These Kids Nearly Got Munsoned
Season 1
Episode 7
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
The botched robbery at the Black Rabbit proves to be too big a mess for Vince and Jake to clean up.
Photo: Netflix
The last piece of the Friedken brothers’ origin story comes together when we flash back to the night Vince dropped a bowling ball on his dad’s head to save his mom. Vince has carried this event like a home-cooked original sin through a lifetime of gambling, addiction, crimes, and misdemeanors. Was it necessary to wait until the second-to-last episode for this reveal? Hard to say on a show with a story that feels slightly mismatched to its episode count (like many a modern streaming series), though that usually indicates some information has been withheld to keep the audience in artificial suspense.
Regardless, Big Dick’s death sets us up emotionally for an adrenaline-fueled two-episode final act directed by Justin Kurzel, who is a seasoned executor of cold-crime-genre action suffused with impactful, commercial melodrama. Back to the present, where paramedics and police are arriving at the scene of the robbery. Junior is on the ground with a bullet through his skull, and Vince is already gone, buying a burner phone with a diamond ring so he can call Jake for one. Last. Favor: Get Gen out of town. That’s when it hits Jake: He’s got his own family to get to safety.
Joe Mancuso is taking a steam bath when Detective Seung shows up with the news that his son is dead. We flash back to the night of Dick Friedken’s demise, where Joe shows up to cover up the mess for Vince and Jake’s mother, with whom Joe is clearly romantically attached. He assures her that he’ll take care of the whole thing, but advises her never to tell Jake. “Vince is gonna have to carry this,” he accurately predicts. And carry it Vince has, along with a local gangster as the closest thing to a father figure he had, whose affections don’t mean he won’t kill you as soon as look at you should the situation call for it.
Meanwhile, Jake meets with Campbell to figure out what to do next, leveraging Jules’s involvement in past Black Rabbit antics. Campbell advises that Jake get over to the hospital with the rest of the Rabbit crew before he starts looking too suspicious for fleeing the scene. Campbell also lays out the game board as it stands: Only one of the Friedken brothers will come out of this on top, and Vince has already left Jake with the bag. A zero-sum game that will, at best, land one of them in jail, and at worst, in the hands of Mancuso.
But Jake’s world is already falling apart at the hospital. For the first time, his façade is wavering before Estelle’s eyes. In the maelstrom of collective panic for the injured Wes and Tony, she watches Roxie confront Jake about making a phone call at the scene and fleeing. Jake returns with Campbell’s canned excuse: He was in shock and called his son. The indignation would be convincing if it weren’t for how long he had to pause to get it out, his internal vehicle of lies running out of gas in the final stretch.
And he remains unconvincing when Detective Seung shows up to question him. Who called him from an unlisted number right after the robbery? Once again, Jake can’t come up with a lie fast enough, so Seung cuts him off like he’s a scared kid in the principal’s office: If there’s something Jake wants to tell her, now’s the time. He still says nothing, but Seung picks out a nonverbal tell in the form of the watch around Jake’s wrist. Sure enough, it matches the watch found at the scene of Anna’s murder, unwittingly left behind by Junior. A-plus plot device, those watches. Thanks to the airtight synchronicity between its literal value as a totem tying the Friedkens to Anna’s death, but as a symbol of the sins and circumstantial mistakes that emanate from a family broken by a cutthroat society.
“What do you want to tell me, Jake?” Estelle repeats the question every woman in his life has asked him in this episode. After a lifetime of holding the life-giving truths in his throat, Jake’s fuse is too old and weathered to trigger an explosive confession. Half-truths are all he can muster. “It’s my fault,” he says of Wes’s death. “’Cause he tried to help me.” But he can’t wallow in self-pity for long. He gets a call from Gen, whose galactically stupid decision not to go into hiding with Val and Hunter strains narrative credibility. The whole angle of “my dad’s a runner and I’m too triggered by that to run away from danger myself” makes sense emotionally, but rings false when the character has been presented as, more or less, a smart person up to this point.
But boy, her dad sure is a runner. Like, mostly literally in this episode. Jason Bateman shines in the scene with the Diamond District connect, fast-talking and badgering this guy within an inch of his life until Mancuso and Babbitt show up to take him out. He escapes via another one of these liminal chase scenes, this time through empty hallways and back alleys, executed with efficient panache by Kurzel.
In any case, with Gen in their custody, Mancuso and Babbitt have the leverage to bring in Jake and get him to call Vince. Campbell called it: This is the end of the road for the Friedken brothers as a pair, infernally bound in the spilled blood of the fathers.
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