An adaptation from a novel that actually **feels** like a novel, _The Last Thing He Told Me_ is a slow burn. And while that usually pisses me off, I found myself sucked in by the story and engrossed by the characters. Except for Bailey. (She annoyed the crap out of me- though, to be fair, that was exactly the point. So kudos to Angourie Rice, I guess?) I thoroughly enjoyed the deliberate pacing and incremental unraveling of the mystery. Jennifer Garner's Hannah is pulling at threads in desperation, and her grounded performance is what makes the show work. Her moves from clue to clue never feel like they've been pulled out of thin air, or like Sherlock Holmes-ian strokes of genius; rather, she always looks like a normal person just trying to make sense of the tragedy and chaos that she's fallen into. I also appreciated the structure of embedded flashbacks. Sometimes they were there to provide story details for us, while at other times they served to illustrate what the characters were thinking. In just about every case, the context they provided felt earned and none of them were wasted.

When the show started to lose me, however, was when the mystery finally gets solved. The performances don't drop off - if anything they get more intense and affecting - but the motivations shift from "What the hell is happening?!" to "How do I deal with all of this emotional stuff?" It can make for great storytelling, but the slow pace starts to feel more like a liability after that shift happens. But by the time I was getting impatient I was closing in on the story's endgame, so it didn't detract too much from my enjoyment of the piece as a whole.

A final note about my overall rating. I had an average rating of "7" for all of the episodes (all "7s", save for a single "6" and one "8"), but I added an extra point for the consistency of quality. There wasn't a bad episode in the bunch, and I only felt the urge to skip through scenes a few times throughout. That's quite an accomplishment in this day and age.