Complicated parental situations abound in Netflix's new YA series Trinkets. Elodie (Briana Hildebrand) is now living with her father after her mother's death, Tabitha (Quintessa Swindell) catches her dad cheating on her mom, and Moe Truax (Kiana Madeira) has an absentee father on Trinkets.
One of the bigger mysteries in the 10-episode series is who exactly Moe's dad is. He doesn't get mentioned until a few episodes in, when Moe calls him a "deadbeat" and reveals that she never sees him. The reason why is revealed in episode six: he's in prison.
It's never revealed what Danny Truax did to get sent to prison, but he's seemingly been in there for a while and missed most of Moe's childhood. "I don’t even think my dad would recognize me if he saw me on the street," Moe says in episode six. In another episode she says he's basically a stranger to her.
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In place of having a father around, Moe says her mother has been "a f*cking hero" in raising her and her brother alone. But even though Danny left Moe's mother to do the parenting, she doesn't seem to have many hard feelings about him. "He’s not a bad guy," she tells Moe. "He just made some poor choices." She later describes Danny as "funny and charming" but also "a wild card."
This wild card nature is revealed when Danny calls Moe from the Two Rivers Correctional Institute after Moe has not heard from him in so long. She doesn't answer the call, but a couple of episodes later he texts Moe to tell her he's been released from prison and is staying at her Uncle Carl's house. Moe bikes over to see him, but he is nowhere to be found. Eventually they settle on meeting up for dinner, but Danny stands her up. The problems in their relationship are clearly not based solely on him being in prison since he's still disappointing Moe even though he's now on the outside.
There is no real resolution to this aspect of Moe's storyline, which opens it up as a subject for a possible second season. The show has not yet been renewed, but, if it is, the show could then explore Moe's dynamic with her father, and perhaps clue us all in to why he went to prison in the first place.
Now that Moe's suspension resulted in her losing the Korean STEM opportunity, she will still be around in Portland, giving her father more time to try to reconnect. He is the one who initially expressed interest in meeting up with Moe and talking to her. Since it is all his idea in the first place, he may try again in season two if Moe is open to it. Hopefully the reason he stood her up isn't because he was getting into trouble again. Moe deserves to have a father who is present for her now, even if he couldn't be when she was growing up.