'The Hardy Boys': Who is the 'tall man' working for? Here's why he poses such a danger to the children
Spoilers for 'The Hardy Boys'
Right from the moment they land in the mysterious but quiet and stereotypically boring town of Bridgeport where their parents grew up, the titular boys, Joe and Frank, are being hunted. The reason? They come across something so sinister and powerful that its magic, or curse if you will, cannot be contained. There's a '7-foot tall man' showing up at every odd place they seem to frequent, hunting down anybody in close association to the eye. But are Joe and Frank in danger from him too? And most importantly, who is he working for?
We first meet the tall man in an airplane where the passenger next to him nears suffocation as turbulence arises. The man struggling to breathe, excuses himself to use the toilet lavatory, but soon the tall man next to him realizes his bag was swapped by the other man. Tall man rushes to the toilet to retrieve his bag, but it's too late; the suffocating man has already slipped out of a vent in the aircraft on a parachute he was carrying with him.
The suffocating man, as we find out later in the episode of the 13-part series, is a trained thief for hire, called JB Cox. He was stealing what is also revealed to be the source of all power and omnipotence, The Eye, from the Tall Man, who was transporting it to the people who had hired his service. Once JB steals the eye from Tall Man, the latter is sent by his buyers to travel to Bridgeport and hunt down whoever stole it. First, he targets a hand help in the local ship call Ashteck, but it's of no use even though this boy had seen Tall Man steal the same box containing the Eye from their ship, before killing everybody else on board. He tells Joe and Frank everything he knows about Tall Man, and thus pulls in their help as the Ashteck is owned by the boys' grandmother, whose father was one of the founding members of the Eye.
The boys, who have just realized the mysterious death of their mother was not an accident, but a murder, know she was working on something to bring out truths related to the ship. They connect the dots and are able to figure out whatever the tall man stole is what got their mother killed. Meanwhile, the Eye is in JB's possession now and after jumping off the lane, he seems to have found refuge along the shore of Bridgeport, hiding out in his parachute from everyone. Joe finds out as JB relies on another local kid, the cop's daughter Biff Hooper for food and other pursuits. But once the Tall Man enters the scene, JB must flee the scene, so he breaks into Joe's house and hides the Eye enclosed in an ancient headpiece artifact in the vents of his room. Thus Joe and Frank come across the Eye and from there begins the threat to them posed by Tall Man.
From hunting them on foot to chasing them to the carnival, surviving a gigantic electric shock, surviving from the subsequent coma, breaking out of the hospital, getting captured by the little children and teenagers when he gets lured in to retrieve the eye, getting arrested by the cops, breaking out of prison and finally dying in a road accident as he attempts to attack the Hardy boys one last time, the Tall Man's journey is dark and twisted. But he is a mercenary for hire and stuck to his job with dedication as we learn in the final moments of the show that he was hit and killed by the very person who had hired him to steel the Eye - Anastasia Nabokov - the daughter of Victor Nabokov, who was one of the founding members of the eye and killed by one of the other two.
'The Hardy Boys' premieres on Friday, December 4, on Hulu.