R29 Recaps: Every Episode From Netflix’s The Serpent

Netflix's stylish, time-twisty true crime drama The Serpent tells the story of serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who murdered at least a dozen Western backpackers on the "Hippie Trail" in Southeast Asia in the 1970s. The eight-episode BBC drama originally aired in the U.K. back in January but is finally getting its worldwide debut on Netflix.

Starring Tahar Rahim as the titular character, Sobhraj spins a web of deceit throughout the world that ensnares unsuspecting strangers — and occasionally willing accomplices, like his wife Marie-Andrée Leclerc (Jenna Coleman) — before he's ultimately caught. The eight-part drama jumps back and forth between different time periods to show the audience just how Sobhraj was able to enrapture so many people (and often convince them to do his bidding) — and how hard Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg (Billy Howle) and wife Angela (Ellie Bamber) fought to finally stop him from harming more people.

The Serpent is inspired by true events, although a disclaimer before each episode reminds viewers that some of the names and circumstances have been changed for dramatic purposes, and also out of respect for the Sobjhraj's victims and their families.

While the colourful 1970s costumes and sets and even cinematography make the drama engaging to watch, the non-linear time structure can be confusing — particularly in the earlier episodes, when it frequently jumps back and forth between different years and months (and later, hours). To help keep it all straight, we're parsing through each of the time periods to get to the heart of this story.

The first sign this series is going to be a time-twisting journey comes in the opening seconds, which see a late-middle-aged Sobhraj in a TV interview from 1997 where he essentially flaunts the fact that he probably got away with all his crimes, before jumping into the actual story. Where the actual story begins is a separate question altogether, considering the series skips around in time very liberally.

But the first episode takes place in three main time periods: November 1975, slightly earlier that same year, and early 1976.

The central date in this episode is November 27, and we're at Kenet House in Bangkok. The woman we'll come to know as Monique (really Marie-Andrée) drugs some warm milk before serving it to a man who is clearly in distress, writhing around on a bed and begging to go home. Sobhraj, who is going by Alain, steals his passport and money, then carefully switches the man's passport photo with his own.

Monique and Alain head to the airport and, using Alain's new passport, head to Hong Kong where they stumble upon a young Dutch backpacker looking at jewelry (presumably for his girlfriend). They introduce themselves as gem dealers, and let him know that they can get him a great deal on a ring. Alain piles on the charm, and the backpacker, Willem Bloem (Armand Rosbak), and his girlfriend, Helena Dekker (Ellie de Lange), end up meeting up with Monique and Alain at a club to look at the ring and make a final decision. The couples hit it off, and Monique and Alain convince the backpackers to not only buy the ring, but to come stay with them in Bangkok.

When the Dutch couple arrives in Bangkok a few days later, they don't want to take advantage of Monique and Alain's hospitality so they plan to stay at a hostel. But when they leave customs, Ajay (Amesh Ediriweera), Alain's right-hand man, is there to take them to Kenet House — and they love it there.

Things are idyllic at first. Lena and Wim swim and bond with their hosts — Monique tells Lena she's from Quebec and she came to Asia on holiday and never went home; Alain and Wim bond over being in love with their partners and how hard it is to be mixed race in Europe. But all is not as it seems — several shots show Alain creepily looking over Wim and Lena's passports, and he continues to try to get them to go into business with him.

He wants them to buy jewels, return to Holland, and sell them for twice what they paid for. When Lena says they can't afford it, Monique looks nervous and begs her to buy the gems. But Wim and Lena continue to refuse, so Alain and Monique drug them just like the man in the first 1975 scene. Much like that poor soul, they quickly become super sick.

A Dutch diplomat working at the embassy in Bangkok, Herman Knippenberg, reads a letter from a citizen searching for his sister and her boyfriend: Wim and Lena. At a meeting with some other foreign diplomats, the Dutch ambassador scoffs at Herman's concern because "it's not a diplomat's job to go chasing after long-haired bums." He should let the Thai police handle it!

Spoiler alert: Herman does not just let the Thai police handle it. When he and his Thai assistant call the police, they tell him to get back to them after the Christmas holiday. But Herman won't give up that easily — later, while having a drink with another foreign diplomat, Paul Siemons (Tim McInnerny), he warns Herman that looking for the couple will likely ruin his career. But if he insists on looking into the case himself, he should start by checking out the airport landing cards, then the nearest post office to see if they'd picked up any letters. Naturally Herman does this, and discovers there are six letters they never picked up from Amsterdam, and they also never checked in to the hostel they wrote on their landing card.

Later, Siemons introduces Herman to the Australian diplomat, who mentions offhand a story about an Aussie couple found dead. But he "shouldn't trust longhairs," because the bodies the Thai police found weren't the Australians after all — the Aussies had been lounging on a remote island. Against everyone's advice, Herman vows to investigate whether the bodies were actually his missing Dutch couple. After looking at police photos, he notices a "Made in Holland" tag on their clothing — it's them.

