Who is Gordon in Sterling Point? His lawyer's letters were hidden from Annie for years

Prime Video's Sterling Point pulls off a neat trick: its most interesting character is dead before the first episode finds its footing. Gordon — estranged grandfather, island owner, prolific letter-writer, apparent menace from beyond the grave — never gets a proper scene, and yet every single secret on this show runs through him.

The man, the myth, the estranged grandfather

Here's the file on Gordon. He's the father of Goldie, Annie and Connor's late adoptive mom, and the owner of Sterling Point, a private island in Muskoka, Canada, which is a level of wealth I refuse to process. When he dies, his lawyer shows up at the Jacobsons' New York apartment and announces that the twins are the beneficiaries of his trust and his island. Steven, their adoptive dad, gets nothing, which is objectively hilarious and also the first sign that these two men were not exchanging holiday cards.

Steven's reaction is the tell. He snatches Gordon's letters out of the lawyer's hands before the kids can touch them and generally behaves like a man with a body in the trunk.

The safe protected by dad's birthday, a fortress

Annie, being Annie, breaks into his office and opens the safe using his birthday as the code. Inside:

• Gordon's final letters to her and Connor;
• years' worth of birthday cards that never reached them, hidden one by one;
• a farewell note in which Gordon regrets "the plan" he agreed to, hopes the island will reveal the truth, and asks Annie to find an unnamed "her."

A dead man asking you to "find her" from inside your father's safe is the single most effective summer-plans generator known to television.

The "her," it turns out, is Ramona — the granddaughter Gordon quietly raised on the island while Annie was in New York color-coding her five-year plan. Creator Megan Park has said she built the show to be more than sun-drenched vibes: "there's no reason that it has to be all fluff," she told CBC. Mission accomplished — the fluff has a body count of family secrets, and Gordon left the map. The full contents of that farewell letter, if you want to relive them, are lovingly documented in Recap Lab's episode-one recap.