Reckless Series Ending Explained And Full Recap: Does Charlie Betray June?

As soon as I finished watching Reckless, I genuinely reconsidered ever driving a car again. I even told my girlfriend, What if some rando suddenly steps in front of the car while we are driving and talking? What do you even do then? That is basically the entire nightmare this show builds its premise on, and trust me, it is stressful in the best way. The situation the lead characters land themselves in right at the start sets up one of the most gripping spirals I have seen in a while, and it definitely makes you a little paranoid about the cons of driving and lying. When it comes to the performances and the plot, I have nothing but praise, but since the show itself is far too interesting to waste time circling around, let us get straight into what unfolds in this four-episode miniseries.

Spoilers Ahead

What happens in the show?

June and Charlie are siblings whose lives couldn’t be more different. June is a successful lawyer who has her own firm and deeply cares about her designer scarves and her “heat-controlled” car seats, while Charlie runs a music store that June basically finances and spends his weekends with his daughter Kiah. Both of them are descendants of Aboriginal people of Australia, so when you hear the term “blackfellas” in this show from time to time, it refers to the Indigenous Australians. June and Charlie have a bittersweet relationship and they don’t really spend much time together, but when June’s wife, Kate, leaves early from a family wedding, Charlie has to drive her back home. The two siblings start bickering about some trivial thing when Charlie accidentally runs over someone. June’s first instinct is to tell him to drive on, but Charlie checks on the man who is unfortunately dead, because of him. He suggests calling the cops, but June refuses to risk going to jail for something she believes was unavoidable. Charlie finds the man’s wallet; his name is George, and he lives right across the street. And while June tells him to put it back, Charlie decides it’s better to move him. They carry George into his living room and sit him down, and June discovers from some papers that he had terminal pancreatic cancer, convincing herself they’ve done him a favor by giving him “the gift of quick death” and sparing him months of terrible pain. They drive off thinking they’ve left no trace, but as their car disappears, a light flicks on in the house across the street, which indicates that someone has witnessed everything.

How does Charlie get involved with George’s niece? 

June gets on with her life, despite finding mud on her heels, which in turn goes on her hands, a very Lady Macbeth moment if you’d like. She and Kate are having issues again, and we discover that June has cheated on Kate once, and from the look of it, it doesn’t seem like she wants to keep apologizing for it time and time again. Meanwhile, Charlie is paranoid, checking newspapers and the internet for funeral notices. The painful wait ends when Charlie gets a call from George’s lawyer, informing him that his wallet has been found in George’s house—shabby criminal, I must say. June takes Charlie to the funeral and waits outside when Charlie is supposed to do nothing more than just take his wallet and come back running. However, he’s completely flustered and head over heels when he meets Sharne, George’s niece and only relative. Charlie decides to stay and help her out with serving the quiches and the sandwiches, and he makes up stories about how George used to visit his music store to buy records, how he kept himself busy, and how he loved to take walks, sometimes even at midnight, wink wink. When Charlie plays one of George’s records after everybody leaves, Sharne and he start dancing together, and before you know it, they’ve slept together. 

Why does Sharne get suspicious of Charlie and June? 

June also spins stories about being a trumpet player and going to the same band practice George once went to. When Sharne notices that George’s death certificate lists natural causes but the doctor quietly mentions bruising on his legs and torso, she gets suspicious and thinks about sending the body for an autopsy. June and Charlie obviously do not want that, so June suggests bringing in a private investigator to look through George’s clothes and the house. The private investigator happens to be June’s distant cousin, Roddy, who used to be a sharp tool but has slipped into a depressed drunken fog ever since his wife, Shazza, left him. June just fired him from her own firm and now drags him in to investigate George’s death. The man can barely stand, and he is a complete mess. Meanwhile, Kate has always had her doubts about June cheating on her again, and she storms into George’s house only to find June with Charlie and Sharne. Overwhelmed with guilt, Kate invites Sharne to dinner and tells her that June has never touched a trumpet in her life and that she and Charlie are not even close, which is another lie they cooked up. Sharne decides to stay a little longer and postpones her flight, which sends June into a rage, and she is mad at Charlie for sleeping with her.

