There’s no rest for the wicked in ‘Always the Cowboy’, as Ana and Lucas scramble around, awaiting Rabbit’s inevitable arrival in Banshee. Relentless from the opening shot, ‘Always the Cowboy’ is an hour of effective tension building, even if it reveals some of its big seasonal arcs to be a bit thin.
Of course, the episode is at its best when its highlighting the most interesting dynamics on the show, involving the Rabbit/Ana/Lucas triumverate. It’s easy to write off Rabbit’s scenes with them as unnecessary exposition – but Ben Cross plays the scenes so well, an amalgamation of power, anger, sadness, pain, and regret for everything that’s transpired the last 15 years. When Gordon pulls a gun on him and demands to know where his son is, Rabbit compels him to compare the feeling of losing a child for 5 hours to a decade and a half, a question Gordon can’t even begin to understand. Gordon might be pissed off and angry, but his feelings will have to wait until the Ukranians crawling around the town are exterminated.
This task predictably falls into the hands of Lucas, who is watching his Hood persona crumble around him. Brock and Xavier both remind him of the two people he killed at the school, and the impending investigation that adds Ana’s mysterious injuries to its list of “Things To Learn While In Banshee”. This is but a poke in the side for Lucas at the moment, however: in the last scene of the episode, Rabbit appears in the precinct building (Cadillac dealerships never had the best security measures) to confront him.
He points out how foolish Lucas always was: impulsive, always thinking in the moment, never understanding the idea of consequence to follow. We’ve seen this, whether it’s been in flashbacks, or operations like his failed attempt to rob a museum without any help. And as Rabbit stands looking down at Lucas, we finally see the fear in Lucas’s eyes. For the first time, he can’t beat the shit out of someone to get his point across (as he does in the most pointless scene of the night, his fight with Kai over having sex with a niece Kai’s spent all of two days with): Rabbit has him in the tightest of corners, and the claustrophobia of his presence (occurring simultaneously as his fake persona crumbles) seeps through his composed exterior.
The scenes with Kai and Alex Longshadow are noticeably less effective, however. There’s no way Kai’s going to lose to this guy, no matter how creepy his sister might be, or how big Jeffrey (a man in debt to the casino that Alex plans on using against Kai) might be. This isn’t the only reason why the story line isn’t that interesting – we also don’t really understand Alex as a person, and why he makes the decisions he makes. We know he doesn’t like Kai’s attitude, or how the MMA match earlier in the season was compromised by him and Lucas – but beyond that, he’s void of character, nothing but a scheming face and a hint of unearned arrogance that will probably see him dead by the end of next week’s finale.
But the casino is merely a secondary plot, one whose connection to the season’s big showdown between Rabbit and Lucas won’t become clear until sometime during next week’s ‘A Mixture of Madness’ (is that a callback to the shot of blood and alcohol mixing this episode?). I have no idea how the show is going to make it through the episode while largely maintaining its status quo (too many characters in the town to leave it behind next season), but I’m certainly interested to see how it turns out.
Grade: B+
Other thoughts/observations:
– Where is Kai’s creepy assistant during the episode?
– in the post-credits scene, we see Alex’s sister sharpening her axe and throwing it into a wall, marking the first time in the whole episode she makes a noise.
– Gordon: “you say it’s in your past… but you’re holding a gun today.”
– Job and Sugar are tight now – that’s what happens when you share a body-burying experience together.
– why doesn’t Rabbit give a shit when people point guns at him? As he points out after Ana threatens to kill him, “you already have.”
– the teachers and students of the school are noticeably nonchalant about a screaming woman who is bleeding out of her hospital gown running around.
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