Anna Pigeon Season 1 Episode 5 delivers its most high-stakes episode when Anna wakes up trapped in a cave with no memory of what happened.
The episode shifts from an episodic format to something it hasn’t done before—well, in its first handful of episodes, at least—while breaking it up into a two-parter, leaving audiences on the edge of their seats as they try to piece together what happened to Anna and how she ended up in such a dire situation.
The audience is purposefully kept in the dark alongside Anna, locked into her perspective and feeling the same disorientation and confusion that she feels.
Experiencing the story in real time with the character means that we’re finding everything out at the same time she is, through her flashbacks, which only amplifies the suspense.
Initially, Anna thinks that falling into the cave was an accident, especially as she experiences memory loss from a concussion.
However, when someone appears at the top of the cave and throws her a sandwich, it’s evident that this wasn’t an accident—she was intentionally pushed.
But why?
Anna bends and breaks her mind to find an answer to that question, while also trying to piece together who could have it out for her.
And from the little we’ve seen on this show, she’s extremely good at making enemies, with one particular one coming to mind—the show’s established villain, Jeremiah.
We know he’s crossed paths with Anna and even had a tense confrontation, but the rest of what we’ve seen from him and his motivations has been limited.
And as Anna begins to get flashbacks cluing her into the events that transpired before her fall, it isn’t immediately clear how or why Jeremiah would be involved.
It actually feels like misdirection on purpose, though it becomes increasingly more probable that whoever was involved had access to Anna’s personal life.
As bits and pieces unravel, we learn that she was pushed in after witnessing a man climbing out of the cave using a ladder. And before that, she had an encounter with a woman who twisted her ankle, whom she later finds buried in the cave.
It seems as though Anna crossed the wrong person, with the suspect believing that she’d witnessed the murder.
However, Anna’s account of events is also hard to trust, as she’s going in and out of lucidity after drinking water that was drugged in a canteen left behind by the suspect. Not to mention she’s wrestling with her own subconscious, as she sees Zach in the cave, who goes from being a helpful hallucination—telling her it’s okay to remember the bad things—to eventually becoming a dangerous one that blames her for his death. In flashbacks, we see that Anna was so drunk the night of his murder she didn’t even realize he was dead next to her when she went to bed.
Obviously, these are emotions that Anna hasn’t worked through before, but she does get a moment of clarity here too. After Zach’s death, all she wanted to do was “disappear,” hence her decision to move into the woods and become a park ranger, but coming this close to death—without knowing whether anyone was even looking for her as she pushed them all away—made her realize that’s far from the truth. She doesn’t want to disappear; she wants to live.
And thankfully, Anna is resourceful. She may have been a stage manager at one point, but honestly, her line about embracing new hobbies following a husband’s murder was hilarious.
And those stage manager instincts actually came in handy, as she, in her delusional, dehydrated and concussed state, set a trap for the person who trapped her.
She knew that the killer would come down if he didn’t see her, thinking that she’d passed out somewhere, which allowed her to ambush him from the shadows, knock him out, and use the ladder to climb to freedom—trapping him in the process.
It worked, too!
The episode’s strength was fully tapping into Anna, as audiences got to know her on a primal level—stripped of any external factors as she was forced to rely solely on herself and her instincts to survive.
However, that’s also the show’s biggest flaw. Anna is the only compelling draw, but a good lead only goes so far without an engaging supporting cast.
We’re rooting for Anna, but it’s hard to root for or really care about anyone else in her circle.
Part of that is because she’s pushed them all away as a lone wolf—which she deeply regrets now that she’s in this predicament, as she thinks no one is coming to look for her—but the other half is that they are all largely forgettable.
There’s no chemistry between her and Jesse, and I can’t even get invested in their romance because I see the writing on the wall for her and Frederick.
Zoey is quirky and funny, but she doesn’t add much to the series, while Geoff and Manny are just there.
We barely scratched the surface of these characters’ backstories across five episodes, which also means that if Anna has somehow stumbled into a larger conspiracy, it could be any of them, yet we wouldn’t know because we don’t know what their motivations would even be.
At the very least, Jesse and Zoey both knew Anna enough to know that while she keeps a wall up, she wouldn’t just leave and move back to New York without saying goodbye.
So, they pressed for a search party, realizing that someone staged her disappearance to look intentional, which makes it more personal and targeted than Ana simply seeing someone doing something bad in the woods and getting caught in the crosshairs.
Anna and Geoff got into a big fight, but someone knew that she’d be out of work for a week, so no one would question why she wasn’t showing up to work.
Clearly, Anna learned nothing from last week’s episode (where she found herself stuck with another murderer without any backup). Like, girl, please check in and give people your location.
And while Anna’s good at making enemies and putting a target on her back, who would go out of their way to make Anna disappear? As I said, we don’t know any of the rangers or even Jesse well enough to establish a motive, and if it was one of them, it wouldn’t even be that surprising.
Manny’s wife looked extremely shady and uncomfortable, almost guilty, in a handful of scenes when talking about Anna. Manny mentioned Bethany got a new job, too, so could she have had something to do with it? From the little we know, she’s someone who wants money to have a child, so maybe she took the job for a payout. Is it possible Bethany’s new job is with Jeremiah, and he got his claws into what happened?
See how shady she looks?! Photo Credit: Michelle Faye/USA Network © VERSANT MEDIA 2025. All Rights Reserved
Or is it someone connected to Zach’s murder coming to finish the job? Anna seems convinced she left her old life behind, but maybe that’s not entirely true.
Anna’s mind remembered the group of guys whom she wrote up for littering on the beach (and refusing to apologize for smashing the guy’s radio), but while they may be the suspects responsible for the woman’s death, it seems too far-fetched that they’d cover their tracks and know the ins and outs of Anna’s life.
The episode is based on Nevada Barr’s prequel titled The Rope, which follows a similar plot, though in the novel, Anna witnesses a rape before she’s dropped into a vertical rock shaft where the attacker is nearby, watching and psychologically tormenting her.
It serves largely as her origin story, as she emerges as a fighter, but it also intertwines the obvious suspects with other shady characters in the park, leaning into unexpected twists.
In this case, I don’t know if leaving this storyline vague works well for TV, as fans are looking for answers and a payoff for their investment.
At the end of the episode, Anna makes it back to the search party looking for her, falling into Jesse’s arms, but it never reveals the person she left behind trapped in the cave.
And without knowing everyone all too well, paired with Anna’s memory gaps, it’s hard to know who to trust.
Will she be able to guide them back to where she trapped the suspect? And if he was part of a group, did they help him escape before Anna leads anyone back to the scene of the crime?
Anna may be safe and sound, but there are plenty more questions surrounding the incident—and justice needs to be served.
Will it be? And how will the survival and trauma change Anna moving forward? She’s obviously endured plenty with her husband’s death and needs answers, and it’s made her a tough cookie, but now she’s been reminded that leaning on others is necessary too.
What did you think of the episode? Do you have any theories?