"Average Joe" Season 1 Recap: Everything You Need to Know

Not long after the funeral, Joe swings by his father's auto shop and finds the place trashed. Two men jump him: Georgi, a mob enforcer, and Dimitri — his daughter Jennifer's boyfriend, who turns out to be the son of Russian mob boss Nicolai Dzhugashvili. The pair tie Joe up and beat him bloody trying to get the combination to Teddy's safe. He's saved when his best friend Leon wanders in unannounced; the distraction gives Joe an opening, and in the scramble that follows, he kills them both.

Inside the safe, Joe and Leon find $100,000 and a safe deposit box key — proof the mobsters weren't lying. Calling the cops is off the table almost immediately; instead, the pair decide to track down Teddy's missing $10 million themselves. They're soon joined by Officer Benjamin "Touch" Tuchawuski, sent by Joe's wife Angela to check on her husband. Touch walks in on two corpses and a guilty-looking Joe, and decides throwing in with them beats calling it in.

Keeping the secret from their families doesn't last. Jennifer finds Dimitri's body in her dad's van, and Leon's wife Cathy — a true-crime obsessive — ends up shooting a hitman who's got a gun to her husband's head, sent by Nicolai to track down his missing son.

With no better plan on the table, the group runs with Cathy's idea: dismember the bodies, coat them in peanut butter, and dump them in the woods for the wildlife to finish off. It falls apart the very next day, when golfers find Dimitri's severed head and a security camera turns up at the farm store where Leon bought 35 jars of peanut butter. The case lands on the desk of state detective Pam Talford. Touch, who went to school with her, cozies up to his old classmate to keep the group ahead of the investigation.

When news of his son's death breaks, Nicolai brings in his former top hitwoman, Arina, blackmailing her with the daughter he took from her years ago after faking the girl's death. Arina zeroes in on the group fast. Their first run-in happens at the farm store, where Joe, Touch, and Leon break in to steal the security footage. They get away clean, so Arina switches targets: she tracks down Joe's ailing wife Angela and snatches her right outside a pharmacy.

With Angela in Nicolai's hands, Joe turns himself in for Dimitri's murder and offers a trade: himself for his wife. Jennifer beats him to it. She calls Nicolai directly and tells him she's pregnant with Dimitri's child, dangling his future grandchild in exchange for her parents' lives. Nicolai lets Angela go — and takes Jennifer instead, planning to smuggle her out to Russia.

Once they work out that the safe's key opens a deposit box, the crew gets their hands on the keys to the Lamborghini. Joe puts it together: Teddy stashed the car at the police impound lot he used to hang around as a kid. With Touch's help, they steal it back — but the car's empty. Luckily, Cathy and Leon spot a clue in the interior that points them toward Joe's house. Problem is, the place is crawling with cops after Arina left a pile of bodies there. The group stages a diversion, and while it's playing out, Joe slips inside and finds a million dollars stuffed inside a mounted deer head.

While everyone else is busy dealing with Angela's rescue and then Jennifer's disappearance, Cathy — driven by pure greed — keeps digging on her own and stumbles onto Teddy's real stash: a hideout packed floor to ceiling with heroin. Turns out the stolen $10 million didn't just vanish — Teddy plowed it into building his own drug operation. Armed with everything she's picked up from true-crime TV, Cathy sets out to find a buyer for the product.

With Joe at his lowest, no idea where to even start looking for his daughter, Touch and Pam step in. They visit Pam's mother in prison — a former dirty cop doing time for killing her partner. Alone with Touch, she admits Nicolai forced her hand by threatening Pam's life, and hands over the location of his safe house.

Joe and Leon don't wait for backup — they go in hot. Joe gets Jennifer out, but as Pam arrives to whisk her away, Arina catches up to them. Jennifer talks the hitwoman down, threatening to kill her own unborn child — and with it, Nicolai's only reason to ever hand back Arina's daughter. That's enough to flip her. Meanwhile, Joe stays behind and squares off with Nicolai one last time, killing him by driving a toilet-tank rod he'd hidden in his boot into his eye. They dump the body off a pier and figure the nightmare's finally over.

Taking down the mob doesn't exactly give everyone a happy ending. Cathy tells Leon about the heroin she found, and the two head off to meet a buyer. The deal goes sideways — the buyer shoots Cathy, and a furious Leon guns him down, only to notice a badge fall out of the dead man's pocket. He just killed an undercover cop.

Around the same time, Touch pays a visit to the mother of his late girlfriend Tess — grandmother to Tess's daughter, Donna — and learns that Donna, now grown, took her own life. As a kid, she'd found a gun Touch had left lying around and accidentally shot her mother while playing with it; Touch, more concerned with covering himself than protecting the girl, staged it as a suicide. Gutted by what he's just found out, he goes home and puts the barrel of a gun in his mouth. The scene cuts to a wide shot of the house — and a gunshot rings out.

Shaken by everything she's been through, and by the danger Joe brought into their lives, Angela packs up and leaves town with Jennifer. The season ends with Joe alone, a knock at the door, and one line: "Oh, dear God, no!"