Review: Banshee ‘Half Deaf Is Better Than All Dead’ – A Bungee Jump Without The Cord

There’s a downside sometimes to the freedoms of cable television: shows can become self-indulgent in their gratuitous use of nudity, violence, language and/or drug use. For some shows like Deadwood, it’s an important part of the show’s DNA, essential to building a world and telling a story – and in other cases (just about anything on Showtime, at some point in their run), it’s just a ridiculous distraction, a cheap trick to generate some empty shock in viewers. ‘Half Deaf Is Better Than All Dead’  straddles the line between the two, an episode riddled with nipple shots, dirty white people, and angry people in suits.

My biggest complaint with the episode is how it opens, with Lucas in the middle of a failed heist of a painting. First of all, why rob us a moment to see Lucas at work doing what he really loves, away from the facade of Sheriff Hood. It would give his panic attack flashbacks a little more context, leading us into the moment where he realizes he’s stuck in a dummy room, locked down with alarms blaring. Robbed of that, the phone call juggling Job and Ana with two very different – but equally important – conversations.

There’s a lot of mentions towards Lucas’s state of mind, with many characters wondering if Lucas is on a suicide mission. I don’t think the writers really have much of an answer yet – his approach to just about anything suggests he’s at the very least, struggling to find a direction in his life with a fake identity and the woman he loves married to someone else. But ‘Half Dead’ doesn’t really dig into that, instead moving towards more plot-related complications in his relationship with Proctor.

Two things are made clear in ‘Half Deaf’: Lucas and Ana will have sex this season, and arresting Proctor for anything will inevitably go nowhere. Lucas manages to coerce Arnot Walker (a white supremacist who knew Hanson) to give up incriminating evidence of Proctor killing Hansen. At the end of the episode, someone busts into his hotel room (knocking cranky Brock flat on his ass). It’s never really made clear why Lucas wants to go after Proctor so bad – being a criminal at heart, I don’t think a senator’s rantings about “this blood is on your hands” really becoming a moral issue for him. It’s glazed over, in favor of lots of Proctor hamming it up in front of Lucas, and the week’s brutal fight scene, where a vicious attack by the ever-present Moody brothers leads to Lucas relieving them of some blood, and an ear.

Beneath the sex and violence, the show is managing to keep my interest with its many subplots. I want to get more about Kai’s relationship with his father (who sneaks into the back of the courtroom when Proctor is arraigned), and Lucas’s subtle attempts to connect with his daughter Deva – this week, it’s using her to identify suspects, which angers Ana – really is the emotional core of the show to me (not him and Ana doing it, as we’re being led to believe). Hopefully, we’ll get some of this – and the first installment of The Adventures of Sugar and Lucas – in the next few weeks; all the masculine posturing and powerful men getting constantly laid is wearing thin.

Grade: C+

Other thoughts/observations:

– Job wants his $750,ooo, and shows up in Banshee. Cannot wait to see what happens there.

– Whoever picked episode four for the first masturbation scene, you win a tubful of Ana’s sweat and dirt.

– Proctor sits in prison, belting out Amish songs. Make of that what you will.

– these post-credit sequences get weirder and weirder: this week, it’s just Proctor bent over in the shower, screaming.

– Lucas bangs Kat Moody… because hey, why not. He did just kill her husband, after all.

– the white supremacists live in Hitler’s Bunker.

– this show likes its fancy, expensive car crashes.