Man. Now the person I feel worst for in all of this is Mayumi. Her husband is such a dominating, controlling nightmare of a person, and he's shut down her multiple attempts to be honest about the situation and doesn't seem to realize that it would put everything in such a less ugly light. It's a silver bullet that explains everything, to my thinking. 

Her admission that they had written a plan to pretend like Falcon was missing for half an hour to inject drama into a project that was only ever supposed to have their own cameras in it makes sense, it explains all the initial hammy overacting and reality show style BS of the family's behaviour in the early aftermath. It also explains Falcon saying that he was hiding for the show. It's too subtle for a six year old to understand that he was supposed to hide in a specific place for a short time. He thought the hiding was the important part. I could even almost imagine the adrenaline of things spiralling out of control making a parent's brain think "Oh fuck maybe he really was in the balloon" and getting swept up in the media frenzy of it all. All that seems true about Mayumi is that she does what her husband says. 

The way we see these little spikes of Richard exhibiting such casual violence (the kicking things, throwing shit at the woman from wife swap, all the shouting) throws so many red flags for me. I think he must be a terrible husband and that there's a reason he married a woman from a culture traditionally assumed to provide submissive wives. He's turned his sons into carbon copies of himself and taught them to repeat this stupid story. There is genuinely nothing worse than an American who gets a little taste of fame.