WAGMI (Season 3, Episode 2)
Premise: A reclusive math tutor is kidnapped and suffocated after online hunters decide he is the anonymous founder of a failed cryptocurrency.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 3, Episode 2
- Starring
- DS Henry Graff (Aden Young), DS Frankie Bateman (Kathleen Munroe), Insp. Vivienne Holness (Karen Robinson), DCA Theo Forrester (K.C. Collins), Mark Yohannes (Araya Mengesha), Dr. Lucy Da Silva (Nicola Correia-Damude)
- Guest stars
- Percy Hynes White as River Smith, David La Haye as Patrice Beauchamp, Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll as Malcolm Bell, Jun Che as Stuart Song, Vanessa Matsui as Hannah Bell
- Director
- Winnifred Jong
- Writers
- Tassie Cameron & Rory Diamond
Summary
The Case
“WAGMI” begins with a distorted online voice vowing that a crowd called the Hivemind will hunt down and dismember Takashi, the anonymous founder of a collapsed cryptocurrency. Math tutor Stuart Song is later seized on his way to dinner, and a dog walker finds his body snagged in a tree below a bridge. The autopsy shows he was suffocated with a plastic bag sealed with duct tape and that the cold preserved him; a surgical scar helps name him. Stuart, 28, had wiped his online presence two years earlier and paid his rent only in cash.
His landlord, Joel Costa, admits taking $800 hidden in a book after a man with a camera told him Stuart was Takashi, who launched Ryotcoin and disappeared with investors’ money, now about $2 billion in Bitcoin. That fortune was moved out while Stuart was held for three days in an empty North York house, reached by a rented van. A camera hidden in a bird’s nest outside Stuart’s home leads to filmmaker Patrice Beauchamp, who sank his film funding into Ryotcoin, is making a film about people who vanish, and received an anonymous dossier naming Stuart. A streetwear cap leads the detectives to the tipster, River Smith, a young puzzle fan who calls the search a treasure hunt.
The Interrogation
Patrice says he always backed up to the studio servers, contradicting manager Malcolm Bell, who is broke and desperate to pay for a private school for his autistic six-year-old son, Max. The van was rented with a wallet stolen in Port Credit, where Malcolm lives, and the empty house belongs to his wife Hannah’s uncle. Malcolm admits abducting Stuart for a $300,000 ransom but says Stuart persuaded him he was only an early backer of the coin; he left him tied up, came back to find him dead, and moved the body because workers were due at the house.
The detectives doubt he is the killer and ask Forrester for more time. Enhanced audio from the nest camera catches a lurker using the same insults Takashi once aimed at Stuart online. At the coffee shop where River works, Graff and Bateman lay it out: River is Takashi, fed Stuart to Patrice as a decoy, slipped a tracker into his jacket, and after Malcolm left, suffocated him and sent the $2 billion to himself. They give him a choice between protective custody and a public investigation that would expose him to the investors he cheated.
The ending
Spoiler: River does not deny it. He bargains for constant protection, a private room and all the books he wants, and is handcuffed, as a detective remarks that in hiding his fortune so well, River trapped himself along with it.
Suspects’ fates: River Smith, arrested; Malcolm Bell, arrested.
Why it stands out
- The title is a crypto rallying cry, “We’re All Gonna Make It,” which the detectives spot in the margins of the anonymous dossier.
- Graff turns Da Silva’s joke about savouring a big reveal back on Bateman when he holds back his own find from the nest camera.