🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

Firefly Lane loves a good mystery, and so does Tully Hart. In Season 1, viewers were encouraged to wonder what had led to best friends Tully (Katherine Heigl) and Kate Mularkey (Sarah Chalke) fighting on the steps of someone’s funeral. The season finale reveals who died (Kate’s dad), but not the reason for their falling out. Season 2 picks up that twisted narrative thread, but also raises a new question: Who is Tully’s dad? Tully’s quest to find her lost paternal figure drives much of the first half of Firefly Lane Season 2, but she doesn’t get any real answers until Episode 5, the culmination of decades of searching.

Let’s back up, though. Teenage Tully’s (Ali Skovbye) genealogical curiosity begins in the season premiere, “Wish You Were Here.” Living in Seattle with her grandmother while her mother, Cloud (Beau Garrett), serves a jail sentence, Tully discovers some pictures of her mother with a mystery man. Convinced that this could be the dad she never knew, Tully confronts her mother during a prison visit, only to be told to mind her own business. Mind her own business? Has Cloud even met her daughter?

Of course, her mother’s reaction only makes future journalist Tully more determined to find out the truth, and she convinces Kate (Roan Curtis) to run off in search of the man in the photograph. Their hitchhiking adventure quickly hits a dead end in Episode 2, “On the Road,” but by then the plot has already thickened. The episode opens with a flashback of a younger Cloud frantically knocking on the front door of a mansion. The year is about 1960. Holding baby Tully in her arms, she screams, “You’re just a bunch of cowards! She is your family. She has a name. You can’t pretend she doesn’t exist.” When the door finally does open, it reveals one Benedict Binswanger (Greg Germann), the very same aspiring governor that Tully would eventually face off against as a reporter in the 1980s. How is he connected to all this? Could he be Tully’s dad?

Close, but not quite. Fast-forward to Episode 5 and 2004. Tully is trying to get her career back on track by making her very own documentary special about her lifelong quest to find her long-lost dad. Cloud ultimately agrees to participate and finally spills her secret: Tully’s father is actually Parker Binswanger, Benedict’s kinder, more sensitive brother.

After discovering that Cloud was pregnant, the two planned to run away to San Francisco together, but were thwarted when Parker’s family found out. Cloud received a terse letter from Parker, informing her that he was choosing a fancy college over a life with her. Heavily pregnant, Cloud went to the Binswanger mansion to get answers, only to be told that Parker had already gone. Benedict paid Cloud to stay silent about the whole thing — hence the strangely extensive knowledge of Tully’s past he displays during an encounter between the two at a restaurant in Episode 4, after his term as governor is up.

After some more digging, Kate finds out that Parker owns a restaurant called PJ Pelican’s. But when Kate and Tully get there, it’s too late. Parker’s wife tells Tully that he passed away just six weeks before. As it turns out, Parker never really rejected Cloud — or Tully. The Binswangers and Cloud’s family lied to them so they’d each believe that they’d been rejected by the other. When Parker went to Cloud’s house, her father handed him a similar letter to the one Cloud had received. It informed him that she’d had changed her mind about having the baby and was going to get an abortion. Eventually, Parker changed his name and bought the restaurant, cutting ties with his family.

So, about that restaurant. Episode 5 also follows 1985 Tully as she heads to a restaurant she believes is somehow connected to Benedict and his shady dealings. The story doesn’t pan out — no one there wants to talk — and Tully leaves with only a burned hand to show for it. But her hunch turns out to have been spot on. In 2004, Parker’s wife tells Tully that Benedict would come to the restaurant from time to time before running for office, worried that his brother might talk to the press. And the owner who tended to her burned hand in 1985? That was her own father, PJ. He was working up the courage to contact Tully when he had a stroke and died.

Devastated, Tully nonetheless gets her revenge on the man who tore her family apart. Armed with a camera crew, she corners Benedict on a public street and slaps him in the face before calling him a “pathetic, lonely one-term governor, who lost his brother because of his selfishness and greed.” Then she lands the final blow: “As much as it hurts that I never knew my father, at least I never had to call you uncle.”

To quote Tully’s new agent, Justine Jordan (Jolene Purdy), “Damn, she’s good.”

Take a Stroll Down Firefly Lane with the First 5 Minutes of Season 2Season 2 picks up by heading to the past!