#’The Flight Attendant’s Cassie Is ‘Not Killer Material’ — Did [Spoiler] Kill Alex?

What would you do if you woke up after a fun night to find the other person in bed with you had been killed (and in quite the bloody manner) while you were sleeping?

Flight attendant Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco) cleans up the scene. With no idea what happened the night before (due to her drinking), she then began to try to piece together what she could remember. And at the end of Episode 1, she realized someone else was with her and Alex Sokolov (Michiel Huisman) at dinner the night before his death: a business associate who would go on to be identified as Miranda (Michelle Gomez).

Could she have killed him that night? After all, we see her tricking a bartender into giving her Cassie’s full name, breaking into and rummaging through her apartment, following the flight attendant seemingly with nefarious intent, and then coming face-to-face with her on the train back from Alex’s memorial. (Even Cassie knew going there was a bad move.) It’s all looking like she did. There isn’t anyone else who looks as guilty quite yet.

According to Huisman, who suspected that his character “knew that something was likely going to happen soon” and “had some sort of foreboding feeling, some sort of fatalistic feeling that things might get out of control,” even he’s not sure exactly who Miranda is.

“She’s sort of like an in between person for a couple of really shady investors that Alex works for,” he teased for TV Insider. “I don’t think Alex ever really knew who Miranda was.” Something tells us it’s going to take until we learn everything that happened that night to know the full extent of Miranda’s potential involvement.

But she does look like a better suspect to FBI Agent Kim Hammond than Cassie. “Anybody else who comes into the orbit, they seem a little bit more polished, and those are the people I think she is a little bit more weary of and a little bit more curious about,” Merle Dandridge said of her character. “Cassie seems vulnerable and anybody who might be around it or in the periphery of this crime is definitely worth investigating.”

That vulnerability is why the agent is willing to look for other explanations. “She can’t be as nefarious as everybody’s making her seem,” Dandridge continued. “She’s not killer material. She’s just sloppy. … This is so out of her realm of ability and comfort zone that she’s shaken by everything we say. And she seems to completely unravel every time we ask her a question.”

(Phil Caruso/HBO Max)

The case itself doesn’t seem like an open-and-shut one to her character. “It already seems messy, filled with holes,” from the start, when Hammond has to inform Alex’s mother what happened. “Anything like that gets all of her neurons firing and it makes for something that she wants to really dig into to get to the real truth of the matter,” Dandridge explained. “Things aren’t adding up on the page.”

But her partner, Van White (Nolan Gerard Funk), is a different story. Whereas Hammond wants everything done by the book and is “OK with exhausting everything until it’s done right,” he “has more ambitious intent just to get ahead,” the actress said. For example, he’s more focused on Cassie than any other possibility.

“He’s always second guessing [Hammond] and going behind her back, so it’s almost as if she has to look over her shoulder as well as try to instill some kind of integrity into his work, and as you can tell, it’s difficult because he was raised the way he was raised,” Dandridge added.

But whose instincts are right so far? Is Van White correct to be looking to Cassie or Kim Hammond to be considering other possibilities? And just who is Miranda? Did she kill Alex? Is Cassie next on her list?

The Flight Attendant, Thursdays, HBO Max