How does June handle the investigation and the blackmail?

Charlie tries to clear things up when Sharne confronts him about all the lies, and he does it with even more lies. He suddenly comes up with a story that June was handling a confidential case for George and they only made the fake backstories to avoid more questions. Sharne buys it, and their little honeymoon phase starts again. But June’s problems are nowhere near over. Roddy has pulled himself together, and he is determined to prove he is still the best in the game. He inspects the pants George was wearing and figures out the marks are not from grass or mud but from metal. He takes a sample to send to a lab, and when June cannot convince him to hand it over, she sinks even lower. So she reaches out to Zoe, the girl she slept with who works at the same forensics lab. Zoe quietly dumps the sample, and there goes Roddy’s proof. But the witness who saw June and Charlie run George over turns out to be his next-door neighbor, Valda. She demands twenty grand from June, and when June cannot scare her off with her status, she has to give in. June asks Kate to take that amount out of their joint account to help Charlie, but Kate is trying to conceive again, so that option dies right there. June then goes to a shady electronics store called Disco Electro, where the boss, Cameron, hands her the money instantly. She pays Valda and destroys the CCTV clip she had. But Valda was not the only one with the footage. Roddy finds out that another neighbor, Barry, has cameras in his place. When June and Charlie asked him earlier, Barry claimed they were fake to scare burglars, but that was a lie too. Roddy gets the footage, and now he knows exactly who killed George. He also tracks down the garage where June got her car fixed using her own credit card and even her dealings with the guys at Disco Electro.

Is Sharne really George’s cousin? 

While sorting through George’s records, Charlie finds an old photo of George with a little girl, and on the back it says she is his niece at Adventure World, a theme park. Since Sharne said she has never been to Australia, Charlie is stunned but decides to sit on it for a bit. When he finally asks her about it, Sharne freaks out and accuses him of being like her past boyfriends, who start with harmless questions and then spiral into stalking and controlling her. She later apologizes and tells him that right after that trip her father fell into alcoholism and her whole life went off the rails. But one night, when Sharne slips out of bed, Charlie gets uneasy and ends up stumbling onto Amy’s social media account. In one of her pictures, Sharne is in the background wearing the uniform of an Australian pub.

Meanwhile, we learn that Valda is the one who hired Sharne. Sharne was stranded with an expired visa, and Valda paid her to pretend to be George’s niece since his real family abandoned him, and whoever the real niece is clearly does not care. Valda has her own motives too. She is set to inherit George’s house, probably because she cared for him in his last days and he got attached to her. But now Sharne begins to suspect Valda. When she checks George’s medication, she realizes Valda has been giving him overdoses of morphine, which explains why he was feeling dizzy and confused and wandering out of the house at night. Sharne sneaks into Valda’s place looking for proof and finds the same medication there. What’s even stranger is that Valda has replaced her own husband’s photo with George’s, and it is unclear whether the man in the picture is her dead husband or another older man she slowly poisoned before George.

How does June get into trouble with the mafia? 

June has always handled Charlie’s finances, but when they clash over the mess they are in, she threatens to stop managing his stuff. Charlie snaps back that she should go ahead. So when June’s CA, Stevie, brings Charlie his annual financial reports to sign, he refuses without seeing every single figure. That appears to be a problem because June has a deal with the guys at Disco Electro, who are major drug dealers, and they use Charlie’s music shop as a front for a whole network of shell companies. It is a full money laundering setup. When June finally tells Charlie after a long fight, he pulls away from her even more.

