Frenemies

Season

1

Episode

6

Writer

John-Paul Nickel^[1]

Director

Kevin Alejandro

Episode guide
Previous	Next
Bad Romance	Point of No Return

Frenemies is the sixth episode of the Disney+ American Adventure, action and mystery National Treasure: Edge of History series based on the film series.^[2] It aired on January 11, 2023 .^[3]

Premise[]

Not knowing who’s good and who’s bad, Jess works with Billie and deciphers a hundreds-year-old clue that points to a famous 18th century landmark, and together they plan an impossible heist during an historic reenactment to retrieve the next piece of the treasure map. But things don’t go as planned, and Jess is ultimately faced with the most difficult decision of her life.^[3]

Plot summary[]

Now with Jess in her car, Billie states that this is a good opportunity to explain how they got off on the wrong foot. Eventually, she reveals that not only did she know Rafael Rios and Manuela Valenzuela, Jess’s parents, but she’s also in possession of a similar medallion herself. She, too, is a Daughter of the Plumed Serpent.

Billie tries to put Jess at ease by taking her out for a swanky dinner, outfitting her in a nice cocktail dress, and ordering her go-to Mojito Mocktail, obviously not realizing that knowing everything about someone she has never really met isn’t charming but actually deeply weird. Jess is switched on enough to worry that the medallion might be a fake, but she’s somehow convinced by a photograph of Rafael and someone who Billie claims is her brother, Sebastian. Afterwards, Billie mentions how her own brother died in the quest for the treasure, like Rafael, who was killed by Salazar.

She also says that Liam has been working against Jess for financial gain for quite some time, and in fact, he ran off with Lewis Meriwether’s dog journal because Billie paid him to. That means Billie has the journal aboard her luxury treasure-hunting boat, so she takes Jess to decipher the next clue, which she does instantly. Kacey and Dario are super friendly and welcoming to Jess in a way that doesn’t ring true at all, and Billie “reveals” that she’s in possession of the jade box because Liam sold it to her, falsely claiming to Jess that it went missing when his father died.

After some digging, it turns out that the next box seems to be in the well at the Alamo; right under the noses of the Spanish who used the indigenous people to help build it, and will be easily discoverable, despite the Alamo being a tourist trap now, thanks to the lodestone magnets in the other two boxes.

Billie sends Jess back home, where she deliberately starts an argument with Tasha about using the “distraction” at the Governor’s Mansion to push her political agenda. Tash storms out and goes to Oren‘s place where, the former couple watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier and explain how the relationship between Cap and Bucky relates to their situation , and in the end, the two exes end up spending the night together.

Eventually, Ethan goes to check on Jess, and he advises Jess to confront Liam personally, so she goes to his grandfather’s house where she finds the clue room trashed and half of the actual clues missing and is grabbed from behind by the scruffy guy who has been spying on them for quite some time. Kacey arrives right in time to interrupt the guy, who jumps out of the window. Kacey then says he works for Salazar, and that she happened to be at Sadusky’s place because Billie told her to watch Jess’s back.

Ethan goes to the hospital to tell Meena that he really is still in love with Jess and was just lying to himself about it. She takes it really well, and on his way out spots an orderly wheeling around a bunch of clothes that have been taken from patients. Among them is Liam’s tuxedo, covered in blood. Liam is on a ventilator, badly beaten and bruised.

Later, Billie explains how she keeps a replica of Hernán Cortés’s sword on her private plane as, she claims, “a reminder” of all the atrocities he committed against the Daughters of the Plumed Serpent. Luckily, Jess has figured out that Billie is lying to her, and is thus testing Billie’s “friendship” with her mother by baiting her.

Elsewhere, Liam tells Ethan that he saw Billie show up at the mansion and tried to leg it with the diary before she could see it, only to get battered by Kacey outside.

Although, Jess had figured out Billie's plan, it turns out that she left Tasha a note, so she and Oren are outside the Alamo when Jess locks Billie in the well. The box isn’t there, since it’s really at Viesca, formerly known as Alamo, Mexico, in a well there. She briefly catches Tasha and Oren up to speed, and thus revealing how arguing with Tasha was intentional, none of Billie’s “proof” was compelling because her mom hated soccer. Jess goes onto plans their next steps. The bad news is that the well had a bank built over it, and that bank was robbed, exposing the well. The guy who did it was caught and is still in prison in Mexico, but his name is Diego Salazar. Since Jess is undocumented, if she crosses into Mexico, she can’t come back.

Elsewhere, Billie is being arrested. The only genuinely quite surprising turn occurs when Kacey calls their real spy, who turns out to be Sadusky's nurse, Myles. Kacey instructs him to deliver some clearly doctored “evidence” to Agent Ross at the FBI, which implicates Jess in Sadusky’s murder.