I took a break on writing about Netflix’s Trainwreck series so I’ll do a rundown on the previous installments. Well, it’s less of a rundown and more of me saying that Poop Cruise and American Apparel are bad. The Real Project X was also lacking and the series’ commitment to brevity makes for haphazard results. Now, this week’s installment comes from Beanie Mania director Gillian Patcher and it starts with a mother. This mother, Mayumi Heene, cries to a 911 operator, telling them about her son stuck in an airborne helium balloon. She and her husband Richard made the call because one of their sons thought the titular Balloon Boy, Falcon, is up in the air.

This assumption that Falcon is in danger made national news, but there’s more to this story obviously. The mania that the Heene family and America have about Falcon being in danger is actually a false alarm. He didn’t sneak into the balloon and actually fell asleep in the attic, but this seems like a pattern. As this news item gets a worldwide reach, someone clocked the Heenes from their previous appearance on Wife Swap. This revelation, among others, made the public assume that the Heenes endangered Falcon to get a TV deal. The Colorado system eventually gets involved, with prosecutors pressing charges on Richard, who wants to fight said charges.

Balloon Boy, just like the previous installments, uses its share of archive footage to immerse its prospective viewers. It’s probably par for the course that this series has stories that interrupt the macro stories of relatively innocent times. Newscasters interrupted things like Barack Obama’s broadcasts and news about the economy to interview this famous family. It has Wolf Blitzer asking Falcon if his sleep was so deep that he couldn’t hear Richard bellowing his name. This remind me of the adage of a few things being true at once about the Heenes. It could be true that the Heenes did this for attention but also that media scrutiny makes for Freudian slips.

Balloon Boy competently reminds its viewers that there’s more to the story after the media called it a hoax. Again, it shows more archive footage, the third act showing police footage where cops are interviewing the parents. Following this are contradictory interviews where Mayumi claims to clear the record about her using the word ‘hoax’. She claims that her English was worse in 2009, which follows an officer saying that she had a degree in English. She and Richard stand their ground, claiming that this was all a misunderstanding, which some interpret as caginess. Strangely, This is one of the few cases where subjects’ caginess helps a documentary that lets its questions linger.

The new installment of Trainwreck, Balloon Boy, is now available to stream on Netflix.