; she wants to live. 

And thankfully, Anna is resourceful. She may have been a stage manager at one point, but honestly, her line about embracing new hobbies following a husband’s murder was hilarious. 

And those stage manager instincts actually came in handy, as she, in her delusional, dehydrated and concussed state, set a trap for the person who trapped her. 

She knew that the killer would come down if he didn’t see her, thinking that she’d passed out somewhere, which allowed her to ambush him from the shadows, knock him out, and use the ladder to climb to freedom—trapping him in the process. 

It worked, too!

The episode’s strength was fully tapping into Anna, as audiences got to know her on a primal level—stripped of any external factors as she was forced to rely solely on herself and her instincts to survive.

However, that’s also the show’s biggest flaw. Anna is the only compelling draw, but a good lead only goes so far without an engaging supporting cast.

We’re rooting for Anna, but it’s hard to root for or really care about anyone else in her circle. 

Part of that is because she’s pushed them all away as a lone wolf—which she deeply regrets now that she’s in this predicament, as she thinks no one is coming to look for her—but the other half is that they are all largely forgettable. 

There’s no chemistry between her and Jesse, and I can’t even get invested in their romance because I see the writing on the wall for her and Frederick.

Zoey is quirky and funny, but she doesn’t add much to the series, while Geoff and Manny are just there. 

We barely scratched the surface of these characters’ backstories across five episodes, which also means that if Anna has somehow stumbled into a larger conspiracy, it could be any of them, yet we wouldn’t know because we don’t know what their motivations would even be.

At the very least, Jesse and Zoey both knew Anna enough to know that while she keeps a wall up, she wouldn’t just leave and move back to New York without saying goodbye. 

So, they pressed for a search party, realizing that someone staged her disappearance to look intentional, which makes it more personal and targeted than Ana simply seeing someone doing something bad in the woods and getting caught in the crosshairs.

Anna and Geoff got into a big fight, but someone knew that she’d be out of work for a week, so no one would question why she wasn’t showing up to work.

Clearly, Anna learned nothing from last week’s episode (where she found herself stuck with another murderer without any backup). Like, girl, please check in and give people your location.

And while Anna’s good at making enemies and putting a target on her back, who would go out of their way to make Anna disappear? As I said, we don’t know any of the rangers or even Jesse well enough to establish a motive, and if it was one of them, it wouldn’t even be that surprising.

Manny’s wife looked extremely shady and uncomfortable, almost guilty, in a handful of scenes when talking about Anna. Manny mentioned Bethany got a new job, too, so could she have had something to do with it? From the little we know, she’s someone who wants money to have a child, so maybe she took the job for a payout. Is it possible Bethany’s new job is with Jeremiah, and he got his claws into what happened? 

See how shady she looks?! Photo Credit: Michelle Faye/USA Network © VERSANT MEDIA 2025. All Rights Reserved

Or is it someone connected to Zach’s murder coming to finish the job? Anna seems convinced she left her old life behind, but maybe that’s not entirely true. 

Anna’s mind remembered the group of guys whom she wrote up for littering on the beach (and refusing to apologize for smashing the guy’s radio), but while they may be the suspects responsible for the woman’s death, it seems too far-fetched that they’d cover their tracks and know the ins and outs of Anna’s life. 

The episode is based on Nevada Barr’s prequel titled The Rope, which follows a similar plot, though in the novel, Anna witnesses a rape before she’s dropped into a vertical rock shaft where the attacker is nearby, watching and psychologically tormenting her. 

It serves largely as her origin story, as she emerges as a fighter, but it also intertwines the obvious suspects with other shady characters in the park, leaning into unexpected twists.

In this case, I don’t know if leaving this storyline vague works well for TV, as fans are looking for answers and a payoff for their investment. 

At the end of the episode, Anna makes it back to the search party looking for her, falling into Jesse’s arms, but it never reveals the person she left behind trapped in the cave.

And without knowing everyone all too well, paired with Anna’s memory gaps, it’s hard to know who to trust. 

Will she be able to guide them back to where she trapped the suspect? And if he was part of a group, did they help him escape before Anna leads anyone back to the scene of the crime?

Anna may be safe and sound, but there are plenty more questions surrounding the incident—and justice needs to be served. 

Will it be? And how will the survival and trauma change Anna moving forward? She’s obviously endured plenty with her husband’s death and needs answers, and it’s made her a tough cookie, but now she’s been reminded that leaning on others is necessary too. 

What did you think of the episode? Do you have any theories?

