'Home Before Dark': Did abusive parents drive [spoiler] to run away from reality?
Spoilers for 'Home Before Dark'
Apple TV+'s 'Home Before Dark' borrows from the real-life 13-year-old journalist prodigy Hilde Lysiak's life after she broke a local murder in her self-run newspaper, at the age of nine. But the series takes things a little further by weaving a classic whodunnit murder mystery from 31 years ago, where a kid called Richie Fife was kidnapped and presumably murdered.
In the show, Hilde Lisko's (Brooklynn Prince) father Matt (Jim Sturgess), was Richie's best friend and he saw him get kidnapped - a traumatic incident that Matt is still clearly not over even in the show's present. Eventually, as Hilde solves the case, it turns out Richie could still be very much alive and just never made it back home since that night. And for some reason, that brings to mind the discovery Matt makes about Richie (Kiefer O'Reilly) being physically abused by his father, Mayor Fife.
After Richie was kidnapped, a local teenager was wrongly framed for the murder and locked away for the rest of his life until new evidence comes up in the form of video footage of the kidnapping. The man who was framed, Sam Gillis (Michael Greyeyes), is approached by Hilde first, and his parents later and soon they learn that Richie would often have bruises on himself, which Sam presumed came from his father. In flashbacks we see how strict Richie's father would be aggressively manipulating him when he was just a child, berating him for something as simple as the preferred color of his new bike.
The fact that Richie kept this hidden from Matt and their third friend and current deputy Frank Briggs Jr. really speaks volumes about how this must have traumatized the little child. So when he was kidnapped, the van he was kidnapped in slipped into a lake nearby, Richie fought for his life to break out of that locked van, but he never went back home that night.
In the end, we see Richie climb to the banks of the lake gasping for breath and walking out into the woods along the lake - pretty much fine except the wound on his head from falling off the van before. But it's possible that Richie was so fed up with life at home and not being able to deal with it or talk about it, that he felt better to run away once he was assumed to have disappeared.
For an 11-year-old to make that kind of decision, there has to be a lot of repressed trauma. And since we haven't really been told about anything else that Richie was suffering from, it's quite possible that his father's abuse drove him away from home. That is of course if he is still alive, and tragic as it might be, couldn't really survive in the wild. Only Season 2 will tell!
'Home Before Dark' premieres with all 10 episodes on Friday, April 3, only on Apple TV+.