#’The Flight Attendant’: What’s Going on in Cassie’s Head?

What started as a fun night out for flight attendant Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco) and passenger 3C Alex Sokolov (Michiel Huisman) ended in bloody tragedy: she woke up to him dead in the bed with her in his hotel room. But he’s not exactly gone…

Cassie started seeing and talking to Alex in her head, mostly in that hotel room. And as she tried to put the pieces of the night together (including remembering that they weren’t alone at dinner) and figure out who Alex even was, she used him as a sounding board. Is that due to the trauma of waking up next to his dead body (and no idea who killed him) or because of the connection they made during that one night together?

Alex was drawn to Cassie from the beginning because, in his mind, his character “knew that something was likely going to happen soon,” Huisman told TV Insider. “That really opened him up to fun. … When he meets Cassie, he’s really smitten by her, but he also feels in his personal life that he’s recently been betrayed and he’s really attracted to the honesty that Cassie’s showing on their first date out.”

And for the actor, his character wasn’t the only one “longing for” that kind of connection. “Maybe that’s also something that this party girl has also missed or is missing in her life, and it was looking like there was potential for more and then she was robbed of that in a brutal way, basically, by his murder,” Huisman suggested.

That could explain why she’s talking to him — or rather, a version of him — in her mind palace. “He gets closer to the real Alex as the season progresses,” he teased. “So you could say by Episode 8, without giving too much away, by then, we found out a lot about Alex and so then he’s probably closest to the real person.” But, as he added, they had been on one date, on which Alex “was on his best behavior.” So while he may have seemed like “Mr. Perfect and very clean,” you will find out “there’s actually a bit more to him.”

But we’re not just getting flashes to that night in Bangkok; we’re also seeing moments from Cassie’s childhood with her father, presumably because that’s another time of trauma for her. And if FBI Agent Kim Hammond (who has been trying to find alternatives to Cassie for the murderer even as the flight attendant continues to hold back information during the investigation) knew, “she would connect her with some emotional help because not only is she in danger with the law and the way that she completely seems to be just putting her foot in the mud, whatever is going on within her emotionally is a problem,” Merle Dandridge said. “It could end up hurting her and creating even more drama, even more situations that could put her in harm’s way.”

Until Cassie remembers everything that happened that night (and perhaps deals with that time from her childhood), Alex isn’t going anywhere thankfully, and the fact that his character’s death wasn’t it for him was something that intrigued Huisman from the beginning.

“I always thought it would be interesting to play a character that slowly has to piece together who he was because [the Alex in Cassie’s head] doesn’t really understand or know his past until Cassie starts unraveling stuff about him and starts to discover things about him,” he said. It’s all based on what the flight attendant can remember him telling her in their short time together.

We’ll have to wait and see just how this will play out for Alex and Cassie.

The Flight Attendant, Thursdays, HBO Max