The Jetty’s Episode One Twist Explained: What the Amy Photo Means

Warning: spoilers for The Jetty episode one.

In the final scene of The Jetty episode one, DC Ember Manning (Jenna Coleman) looks through her dead husband’s possessions. The first anniversary of Mack’s death from testicular cancer is approaching, and Ember has decided it’s time to move forward. She’s joined by their 15-year-old daughter Hannah (Ruby Stokes), who flicks through old photographs and greetings cards.

Inside the pages of a book, Hannah finds a picture of her father from before she was born. “Oh my god, dad looks so young!” she says, before asking “Who’s that girl in the photo?”. Ember’s reaction is one of stunned disbelief. “That’s Amy Knightly,” she tells Hannah, “the girl who went missing.”

Viewers will recognise the girl in the photo as the nameless schoolgirl character they’ve watched all episode, in the assumption that her story’s timeline was taking place in the present and running simultaneously with adult-Ember’s. Not so. In a twist, every scene of the 15-year-old schoolgirl character played by Bo Bragason is actually set in 2007, not 2024.

Viewers knew that podcaster Riz (Weruche Opia) was investigating the unsolved disappearance of Amy Knightly from 17 years ago, but not that the character we’d been watching throughout the episode was Amy herself. We’d been shown rebellious Amy befriending quiet Caitlin (Laura Marcus), and both of them wearing the same school uniforms as Ember’s daughter and her friends, so it was easy to believe that all the girls existed in the same timeframe.

The present-day storyline, in which Ember suspects that 16-year-old local girl Miranda’s pregnancy was due to statutory rape by a sexual predator targeting young girls, also led viewers to believe that the girl’s secret older ‘boyfriend’ Malachy (Tom Glynn-Carney) was Miranda’s abuser.

The photograph, however, reveals that Malachy is in fact a younger version of Mack, Ember’s dead husband. In 2007, Mack committed statutory rape by having sex with underage schoolgirl Amy before her disappearance, and as a result, Ember is shocked to realise, must now be considered as a chief suspect in her disappearance.

It’s a revelation that prompts Ember to re-evaluate her whole relationship with Mack, who was illegally having sex with Amy while also sleeping with 16-year-old Ember. Was her schoolgirl love story and pregnancy at age 17 by an older man as romantic as she’d always believed, or had she, like Amy, been targeted and groomed by someone with a perverse interest in young girls, and perhaps even, a killer?

The Jetty is available to stream now on BBC iPlayer.