Season one of The Flight Attendant follows Cassie Bowden, the titular flight attendant.
Cassie is a bit of a reckless alcoholic, still dealing with the emotional trauma
and guilt over her father’s death. Her father had let her drink alcohol at an early age
and later died in a car crash while driving drunk. Cassie blamed herself
for enabling her father’s drinking and now had a strained relationship with her brother Davey.
While working on a flight to Bangkok, Cassie meets and flirts with a handsome stranger named
Alex Sokolov, who is first introduced reading the book Crime and Punishment.
The two spend an alcohol-fueled night together in Bangkok, but when Cassie wakes up the next morning
she finds Alex dead in bed next to her with his throat slit. Cassie remembers
nothing from their night together and flees the scene for fear of being charged for his murder.
Cassie flies back to America and asks her best friend Annie to represent her as her lawyer.
FBI agents Van and Kim begin investigating Alex’s murder and question Cassie,
who constantly goes against Annie’s legal counsel and continues to incrimminate herself. Fearful
that she’ll be found guilty, Cassie resolves to uncover the truth about Alex’s death herself.
As Cassie begins her own investigation, she is plagued by visions of the dead Alex.
Cassie also continues to struggle with her usual self-destructive tendencies,
meeting and sleeping with a man named Buckley. Cassie also continues her work
as a flight attendant, alongside her co-workers and friends Shane and Megan.
Eventually, Cassie remembers her and Alex encountering a woman named Miranda on the
night of Alex’s death. Miranda was a mysterious business associate of Alex’s that Cassie quickly
begins to suspect was the true murderer. Cassie also discovers that the Sokolov family were the
very powerful and very shady owners of Unisphere Asset Management. They were involved in various
illegal activities, including laundering hundreds of millions of dollars for various entities,
including another corrupt organization, Lionfish. Cassie teams up with Annie’s hacker boyfriend Max,
against Annie’s wishes and legal advice, to break into Lionfish’s offices to collect data
on their corruption that would hopefully exonerate Cassie. They transfer several evidence files over
to a flash drive, including the IDs of several individuals Lionfish has previously had killed,
and some they planned to kill, including Cassie and Miranda, whose real name is revealed to be
Elena King. Cassie also finds a recording of her co-worker Megan speaking to someone in Korean.
As Cassie and Max leave Lionfish they are pursued, and Max is run over by a car,
seriously injuring him. Annie angrily confronts Cassie for her self-destructive
ways now affecting other people’s lives and breaks things off with her best friend. Cassie
also realizes the flash drive was missing, meaning all of her effort was for nothing.
Meanwhile, what’s up with Megan and the Koreans!? Cassie’s friend and fellow flight attendant Megan
has felt ignored in life and is approached by mysterious North Korean contacts who want her
to steal data from her husband Bill’s work. This gave Megan an opportunity to add some excitement
to her life, and she begins delivering data to the Koreans, but quickly finds herself way in over
her head when her husband is accused of North Korean espionage. Megan leaves her husband and
son a large stack of cash that she received from the Koreans, then runs off to right her wrongs.
Back to Cassie, she is confronted by Miranda and the two finally hash out their suspicions
of each other. Miranda reveals that she worked for Lionfish and had revealed to Alex that
his family was involved in laundering money. Furious over his family’s criminal activities,
Alex transferred Lionfish’s $300 million from his parents’ account to
a hidden account and then flew to Bangkok. Miranda had confronted Alex there,
trying to convince him to return the money to avoid the wrath of some very dangerous people,
but the next day he was found dead. Victor, the head of Lionfish, had sent his enforcer Feliks
to kill Alex and retrieve the stolen money. Unfortunately for them, Feliks was unable to
uncover information on the account Alex had hidden the money in. And that’s when Cassie
remembers that she had taken Alex’s copy of Crime and Punishment to read and that he must have
written the account information in it. To retrieve the book and stop Cassie and Miranda from spilling
his criminal secrets, Victor sends Feliks to kill them. While being pursued by Feliks,
Cassie discovers the killer is actually Buckley, the man she’s been having a sexual relationship
with. Cassie and Miranda escape from Buckley, but hatch a plan to take him down once and for all.
Unfortunately, that plan immediately goes awry, when Miranda instead confronts Victor,
killing him, but being shot in the leg in the process. This forces Cassie to deal with Buckley
herself. Cassie and Buckley fight, resulting in Buckley getting the upper hand. Fortunately,
Cassie’s friend and fellow flight attendant Shane arrives, shooting Buckley and arresting him.
Shane reveals himself to be a CIA agent, secretly infiltrating the flight attendants
to monitor Megan due to her involvement with the North Koreans and their corporate espionage.
Cassie then returns home and is fully exonerated in the murder of Alex,
due in part to Annie finding the lost Lionfish flash drive and turning it over the FBI agents Van
and Kim. Cassie and Annie reconcile and then Cassie discovers that Miranda has left her
Alex’s copy of Crime and Punishment, but with the page containing the account information missing.
Cassie makes a vow to learn from her past mistakes and remain sober,
then returns to work with a new lease on life. While on her next flight,
she is surprised to find Shane still posing as a flight attendant. He informs Cassie that he was
still working undercover and that his boss at the CIA was interested in hiring Cassie as an asset.