Vince Friedken has unraveled his brother’s carefully built life. In Black Rabbit, the prodigal son is also the consummate screwup — and he’s bringing everything down around him. 

“Vince is kind of a fuckup,” Jason Bateman, who plays Vince, tells Tudum. “He makes a bunch of mistakes and is risky to have around, but he’s a well-meaning guy.” That amicable nature is slight comfort to Vince’s brother Jake (Jude Law), the owner of up-and-coming New York restaurant Black Rabbit. When gambling addict Vince sweeps back into town, he’s a chaos magnet, and soon Jake is dragged down into the depths of New York’s criminal underworld, trying to keep his business afloat and his loved ones alive.

But, of course, Jake still loves his brother. “You understand why this guy gets away with it,” Law tells Tudum. “Sometimes with characters like this you think, ‘How is this 50-year-old guy getting away with this?’ In Jason’s hands, because Jason is so likable and humorous and warm and entertaining, you understand why people keep getting lured into the fray.” 

It’s that dynamic that formed the starting point for Black Rabbit creators Zach Baylin and Kate Susman. “We both have siblings and were interested in exploring the idea that you’re one person with your sibling and someone else in the world,” Susman tells Tudum. “And that no matter what you do or where you go in life, your childhood dynamic can be really hard to escape.”

Also hard to escape? Ruthless mob boss Mancuso (Oscar winner Troy Kotsur), who’s out to collect Vince’s unpaid debt from years prior. Add in cutthroat business politics, an illicit affair, and criminal accusations leveled at Jake’s restaurant itself, and you get a stew Black Rabbit wouldn’t be too happy to serve. 

Everything culminates in the final episode, “Isle of Joy,” which sees Jake and Vince struggling to get away from their past and find their way to a brighter future. The series begins in Episode 1 with a flash forward to the restaurant being robbed in the middle of a high-class party. “We wanted to throw the audience into the middle of the world, into the height of the tension of what Jake and Vince were going through,” says Baylin. “I don't think we ever talked about it as being really a whodunit. I think that we looked at the mystery as more of a whydunit, or how did we get here?”

The final episodes reveal the complicated truth behind that tantalizing cliffhanger. Read on to learn the secrets of Black Rabbit.

How does Jake try to help Vince?

When Black Rabbit begins, Vince has been long erased from the restaurant masthead. His erratic behavior led to a bet over a jump from the roof and a subsequent lawsuit, and Jake, investor Wes (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù), and head chef Roxie (Amaka Okafor) agreed to buy him out for the good of the business. That doesn’t keep Vince from sloshing back into Jake’s life after a violent encounter with a thief in Reno ends with him once again penniless. 

In the years since Vince left town, Jake has built Black Rabbit (named after the duo’s previous venture, a rock band) into a New York City powerhouse. But he’s still missing something.

So part of Jake is pleased to see his brother — but not for long. Soon, Vince has fallen back into his old habits, and a few of Mancuso’s representatives have come around to demand repayment on an old debt. Desperate to protect his estranged daughter Gen (Odessa Young) from the threats of Mancuso’s men, Vince turns to Jake, who finds just enough love in his heart to bail his brother out once again. He offers Mancuso and his wild-child son Junior (Forrest Weber) a payment plan, with Black Rabbit as collateral. Skimming off the top of a charity dinner gets the pair on the way to paying their debt, but things only get more complex from there.

What happened to Anna at Black Rabbit?

Jake may present himself as buttoned-up, but one of the biggest problems he and his business face is entirely on him. The third floor of Black Rabbit is a celebrity gathering place, where musician/part-owner Wes holds court and famous faces chow down. It’s also a boys’ club, with horrible behavior flying under the radar of the management. Jake has turned a blind eye to those misdeeds in the past, but when Anna (Abbey Lee) accuses renowned artist and third floor fixture Jules (John Ales) of sexual assault, he can’t hide from the truth any longer. 

Jake has financially overextended himself. He’s planning to expand to another restaurant and is embezzling from his own restaurant to fund his lifestyle. He’s also begun an affair with interior designer Estelle (Cleopatra Coleman), Wes’ girlfriend, and is struggling to clean up Vince’s messes.

So when Anna makes her accusation, he’s less than sympathetic — and the revelation drives a wedge between Jake and his head chef Roxie, who begins to wonder if she might get more out of her career without the two brothers making messes all around her.

The money from the charity dinner is a windfall for both Jake and Vince, but Jake gets to it first. He uses it to fill in the missing holes from his embezzlement, leaving $16,000 — not nearly enough to pay off Vince’s $100,000 debt. With a reporter trying to speak to Anna about her accusation, and Mancuso’s henchmen on the prowl, disaster is closing in.

Who kills Anna?

