‘Task’ Episode 2 Recap: Have You Seen This Boy?

Where to Stream: Task Powered by Reelgood Hath not a fentanyl-dealing biker gang eyes? Hath not a fentanyl-dealing biker gang hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a cop is? If you prick them, do they not bleed? If you tickle them, do they not laugh? If you poison them, do they not die? And if you wrong them, shall they not revenge? In this second episode of Task, which in some ways is even stronger than the first, creator-writer Brand Ingelsby and director Jeremiah Zagar introduce us to the Dark Hearts, the biker gang that our warm-hearted anti-hero Robbie and his erstwhile crew of waste-management workers cum home invaders have been robbing. It turns out that Robbie’s late brother Billy was a member, who was beaten to death by gang leader Perry (Jamie McShane) over some unknown infraction. That’s usually how the gang deals with discipline violations. So what’s going on lately is new, not just to the law enforcement officers observing the carnage from afar and wondering how such a tight operation could be so vulnerable, but to that tight operation itself. Perry and his adoptive son and protégé, street kid turned local gang leader Jayson (Sam Keeley), are legitimately beside themselves — but not just because their opsec is weak and their trap houses are getting robbed, and not even because three of their own were just murdered No, Perry and Jayson are angered and frightened to the point of tears because Sam (Ben Lewis Doherty), the son of the slain bikers, is missing. Whoever killed his parents has him. And that is unbearable, even to people who traffic in misery and death for a living.  I absolutely adore this development, this fleshing-out of the Dark Hearts via their commanders. I appreciate Task’s willingness to explore the idea that even the criminal underclass are — get this — human, and capable of grief, love, bravery, and self-sacrifice in service of the people they care about. And I love the parallel narrative structure it establishes. Jayson and Perry are just as motivated to find Sam as Fred, Aleah, Anthony, and Lizzie’s task force — more so, even, since they were friends with the poor kid’s murdered parents.  It’s true that we get an earful about how rotten Sam’s living conditions were; the only reason he was at his parents’ safehouse to begin with was because the grandmother who had custody of him was diagnosed with dementia, pushing him back into a household from which CPS had previously removed him. But his parents still seemed to care enough to turn him into a sweet and charming little guy, and their promise to buy him a Batman toy for doing well in a summer reading club indicates that they were actually, actively parenting him in a positive way. So who are we supposed to root for now? Do you want Tom and the task force to find the kid and whisk him away to foster care? Or would you rather him wind up in the arms of people who know and love him and his late parents, even knowing what we know about them? Do you know how rare it is for cop shows to actually raise compelling ethical questions? There are certainly enough of those to go around this episode. Maeve, Robbie’s niece, faces one when she realizes the child Robbie is looking after on behalf of “a friend from work” is actually a missing-persons case connected to a lethal home invasion involving the same biker gang that got her dad killed. Maeve does something I consider pretty reasonable. Promising to buy him that Batman toy, she sends him into a store, then uses the phone of a friend from her job at a family entertainment center to call 911 and report the missing child. Tom’s task force and a phalanx of cops show up, but Maeve discovers that Sam has somehow snuck back into her car prior to the checkpoints being established. Now she faces the same choice Robbie’s been trying to puzzle out all day: Is getting this kid to the authorities worth destroying their own family? Maeve makes the same decision her uncle’s been making. She hides Sam in her trunk, then concocts a bogus tip about having seen the kid in the entertainment center. Tom and his team wind up blowing the thing off as a bum tip, but her friend, at least, realizes something is up. I’ll tell you what else is up: Emilia Jones as Maeve, that’s what’s up. Wearing her mullet like a medieval helmet, she wades into battle against the various morons and deadbeats in her life every day, despite the obvious fact that she is both smart and kind enough to be living a whole different kind of life if the opportunity were available to her. She may complain that she knows nothing about kids, but she’s great with them. She may tell prospective hookups that she’s “nothing at all,” but she has an easy charisma and innate inteligence that sees her take charge of or outfox men twice her age on a regular basis. She’s simply been given no chance to put her talent to good use. But that’s the message of Task, and of Ingelsby’s Mare of Easttown before it. Their thesis is that the country’s outrageously lopsided economy, which the current administration has made even worse, and its ramshackle and punitive approach to mental illness, addiction, and criminality, which the current administration has also made worse, produce not so much a perfect storm but a perfect whirlpool. Their vortex sucks in and seals in everyone within its reach. The starkest example of this domino theory of misery, in which one person’s poor circumstances wind up affecting the lives of countless others, lies within Tom’s family itself. When his older daughter Sara (Phoebe Fox) comes home for her brother Ethan’s sentencing in their mother’s death, she learns to her horror and outrage that their sister Emily plans on offering a victim’s statement presenting mitigating circumstances. Unlike Sara, Emily and Ethan, who are biological siblings of one another, were adopted, and their upbringing prior to Tom involved some as yet unspecified trauma. Shouldn’t that matter? It matters to Sara, but not in a good way. With breathtaking cruelty, she repeatedly refers to Ethan as Emily’s brother, not hers, and to their murdered parent as her mother, not Emily’s. The mocking “Wellll….” and comme çi comme ça hand gesture with which Sara responds to Emily’s assertion that she was her mother too is almost unspeakably nasty, but in exactly the way you might expect someone to actually be under these circumstances. From the schism between the biological child and the adopted/stepchild to the unspoken racism — Sara is white, Emily and Ethan are not — it feels painfully real. All Tom can do is respond, in his usual rumpled fashion, that this experience has left him totally lost, bereft of the faith that once guided his life as a priest. (He worked as an FBI liaison, offering counseling as a chaplain at mass-casualty events like Columbine and Oklahoma City.) The entire exchange, over dinner, leaves Emily fleeing to seek refuge in the same baseball dugout Ethan used to hide in, while the family lawyer sits there in shocked silence. But there’s levity here too, courtesy of two stealth MVPs: Fabien Frankel as the charming Italian-American cop Anthony Grasso and Alison Oliver as his scatterbrained task-force partner Lizzie. For most of the episode he condescends to her, because for most of the episode she’s legit annoying. But then he comes by and bums a smoke, and they get to talking about his former career as a children’s birthday-party DJ for rich Catholic kids, and suddenly you’re like holy shit, these two have berserk chemistry. Yes, Frankel is preposterously charming and sexy, as we already saw on House of the Dragon, before his character there proved himself to be a huge piece of shit. But it’s the fact that these two have so little in common personality-wise yet still are inclined to get along once they get past that initial friction that makes the moment. Bridging that gap between them is what makes the possibility of a romance here more exciting. Though we’re only two episodes in, so far Task is an improvement over Ingelsby’s stylistically and thematically similar Mare of Easttown in almost every conceivable way. Naturally I miss the inimitable presence of Kate Winslet, but such is the power of Tom Pelphrey and his seemingly bottomless fuel tank of pathos that this show has it covered. It’s aided additionally by Jeremiah Zagar’s superb direction, which takes care to match the characters’ piercing emotions with equally striking shot compositions and lingering, well-framed closeups. Gliding over all is the gloriously goes-to-eleven score by Dan Deacon, who like so many others — Danny Elfman, Mark Mothersbaugh, Trent Reznor, Mica Levi, Daniel Lopatin — proves that the art-rock weirdo to superlative film composer pipeline is real and flowing freely. Task is not a happy show, but it’s one I’m happy to recommend.   Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

View Original Article