Two months before the November incident depicted in the opening moments of this episode, two girls are checking in to the hostel where the Dutch couple was planning to stay. An American girl, Teresa Knowlton (Alice Englert), is planning to head to Nepal the next day, and decides to split a room with Celia (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), the Brit behind her in line. They spend their day sightseeing and adventuring before ending their day drinking at the hostel, where they encounter Ajay. Teresa reveals that she's actually headed to a monastery the next day to become a nun, so she decides to accept Ajay's invitation to go to a different party and live it up with her last night of freedom. (Cue Jack Donaghy's advice: Never go with a hippie to a second location!)

When Teresa gets to the party, she immediately vibes with the French man we'll come to learn is Dominique (Fabien Frankel) and sets her alarm for 7 a.m. — as soon as it goes off, she has to leave. But Alain spots a new mark, and swoops in to ask her why she has traveller's checks sticking out of her bag if she's just planning to go to a monastery. They're ~for~ the monastery, she says, and Alain talks her into a different adventure: a sex show.

Teresa's not having much fun at the sex club, but as she tries to leave she collapses — she's been drugged. In the car, Alain tells her that it's such an American thing to think that she can just leave the hamster wheel of capitalism and run off to Nepal. Ajay is confused when Alain directs him to drive to the beach, but he does anyway — and although he's hesitant, he ends up doing what he's told. She's seen too much, and besides, when authorities discover her body she'll only be another reckless westerner who took drugs and went swimming. Later, a fisherman finds her body in the water.

This episode begins in early 1976, with Herman and Angela continuing to investigate the deaths of their Dutch backpackers, but it also jumps back and forth to a few different points in 1975 to reveal more about how Marie-Andrée and Charles first met and how the Canadian woman so easily fell into his trap.

The episode opens with Herman going to visit the bodies of the not-Australian couple, where the Thai medical examiner tells him that the man was strangled and the woman was hit in the head with a hard object. But the key fact is that there was smoke in both of their lungs — which means they were both still breathing when they were set on fire.

On March 3, he finally receives photos of the Dutch backpackers, which we already knew are Wim and Lena, but in case you were confused by all the jumping around this confirms it. They'd written home about meeting a French gem dealer based out of Bangkok, so when Herman stumbles upon a notice in the English-language newspaper that "Count Michel-Andre Jurion of the Belgian embassy is to make himself known to the lawyers of French gem dealer Alain Chartier" for slander, an alarm goes off in his head. Could this be the same French gem dealer? (Okay, yes, we know this, but at this point Herman does not.)

When Herman confides his latest findings to Siemons, the Belgian diplomat tells him to ditch his driver and go on a covert mission. The men wind up at a sex club to meet the Count and inform him that they share an interest in the gem dealer. Siemons also reveals that apparently a very frightened French woman has been making the rounds to all the foreign embassies in town and making crazy accusations against a French gem dealer, including drugging, robbery, and murder of some young longhairs. Unfortunately, nothing happened re: her complaints. And the reason Siemons never mentioned it before is because he's just been keeping Belgium's best interest in mind. Now that this has become a bigger issue, though, it's worth further investigation regardless of anyone's reputation.

Herman calls around looking for the French woman, and finally gets her identity from the British embassy. She was apparently highly agitated as she relayed her tale, and left proof of the Gem dealer's wrongdoing: Wim's journal (including photos), plus a card reading "A. Gautier, Gems Dealer." Herman heads to Kanit House with Siemons, who stays outside with the engine running just in case as Herman locates the woman, who is frightened as she pulls him inside her apartment.

This flashback takes us to May 5, 1975 in Kashmir, India, to Marie-Andrée and Charles' first meeting. As we hear via a voiceover from Marie-Andrée's journal, it's her first time away from Quebec in the most interesting place she's ever been, and a mysterious stranger she met on the flight is clearly interested in her. She and her friends have decided to link up with him — Alain — and he's negotiated a deal for them at a resort. Her companion comes down with an upset stomach, so she takes a pretty romantic sunset boat ride alone with Alain, who tells her he is a photographer.

A shy Marie-Andrée opens up to Alain about how she was in a horrible accident and feared she would never walk again, but she's recovered now and seeing the world. He lays on the charm thick, telling her that she deserves to be with someone who sees her the way she is, not the way she sees herself, because she is beautiful.

