A Man on the Inside, Netflix’s latest comedy-drama follows a widower named Charles (Ted Danson) as he tries to find the purpose of his life following the death of his wife. After deciding to work as an investigative assistant to Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada), a private investigator, he gets involved in an investigation.
Created by The Good Place fame Michael Schur, A Man on the Inside starts with Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), urging Charles, her widower father to find something to do that would help him to steer back into life.
To this advice, Charles decides to answer a job posting that would require him to be a private investigator or Julie’s "man on the inside" at Pacific View, a senior care facility. His objective here is to discover what happened to a necklace, which was a priceless family heirloom after it got stolen from one of the residents at Pacific View.
To get on with his mission, Charles pretended to be a new resident at Pacific View and registered himself under the suspicious eyes of Didi (Stephanie Beatriz), the administration. He kept reporting everything that he found suspicious to Julie. However, as he started making many friends during the investigation, his task of finding the necklace became increasingly difficult.
Charles is forced to come face-to-face with his fears and troubles that he is facing with the changes happening in his life, this gradually helps him to crack the case. Let us now explore what happened at the end of A Man on the Inside.
The following article contains spoilers.
Who stole the necklace in A Man on the Inside?
Finding the culprit in A Man on the Inside turned out to be quite different than Charles and Julie had expected. While they had suspected the stealing to be the doing of some criminal, it was ultimately revealed that Gladys (Susan Ruttan), a resident of Pacific View was behind the stealing of the necklace and other items that went missing.
Gladys was a kind old woman who did not steal those items out of any kind of jealousy or malice. Being a patient with dementia, she simply forgot what belonged to whom and took things as her own. Because of her memory problems, she had been moved from the general population of Pacific View and shifted to the ward dedicated to memory care, also known as "The Neighborhood."
Charles had not considered this angle initially since he began the investigation to avoid thinking about his wife who passed away because of complications related to Alzheimer’s. Thinking about her was extremely difficult for Charles and he had avoided doing so for most of the series.
However, prompted by Calbert (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a new friend that Charles made at Pacific View, Charles reflected on how his wife behaved since her memory troubles began and took things that did not belong to her simply because she was confused.
Thinking about the case from this angle helped Charles realize since Gladys was moved to the memory care ward, no instances of disappearance of things and valuables had happened at Pacific View.
What happens to Charles and his daughter Emily at the end of A Man on the Inside?
After Charles started feeling lost following his wife’s passing, his relationship with his daughter Emily got stagnant. Emily resented her father as he quickly packed her mother’s belongings and did not include her in the grieving process.
However, on Emily’s part, she also felt disconnected from her father, both when he was leading a monotonous life following his wife’s death and then when he got involved with the investigation at Pacific View.
Both Charles and Emily were not comfortable with sharing their feelings and they realized that they never actually talked about how they felt after losing someone so close to them.
It was his friendship with Calbert that made Charles learn that the relationship between a parent and a child is ever-evolving and does not need to remain stagnant forever just because it feels so at one point.
With this simple realization, Charles invited his daughter so that they could go through the stuff of his late wife together. He opened up to Emily about what her mother’s Alzheimers had been like. This marked a beautiful change in the relationship between the father and daughter as they came out of the stagnancy that they had hit.
While A Man on Inside is a comedy show, at its heart it's an exploration of human relationships and how people deal with grief and the loss of a loved one.
A Man on the Inside can be streamed on Netflix.
Trending
Stay tuned to SoapCentral for more updates on shows!
Reply
