Firefly Lane season 2 part 1 recap guide: All 9 episodes explained

Firefly Lane season 2, episode 4 recap: Papa Don’t Preach

Firefly Lane season 2, episode 4 begins with a tragic flashback to Johnny’s time in Iraq. We see that when the explosion went off, Johnny thought he saw visions of a young girl with a balloon. The “flashback” is actually a bad dream. Kate wakes Johnny up to remind him that Marah has a field hockey game later that day and he brushes her off.

1970s

In the 1970s, Kate tries her hand at throwing another party at her house. Margie is out for the night, so it’s just Bud and he agrees to stay in his room. The plan is to host an AV Club night to showcase Eugene’s (Seth Isaac Johnson) movie to the group. But a few of the kids smuggle in alcohol, and the night takes a turn into debauchery with Tully, Kate, Eugene, and even Lisa-Karen getting drunk.

Eugene asks Tully out, but since Tully knows Kate likes him, she suggests that he ask her instead, so he does.

Kate thinks she’s finally going to get her first kiss with Eugene, but just before their lips can touch, Bud walks in and interrupts them. Bud quickly shuts down the festivities after that and instructs Kate to clean everything up before her mother returns. But then Kate gets sick and throws up all over her dad’s slippers.

The next morning, Bud pretends that nothing ever happened and even cleans the house himself. Margie never seems to find out, and Kate is touched that her dad would do that for her.

Meanwhile, when Tully gets home, she gets harassed by Cloud’s new uber-religious boyfriend, who attempts to wash her mouth out with soap. To Cloud’s credit, she immediately kicks him out of the house.

1990s

We skip ahead to the 1990s in this episode. Tully is now working at Get Up America, and Kate and Johnny are married with a young Marah running around.

For the first time, Tully and Kate are living apart, with Tully in New York and Kate back in Seattle. Kate flies out to New York to visit her, and the two bond and lament the fact they don’t get to see each other as much anymore. Kate also thinks she’s pregnant and is upset when she realizes she’s not. It looks like Kate really wanted to have more children, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards for her and Johnny.

Tully confronts Benedict Binswanger again in the 1990s after spotting him at a restaurant while out to dinner with Kate. He’s extremely cruel to her when she calls him out for pretending not to know who she was during that press conference in the 1980s.

2000s

After seeing the success of Tully’s website and blog, Wilson King reaches out to her and offers to drop the lawsuit and give her back The Girlfriend Hour, allowing her complete creative control. But Tully turns him down after Wilson makes a patronizing remark and calls her “kiddo,” similar to what Benedict Binswanger said to her in the 90s.

Tully decides she’s going to do something better. She wants to make a documentary special following her journey to finding her biological father. Unfortunately, Cloud wants no part of it, and she and Tully get into a big fight that ends with her moving out of Tully’s penthouse.

Elsewhere, Kate and Johnny reach a breaking point when Johnny lashes out at Marah’s field hockey game resulting in a huge fight between them. Kate tells Johnny he needs to move out.

Later, Johnny and Marah visit an outdoor farmers market, and Johnny loses track of Marah. It gives him a sense of horrible deja vu as he remembers losing Marah once in the past, in the 1990s, when Kate was in New York. All of that is compounded by Johnny’s traumatic vision of Marah in Iraq and his fear of losing his family.

That moment causes Johnny to re-evaluate, and he finally apologizes to Kate and tells her how guilty he feels for accepting that job in the first place because he could have died and left his family behind. Johnny promises Kate he’s going to fix things, starting by going to therapy.

The episode ends with another peek at the car accident in 2005. When the paramedics arrive they find Tully in the vehicle!