Meanwhile, June is threatened by Desmond, Cameron’s boss, a crime lord known as the Perth Don Teeth. Desmond is not someone you want to cross, and he is not interested in June’s bright ideas about expanding their business because he likes minimal paperwork that keeps everything running quietly. Roddy follows June when she gets threatened in her car, and one of Cameron’s men even beats him up for poking around. June is spiraling, and the situation is getting worse by the minute. And it does get worse. She misses the IVF appointment and leaves Kate alone, and even though Kate forgives her and agrees to use June’s eggs, she finds out that June had them destroyed years ago. On top of all that, Roddy demands his job back, with his own comfy office and a company car as add-ons for keeping his mouth shut. 

Why does Charlie betray June?

Cameron’s men abduct Charlie from his shop, and June has finally had enough of the bullying. She scoops up Kiah and drops her off with Kate, then cooks up a wild idea to pitch a new business to Desmond. She plans on a mining project that would require betraying the indigenous people and their land, and she is absolutely fine with that if it means getting Charlie back. Desmond agrees to free him, so June and Roddy storm into the warehouse where Charlie is held, and they rescue him, with Roddy proudly waving around his fake gun like a hero and somehow scaring all the goons. But when June refuses to give Roddy what he wants, Roddy turns to Charlie and asks him to hand June over because every piece of evidence points to her. Charlie refuses, because she has raised him since he was a kid, and, in his mind, their bond has only gotten stronger since they ran over an old man together.

But June’s life is about to spiral even further. As she gets ready for Kate’s exhibition, looking fabulous, she gets a call from Charlie. Sharne has blackmailed Valda into giving her twenty grand, all the cash she just collected from June. Sharne has proof, so Valda has no choice but to pay. When Sharne tries to pack and leave, Valda’s useless son, Rex, jumps her in a bargain bin burglar costume. Charlie shows up just in time and saves her. Sharne finally tells Charlie the truth about everything, and he admits it was him who killed George. They decide they still like each other, but Valda immediately calls the cops on Sharne. When Valda met with a lawyer to lock down her inheritance, she was told George’s real niece has reached out and wants an autopsy, so Valda flips the script and tries to get Sharne arrested for fraud. Which means June has to ditch Kate again and fix Charlie’s romance. She uses her brain and gets the cops to agree to let Sharne go since she has not taken a cent from George’s estate, and they let her go under the condition that she leaves the country.

Just when Kate thinks her nightmare is over, Desmond walks into the exhibition and punches June in the face. He tells her he wants all the profits from the new business idea. Kate walks in, and she is done. And here is why June even got involved with the mob. After she punched her old boss, nobody in town would hire her, so she had to borrow money from the mob to start her firm. The favors kept growing, and she had no escape route. Kate threatens her with ruining her family’s reputation, and that is the moment June checks out completely. She was never truly in love with Kate anyway, and she was always walking on eggshells around her. She has had enough of Kate’s rich white girl attitude. June walks out of the exhibition with a bloody face that somehow looks amazing with her white suit, takes a final dig at their champagne, and leaves. She gives Charlie a credit card and tells him to run away with Sharne and start fresh.

Now you would think June finally has control of the situation, but no. She goes to Valda one last time and tells her she could make a very strong case with the evidence Sharne gave her, but instead she wants a deal. June wants Valda to tell the authorities the truth, that Charlie was the one driving the car. If she does that, both of them walk free. Valda agrees, but Roddy, along with Charlie and Sharne, is listening from outside using his shady radio setup. Charlie confronts June as she walks out. June is exhausted from fighting every battle alone, and the show finally lets us see why she does not want children, because she is already fighting a world stacked against her. Charlie has called the cops on her, and she hugs him goodbye. So not only was she not responsible for George’s death, but she also saved her brother again, even when he threw her under the bus for his own crime.

I truly do not understand how everyone is so comfortable doing this to her, but that is exactly how the world works. The hardworking woman who carries everyone on her back gets punished, while Charlie, who actually ran George over, gets a cute little happily ever after with his girlfriend. And yes, I am frustrated with this ending, as everyone should be. After everything we have seen, Charlie only has a life and a career because of June, and what does he do? He puts her in jail. Classic entitled manchild behavior. 

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