Two months later, Alain has written a letter to Marie-Andrée about how much he loves and misses her, so she decides to come see him. Three weeks after their reunion, she writes in her diary that "a two-week holiday has become three weeks of torment, but I refuse to come home even though he has not shown me the intimacy I crave." So clearly Alain is withholding affection as part of his strategy to manipulate Marie-Andrée — and it totally works. He comes back one day with a puppy and a gorgeous bracelet (which we saw her wearing in the previous episode), plus a dress for her to wear as they go to the beach.

As Alain sensually rubs sunscreen on her scarred legs, he asks Marie-Andrée what she thinks the couple near them is saying. He thinks it's "what is a beautiful woman like her doing with half breed like him?" He tells her to approach them and say she's a fashion model and he's her photographer husband. She wonders if it's a test, but he tells her it's a game.

Marie-Andrée plays along, and soon she and Charles and their new vacation friends, an Australian couple, are all hanging out together when the woman gets a stomach ache. Later, Charles and Marie-Andrée enter their room to find them unconscious on the floor. He instructs her to shut the door so they can rob them, and not to worry because they're just rich assholes anyway.

A few months later, Charles and Marie-Andrée step into what we know is their flat at Kanit House for the first time. She wonders if he was ever a photographer and if Alain is really his name. (Of course it's not.) He's Charles, and he's been alone since he was 15 years old. This actual emotional honesty proves to be an aphrodisiac for Marie-Andrée, because the two rip each other's clothes off and bang.

It's here where they hit their stride, with a montage of Charles dealing gems, drugging people, them vomiting, all while Marie-Andrée watches. Marie-Andrée also befriends their new neighbour, Nadine (Mathilde Warnier), a French woman who also spends a lot of time alone while her chef husband Remi (Grégoire Isvarine) is at work. Marie-Andrée introduces herself as Monique, telling Nadine that she's a model and she met Alain at Lake Dal at a fashion shoot.

This is also when Dominique comes into Alain and Monique's orbit, having met Alain in Chiang Mai. Apparently he ate something bad and Alain is helps him. Monique is confused, since she thought that Alain's thing was robbery, but he tells her that he doesn't want her doing housework. If she helps "nurse" Dominique while he's sick, he'll become devoted to her.

It's the night of Teresa's murder, and the party at Kanit House is in full swing. Alain has already zeroed in on Teresa when Nadine asks Marie-Andrée if she's jealous of her husband flirting with other people. It's just how he is, she says, and Nadine tells her she's too sophisticated to be Quebecois. But later that night Marie-Andrée is shocked when Charles comes home and asks her to cash the American's traveler's checks — she's worried the woman will be able to tell the police about their crimes. When Ajay says that isn't an issue, Marie-Andrée realizes what has happened — and goes along with it.

Some time passes and Marie-Andrée comes home one day to find a Thai jeweller, Suda (Chicha Amatayakul), acting like Alain's girlfriend — Suda asks if the dog missed her, and tells Marie-Andrée, whom she calls Alain's secretary, that she helped pick out the bracelet Marie-Andrée is wearing. But when she leaves, Charles tells Marie-Andrée that he only uses Suda for her gems and her protection, since her dad's a cop.

Another party, another guy drugged — the man from the first episode — and Marie-Andrée writes in her diary that she's terrified, but she is Monique and Monique has to stay calm. She's playing a role, though she's not sure whether she can play that role forever.

A few days later and Wim and Lena have arrived, and soon after that they're sick in bed. Marie-Andrée is caring for the couple as they beg for her help — she asks Lena why she didn't just do as she'd instructed and taken the gems to re-sell? At this point, they know that they're being drugged, but Marie-Andrée leaves the room and is shaking as she hears their screams.

Okay, so, the opening date for this episode is November 20, 1973, but it's really just to show us that's when Dominique left his home in France to travel the world. Two years later he meets Charles in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and you know the rest. Our story this episode really begins in March of 1976 in our Herman timeline, as Herman and Angela continue to investigate Wim and Lena's murders — and get closer to uncovering Charles' web of crime.

The timelines in this episode are really March 1976 and the investigation, earlier in 1975 when Charles and Dominique first meet, and December 1975 when Dominique tries to escape. Here's how that goes down.

Nadine and her husband, Remi, are on safer ground at Herman and Angela's house as she shows them Wim's diary. While she didn't actually see the couple there, she and Remi know that the same thing that happened to the couple is the same thing that happens to everyone — and there are way more victims than the two Dutch backpackers.

The radio next to Lena in one of the photos? Alain gave that to Nadine as a gift — and she would periodically bring clients to him for his gem business. She was lonely with Remi working all the time, and Alain clearly looked for that in people — even if they didn't see it in themselves, he was able to fix it. "It was like the sun shone on you," she says.

Herman wants more information about Alain, and discovers a few more key facts: he's probably French and Vietnamese — he'd talked about going to boarding school and losing his Vietnamese language skills in the past — and he wears clothes with the initials "C.S." inside. Oh, and Nadine and Remi haven't seen him since Christmas. They have no idea where he is, either. Actually, it was Dominique that finally made them realize Alain was doing shady stuff to begin with. She recounts the tale of Dominique's daring escape attempt.

