Is it just me, or should the protagonists of Apple TV‘s Nocturne be allowed nowhere near the case that Nocturne is about? This week’s cold open shows the dissolution and suicide of Saga Bauer’s dad and Jonah Lynn’s partner Sam Mendel following the disappearance of his wife Rebecca, all of which both Saga and Jonah blame on the brilliant serial killer Jurek Walter. Yet here they are, leading the investigation into Jurek Walter’s accomplice. Jonah comes out of retirement to take point, an unconventional move. Saga goes undercover in a mental institution as a patient. They’re so convinced of Walter’s ability to get into other people’s heads that they never stop to think whether he’s already gotten into their own.

This is not to say that they’re bad at their jobs. On the contrary, both Jonah and Saga make huge strides. Noticing a notebook that the missing nurse Sally Gifford was carrying in a photograph, Jonah searches her house for it and finds a note from Jurek inside with a coded message to “RELEASE MICHAEL,” the abduction victim. While the note is nominally addressed to Jurek’s lawyer, there’s no such person, and the address is a mailbox on an abandoned building in the middle of an industrial no-man’s-land. 

Quinn and the rest of the team assume it’s a dead drop that Jurek’s accomplice checks on a prearranged schedule. In order to provoke the killer into sending another note, they issue bogus transfer orders. Sure enough, he slips a note to Nurse Karl, whom he continues to bamboozle even though Karl has the good sense to suspect him in Sally’s disappearance. To be fair, Sally’s notebook reveals her falling for his bullshit too. 

Fortunately, Saga has already ID’d Karl for them as a person of interest, noticing that he was acting fidgety after a visit to Jurek’s unit, during which he gave the killer a candy bar. Saga pickpockets the wrapper from Karl and licks it in front of a security camera to send Nate the message that this is Jurek’s courier. So they’ve got a drone in the sky following the guy in his car, festooned with the bumper stickers of a cartoon “social justice warrior” (to use Jonah’s phrase) and hilariously blasting Imagine Dragons’s “Radioactive,” as he heads to the drop site and delivers the note.

But the noise of the drone scares off the intended recipient the next day, so Jonah must pursue them through a ruinous warehouse on foot. The accomplice gets the drop on the towering cop and knocks him out with chloroform. By the time Jonah wakes up, he’s wanted for questioning. Agent Flynn has read the note Karl left behind, and it reads “JONAH PLANTED MY DNA.”

Meanwhile, Saga gets herself moved to the restricted housing unit where Walter is kept by attacking a male nurse who’s been sexually harassing her. Nate watches through the security cams in horror as she’s carted off, a net around her head to prevent her from biting, shackles around her limbs. She winds up in the cell next to Jurek, an outcome that’s presented like something out of a horror movie. 

Why, though? Wasn’t this the plan all along? I don’t get the huge swell of scary music from composers Toydrum here, nor Nate’s shock that this is happening. Getting close to Jurek is the goal, right? Along with the very presence of people as involved in the case as Jonah and Saga are in the investigation, this one baffles me.

I know there are only so many ways to say this, but most of Nocturne’s deficiencies are made up for by the talent of the cast and crew. As much as the actual mechanics of the investigation feel off, the actors involved — Zazie Beetz, Stephen Graham, Rory Culkin, and Liev Schreiber in particular — feel dead on. Part of me wishes the show could somehow drop all the detective stuff and just put those four people in a room somewhere to see what happens. Those performances, not drones and dead drops, are where the power of Nocturne resides.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.