'Before We Die' Recap: Season 2 Episode 2

Before We Die airs Thursdays at 8:00 pm and is available to stream. WTTW Passport members can stream the whole show now. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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Hannah has won herself more time. After she plays for Kane the recording of the corrupt cop Marcus warning Dubravka that her nephew has been arrested, Kane asks her to find more evidence, some that is not illegally obtained, and gives her more time to do so.

But Hannah is still in a rush to take down Dubravka and the Mimicas, because she fears that they are trying to find and kill her son Christian. And she’s right.

In Costa Rica, Christian goes to his emergency rendezvous point with his lover Bianca, but she’s not there—and he can’t contact her. That’s because she has been captured and put in a container on a ship sailing for the UK, with a thin mattress, toilet, water, and food to tide her over in the hot, cramped space. Christian sees men watching the rendezvous point from a truck and runs away.

He sneaks back into his ransacked apartment—the truck is waiting out front—and finds it empty. He grabs some fake passports, plus a photo of Bianca. He then pays a kid playing out front to swarm the truck with his friends, while Christian grabs his motorbike and flees.

The operation to kill Christian and kidnap Bianca is being organized by Nicky Harris, another corrupt police officer—who’s higher up than Marcus. She’s also secretly dating Kane, who reveals on a lunch date that he has new info that calls her just-released report into the Mimicas into question. He can’t reveal what it is, but does tell her it was obtained through an illegal phone tap.

Nicky leaves, casting doubt on the continuation of the relationship because, she says, Kane can’t separate himself from work. She texts Dubravka, telling her that she’s sending a car: they need to talk.

Dubravka’s nephew Goran gets a call from Croatia asking him to make sure Dubravka goes through with selling the cocaine Dubravka’s son Davor acquired, quickly. He follows her in the car sent by Nicky, but is seen by the driver when they arrive at the destination: an empty warehouse where Dubravka and Nicky have met before.

Nicky tells Dubravka that Kane knows about Marcus, and asks for 5% more of the profit from the cocaine deal in order to deal with him. Dubravka reluctantly agrees.

Dubravka doesn’t take kindly to mistakes like Marcus’s. She has punished her nephew Jovan for allowing himself to be taken in on false charges by Hannah and not immediately asking for a lawyer—even though he did. Even though Dubravka tells Jovan that she knows he’s loyal, she has a henchmen break one of Jovan’s legs.

Goran questions whether such violence was necessary, and Dubravka tells him not to interfere. She also argues with Goran for following her—until she is interrupted by a phone call. It’s the police: the body of Davor has been found in a reservoir.

Christian escaped his encounter with Davor alive, and continues to show resourcefulness in evading his followers in Costa Rica. When he arrives at a bus station and finds them waiting, looking at a tablet, he turns his phone off. They respond by saying he has disappeared from their map—his phone is being tracked. He turns the phone back on and stashes it in the backpack of a man who’s getting into a car. The henchmen pursue the car, and Christian gets on a bus.

When he arrives at his destination, he surreptitiously throws out the gun he has been carrying and uses a fake passport to buy a flight to the UK.

Kane calls Hannah to tell her that Davor has been found, and the news upsets her just as it did Dubravka, since she is the one who killed him. Billy assures her that the rounds she used in her gun are untraceable, and tells her to remember why she killed Davor: to save Christian.

Kane tells Hannah that the discovery that Davor is dead lends credence to her theories about the Mimicas: that they are lying low and that Dubravka has taken over from Davor. Kane wants Hannah to identify Davor’s body for the police.

She reluctantly does, and sees Dubravka arriving to do the same as she leaves. Goran accompanies Dubravka to her son’s corpse. She cries over it, then thanks Goran for being there once she has recovered. Hannah tells Billy she saw Dubravka, and that the Croatian matriarch will now be even more motivated to track down Christian.

She’s right again: when Billy tells Hannah to go and rest, in a home where he has restocked Hannah’s groceries, Hannah finds Dubravka waiting for her. I will not rest until Christian is also dead, Dubravka tells Hannah. She wants Hannah to know how it feels to lose a son. She lets herself out.

Hannah calls Billy and tells him that she thinks Dubravka knows where Christian is.

Billy and Hannah have been looking into Marcus’s past in the hope that they can identify who corrupted him, and when. They have learned that his mediocre career suddenly took a meteoric rise, suggesting that there’s another corrupt cop, higher up, who helped him. But figuring out who it is by digging through case histories will take too long, so they get Kane’s approval to offer Marcus reduced sentencing in exchange for information on the Mimicas and the other corrupt cop.

They visit Marcus at home, where his wife and two daughters are, and offer him the deal. They leave and give him a deadline of later that night to give them his decision.

Hannah waits in Kane’s office with another officer and Billy on the phone for Marcus’s call. Nicky walks in at the last minute—Kane lies that he only just told her about Marcus, since it is pertinent to her report.

Marcus calls, and tells them he’ll take the deal. Just then, he’s shot and killed. Billy and the other officers waiting outside his house rush in.