'The Hardy Boys': Did Frank and Joe's grandmother kill Laura? Here's how Gloria is complicit in her death
Spoilers for 'The Hardy Boys'
There's something sketchy about Gloria Esterbrook right from the moment we meet her. She is too chirpy about the Hardy boys' future right from the first instance which happens to be the tragic funeral of her own daughter and their mother, Laura. From gifting Frank their mother's jewelry box to trying to introduce them as her heirs in the town of Bridgeport soon after they move there for the summer, Gloria is pretty fishy, thus leading us to wonder if the death of Laura Hardy was after all a murder executed by a jilted mother? In the end, as we learn, even though Gloria did not kill her own daughter, she plays a grave role in the murder.
Laura died from a car crash while on her way back from Bridgeport, where she had gone to meet her affluent mother in their estate. Soon hints and leads reveal her death wasn't just an accident, but she was murdered for a story she was investigating and about to expose in the papers. The story was about a family heirloom called the Eye - a sinister, powerful object that Gloria's father and two other men had seized from underground tunnels during a mining expedition.
The eye was long lost, first split into three bits and then the Esterbrook's piece was never seen again when Gloria's father died in a plane crash while traveling with it. Years later, however, Laura uncovers that there has been a robbery at the family shop and deduces her mother was once again on the move, seeking the Eye and looking to reunite the separate three pieces into one so all three founding families could use its power to influence the world as originally planned.
The power of the eye is an omnipotent vision into how things would turn out; if one wants to rig or call an outcome, the eye leads them to the possible outcome so they can avert the crisis or influence the progress accordingly. But Laura wasn't going to have any of this evil influence existing any longer. The only mistake she made was to confront her mother about uniting the pieces of the eye and thus call upon her own death. Greedy and hungry for the power the eye promises after being consciously left out of the inner circle by her own father, Gloria refuses to budge from the opportunity to use the power and channel it for herself. She chose the eye over her own daughter, so even though she didn't kill Laura, her complicity did.
'The Hardy Boys' premiered this Friday, December 4, only on Hulu.