Anna’s story ends tragically. Jules’ fixer Campbell (Morgan Spector) is on her trail, offering her a hefty payout and a flight out of the country in exchange for her silence. She accepts, but a shortsighted move from Vince makes things even worse. As he’s being hassled by Junior, he blurts out the situation with Anna, and the musclehead takes it as a threat to his father’s collateral. Junior heads out to threaten Anna into silence, but as he tries to break down her bathroom door, she hits her head and dies. Campbell slides in afterward and cleans the scene up, leaving no trace of his own presence behind. 

Why does the robbery happen?

After Anna’s death, everything truly begins to fall apart for the brothers. The police are asking questions and looking for security camera footage; Mancuso and his men are still waiting for their money; and Wes has found out about Jake’s affair with Estelle, leading him to join Roxie in her bid to buy Black Rabbit out from under the Friedkens’ noses. Vince and Jake finally scrape together the money for Mancuso by running an insurance scam on their childhood home, but it’s too late: Junior is on the warpath, ready to kill the pair of them to cover up his involvement in Anna’s death.

So Jake offers Junior a bone: a tip about robbing Black Rabbit during a party that will bring an array of wealthy guests to the third floor. After the brothers get into a massive fight (during which Jake calls Vince an anchor weighing him down and blames him for all their troubles), Vince decides to join Junior in robbing his own restaurant. But things quickly go wrong when Wes makes a move to try and stop the armed robber. He’s shot, and Junior turns towards Jake next, but Vince saves his brother and kills Junior. On the run, Vince sells the stolen goods and tries to stay one step ahead of the furious Mancuso — who kidnaps Gen and holds her hostage. All the pieces are in place for an explosive finale. 

How does Black Rabbit end?

With Wes succumbing to his injuries, Vince is soon accused of the murder. Jake finds a way out for Gen by trading Vince’s location to Mancuso in exchange for his niece’s safety, but Vince wriggles his way out once again. The brothers meet, for the last time, and hash out their differences. Vince takes the opportunity to reveal the secret he’s been keeping for his entire life, one the audience already knows via flashback: Vince killed their abusive father, dropping a bowling ball on his head from upstairs as he menaced their mother. 

The seeds of this revelation were sown as early as the first episode of Black Rabbit, when we see Vince asking a casino employee to turn off “I Choose You” by Willie Hutch. “In Episode 7, we flash back to his parents listening to that song,” Susman notes. “Just seeding what they were listening to that shaped who the guys were.”

Vince has spent the last few decades hating himself for what he did, but Jake has held no such grudge. He reveals a secret of his own: He knows Vince killed their father. He’s known for his entire life, and he loved Vince anyway. “Vince felt responsible for something that had upended the brothers’ lives,” Baylin says. “But in some ways, it was something heroic and protective. You’re bonded by the difficult choices that you’ve made in your life that sometimes feel villainous, and you can’t always understand how other people have viewed them.”

The brothers decamp to the roof of Black Rabbit, where Vince made his ill-advised bet all those years before. This time, Vince makes a phone call. “I owe you a jump,” he then tells Jake, and jumps from the roof to his death, taking himself out of the equation — and out of his brother’s life.

“In his mind he was cursed from the beginning, and so he lived that life,” Susman says. “We wanted to show that his journey was to actually become selfless or to say, ‘I really can only see one way to help my brother at this moment,’ and he does it. We always knew that the show was going to be a tragedy, but I think Vince’s final act is done with love and kindness in his heart.”

Vince’s death by suicide was always part of the plan for Black Rabbit, but it took some time to settle on the method of his tragic final act. “We have an amazing location scout, Paul Eskenazi, who found that restaurant,” Baylin recalls. “Once we found that and the roof and how cinematic and symbolic that setting was, we decided that that’s how it would go down.”

Vince’s final phone call, it turns out, was a call to the police confessing the entirety of his involvement in the robbery and Wes’ murder. “

Jake is home free, but Black Rabbit will never recover. Mancuso arrives at Jake’s home to take his pound of flesh, but hugs Jake and leaves when he learns of Vince’s death. It’s a shockingly tender moment after everything that’s unfolded. 

The final moments of the series are bittersweet. Jules is arrested for assaulting Anna. Roxie starts fresh with a new business. Estelle goes off on her own as well, leaving Jake to wonder if they ever could have been something real. And Jake, while devastated by the loss of his brother, tries to make the most of his new lease on life. He takes his son to school and tries to stay present: no more investors (and certainly not mobsters) on his tail. The final moments of the series loop all the way back around to the first episode — we see Jake in the bathroom, buttoning up his shirt, preparing for the day. But instead of running Black Rabbit, he’s manning the bar at someone else’s restaurant. 

For the creators, even after all of the pain Jake has been through, the series ends on an inherently optimistic note. “Jake moves on,” Susman says. “He’s able to live in a different way than he ever has before, unencumbered by the weight of their past.”

Black Rabbit is now streaming on Netflix.