Siemons is livid with Herman because he can't believe the Dutch man and his wife have so much faith in authorities. How are they so naive to believe that the Thai police will do the right thing? Herman's worried, of course, and doesn't want Nadine and Remi to put themselves in too much danger, but he needs more concrete proof re: any of Alain's criminal activity.

Herman and Angela discover that Wim and Lena supposedly left the country on December 18 — at least that's what Thai customs exit cards say — but they actually died on December 18. Nadine goes to check her post office box to see if Dominique made it home — she's been anxiously awaiting word that he's safe, which he was planning on sending to the post office rather than Kanit house, of course — where she at last has a letter.

But as she reads it, she hears a voice call her name: It's Alain, Monique, and Ajay, finally back from their trip. They somewhat menacingly ask if she's seen Dominique, but she says no — then gets in a car with them.

After becoming acquainted in Chiang Mai, Charles and Dominique are hiking through the wilderness and discussing why Dominique has been traveling for two years: He hasn't gone home yet because he's searching for something different (a wanderer — someone who very much fits the ideal profile for one of Charles' victims).

Some time later, at Kanit House, Dominique is sick in bed. Nadine asks why he isn't going to the hospital, and Charles tells her it's a death sentence to go to the hospital. Instead, he and Monique will nurse him back to health and in exchange Dominique will help around the house. Although Dominique continues to be ill, Alain tells him not to call his parents and to use it as a purge to come into his own self.

But one day in October as Dominique mixes himself his "medicine," the monkey that Alain and Monique keep as a house pet drinks from the glass and keels over. He also notices Teresa's alarm clock in another room, which he recognizes from when he thought he was going to hook up with her at that party. There's something strange going on and he is finally realizing it. Later, he tells Alain and Monique that he wants to stop taking his medicine to see how he feels without it, and also he wants his passport back.

Alain reluctantly hands Dominique his passport — which now has Alain's photo in it. He tries to brush it off as "just a thing he does for the business" and promises to fix it back, but by the way Dominique's tourist visa has expired while he was sick so he's actually kind of in a lot of trouble if the authorities find out. But since someone at the French embassy owes Alain a favour, he'll take care of it.

Later, Dominique drives Alain to visit Suda and her cop dad, where he sees Alain talking animatedly and pointing at him. While Alain was just offering them a ride home, he makes Dominique believe he was ratting him out for being in the country illegally (but not to worry, he'd vouch for him).

Now it's the night of the very first party in the show, November 27, and the poor sick hippie is getting hauled off to the "hospital." When Alain and Monique go away for the weekend Dominique snoops through their house — and finds the sick hippie's passport photo in a bag. (He also snags a knife for good measure because he knows that something is definitely wrong here.)

Dominique is reading in bed at night when he hears some noise in the hallway — Alain and Ajay are taking a sick girl downstairs. She's the lover of the Turk, aka the very first sick guy we met. Monique explains that they're just junkies and heroin smugglers, but Dominique wonders why everyone who comes there gets sick.

At last, he decides to call his parents. He's emotional as he speaks to his father, and his parents are both frantic to have him come home. He tells them that he can't because it's too expensive, then is overcome with emotion and hangs up.

That night, Ajay bangs on Dominique's door — they don't have power, and Alain wants to see him now. Alain shows Dominique a headline about a dead European girl. "Did you meet Stephanie? You would've liked her," Ajay tells Dominique. The men confront Dominque about wanting to leave — why, when they've treated him so well?

Dominique says he misses his parents and wants to go home, but Alain says that he won't be able to because he's a different person now. The man he has become is not the boy who left his parents, and he can't let Dominique leave now because they're brothers. Dominique is even more scared as he hears Wim and Lena struggling in the other room.

Monique isn't too happy with what's going on — she knew they were drugging Dominique but didn't realize it had anything to do with murder — and by the time she, Alain, and Ajay leave for Christmas she looks terrified of Alain.

Once they're gone, though, Nadine knocks on Dominique's door and offers to help him escape. While he's not sure he can trust her at first, considering she helped get Alain clients for his gem business, he relents and they realize he has to get out of there. Nadine, Dominique, and Remi get to work on Dominique's escape: They buy him a plane ticket and help him figure out how to put his own photo back into his passport and sew in a page with a valid visa from another victim and send him home.

At the airport, Dominique's flight is delayed and he's nervous as hell. When he finally goes to board his flight, he sees Alain walking through customs on his way back from a trip. Luckily, the passport agent waves him through and he's finally on his way home. Alain, meanwhile, greets someone with a baby. Who is that?