As the show reveals its many secrets through multiple flashbacks, viewers could be excused for finding themselves a little confused about exactly who Harp is, and why it is that he seems to be after Jane.
Here, we have broken down all the revelations from the Netflix show to try and answer a simple question—who is Pieces of Her’s Nick Harp, and what is his relationship to Jane?
Be warned: Naturally, the answer contains spoilers for the entirety of the series.
Who is Nick Harp?
Of course, the question is which Nick Harp we are talking about. After all, the Netflix series reveals that the man who calls himself Nick Harp is actually an unnamed guy who (Don Draper-style) stole the identity of a dead man—in this case, someone who had died of an overdose four years prior to when the Queller family meet the man calling himself Nick.
We do not learn anything else about this first Nick, but we learn plenty about the second across the many flashbacks of Pieces of Her.
This Nick (Joe Dempsie) is revealed to be the part of Army for the Changing World, an anarchist collective trying to create revolution by any means necessary. We will come back to what exactly Nick is and is not willing to do for this cause.
Laura—or, as she was called before going into witness protection, Jane Queller—meets Nick in the late 1980s through her brother Andrew (Nicholas Burton), Nick’s fellow Stanford student who Jane’s daughter Andy (Bella Heathcote) is named after.
Jane’s father is Martin Queller (Terry O’Quinn), a formidable pharmaceutical CEO who both Jane (played in flashbacks by Jessica Barden) and Nick have a reason to hate. Nick hates him because of his job, which involves marketing potentially life-destroying opioids and anti-depressants, while Jane hates him because he tried to poison her so she would miscarry the baby she is having with Nick.
Nick hatches a plan to try and discredit and scare Martin. He has managed to get a fellow traveler named Grace Juno (Catherine McClements) onto a panel Martin is speaking on by kidnapping the original speaker. The plan is to stage a stunt where Grace throws a wad of money at him in protest, which contains a squib full of red paint in it to represent how Martin is making “blood money.” The problem is that Grace’s husband was ravaged by Martin’s meds, and so she shoots him and herself.
Initially in Pieces of Her, we are led to believe that Nick changed the plan at the last minute, and so is responsible for Jane’s father’s murder—at least, that is what she tells the police in the testimony that led to her being put into witness protection.
However, this is revealed to be a lie. It was Jane who gave Grace the gun. Jane knew that her father would never let her carry her pregnancy to term, and so she arranged for him to die. Side note—of course, the person she is pregnant with is her daughter, Andy, meaning that Nick Harp is her secret father.
Two things persuade her to rat out her lover. First, he is slowly revealed to be controlling and abusive himself. Second, her brother Andrew dies while the Army is on the run. As such, Jane knows the only way to get away from Nick and to stop her life as a fugitive is to go to the authorities.
Nick, however, remains a fugitive. So when Jane (now Laura) makes the news for her actions preventing the mass shooting we saw in Episode 1, he sends someone to capture her.
At the end of the episode, Nick, Andy and Jane all end up together. Nick wants revenge on Jane, but he also wants to get a tap from here that implicates her brother Jasper (David Wenham) in Martin’s death. Jane had used this to blackmail her brother into shutting down the worst elements of Martin’s business, and now Nick wants to use it to blackmail him into giving him a pardon.
After a dramatic fight (in which Nick shoots Andy in the arm and Jane attacks him with a razor blade she hid in a bandage), the authorities are able to capture Nick. According to Jane, the tape was lost in the fire, but exactly how true that is is left to the viewers’ imaginations.
Pieces of Her is streaming now on Netflix.