Anna Pigeon Season 1 Episode 4 comes with a few key reminders that we can all benefit from—never go out in a storm alone, be a team player, and stop living in the past. 

There’s something undeniably thrilling about storm scenes in TV shows; everyone’s on edge, adrenaline is high, and the stakes couldn’t be greater.

There’s never been a storm scene that didn’t fully have my attention, though this time, it also served as the backdrop for a compelling mystery. I usually pride myself on figuring out the killer early in situations like this, but in the case of the campers Anna risked her life to save before the flash floods, neither the culprit nor the motive was immediately clear, which made it all the more fun. 

Not only did nature pose a threat to the campers and Anna, but there was a killer among them who was taking every chance to get rid of Lainey. Early on, Anna mentioned that it’s usually the husband, even though it seemed as though there was plenty of tension between Lainey and her best friend Romy. Lainey fell off her horse when he got spooked by the storm, though Anna clocked that her stirrup was cut. At that point, she thought Romy had something to do with it; however, Romy shrugged it off and said she was teaching her husband Tom how to do it. 

That should’ve been the first red flag, but Anna wasn’t clear yet on the motive. Was it revenge for stealing a client? Was it jealousy over the marriage?

The second incident appeared as an accident at first, until Romy told Anna that she didn’t slip on the side of the ravine; she was pushed. 

At that moment, it occurs to Anna that Romy wasn’t the intended victim—the suspect thought it was Lainey since she was wearing her friend’s jacket. 

That narrowed it down to the two husbands (see! always the husband’s)—Romy’s husband Tom or Lainey’s husband Patrick. 

But the show added an additional layer of complexity, further deepening the mystery when a man showed up and told Jeff and Zoey that he was Lainey’s boyfriend. Zoey had a bad gut feeling even before Anna set out to warn the campers and get them out of the flood zone, so this just sent her Spidey senses into overdrive. 

Despite spotty service due to the storm, Zoey got Anna’s message to look into any criminal records involving Lainey and her husband Patrick, so when Lainey’s bf walked in, she told Jeff that something was terribly wrong. 

Eventually, Lainey’s boyfriend confessed that he was actually a PI working for her—and he was trying to get to them because they were all in terrible danger. He revealed that he’s been looking into Romy’s husband, Tom, whose real name is Keith, after he jumped bail following murder charges for pushing his previous wife down a flight of stairs. And what’s worse is that he has a track record for marrying rich women who mysteriously disappear. 

Romy would’ve been yet another name on the list, though, thankfully, Lainey had no boundaries when she began looking into him. Her suspicions turned out to be true, but she gave it away when she mentioned Tom’s license was suspended because of a DUI. It was at that moment Anna knew something was off, and he realized he had to eliminate her to keep his secret. 

Unfortunately, by the time Anna pieced it all together, Tom became desperate, grabbing Romy and holding a knife to her throat.

In the process, Patrick was stabbed, a fire broke out in the wooden cabin, Anna was temporarily blinded after chemicals were sprayed directly into her eyes, and Tom escaped, locking them inside as the flames raged on. 

It was the worst time for Anna to get flashbacks of the night her husband, Zach, was murdered, but thankfully, she was able to lean on her survival instincts to get them all out in time, just as Jeff and Zoey reached the house, with Tom in tow. 

Things may have appeared bleak for a moment, but the storm passed, as it always does, and Tom was arrested, while the trio of friends began their road to recovery. 

And Anna realized two very important things—while helping people is in her nature, it’s also really crucial to be a team player and to listen to your manager. She was warned never to go out into a storm alone, but chose to do so anyway because they were short-staffed. While she knows how to take care of herself, she was doing herself a disservice by pushing everyone away instead of leaning on them. 

And that included Jesse. Her avoidant attachment style has extended to this new relationship.

She couldn’t embrace anything real because she was stuck in the past, reliving the night of her husband’s death, rather than focusing on the future and allowing herself to move on. 

As Anna noted, “What if being in that moment means this one passes you by?”

It wasn’t fair to either of them—though this absolutely doesn’t mean that the investigation into Zach’s murder is over. Moving on doesn’t mean forgetting, and she still needs to find justice and closure.

Not to mention, in the flashbacks she was having at the cabin, it almost seemed like her wine was drugged that evening? I think subconsciously, Anna knows something crucial to solving the mystery, but it’s been buried by her trauma. When she starts bringing those memories to the surface, she’s going to need people to lean on—I just hope it’s Frederick and not Jesse (sorry dude!).