Spoilers ahead for the first two episodes of Cruel Summer.
Summer has arrived, and so has a new mystery.
OK, summer has only really arrived on TV in the form of Freeform’s new drama Cruel Summer, but we stand by the mystery part. The teen drama, set over three different summers in the mid-’90s, is all about unraveling what happened after the pretty and popular Kate Wallis (Olivia Holt) mysteriously disappeared, seemingly replaced in the high school food chain by the former nerd, Jeanette Turner (Chiara Aurelia).
Over the course of the first episode and three different years, we saw Jeanette transform from nerdy wannabe to Kate Wallis 2.0, then to a broody recluse who hates the world and who the world hates right back.
By the end of that first hour, Kate had been rescued from the basement of the new assistant principal, and she was claiming that Jeanette had seen where she was being held and didn’t do anything about it. By the end of the second hour of the premiere, Jeanette was suing Kate and swearing that no such thing happened. But who do we believe?