Season 2, Episode 1: ‘Rupidoop’
There are 416,000 stories in the naked city of Tulsa, Okla., according to recent census data. Lee Raybon has told quite a few of them.
A self-styled “truthstorian” — a combination of muckraking journalist, private investigator, poet of the streets and general nuisance — Lee digs up the dirt that the city’s power brokers would prefer to leave undisturbed. Along the way he meets colorful characters, romances beautiful women and gets beaten up, a lot. The idea that it’s all worth it, that living in borderline destitution and constant danger is a sacrifice worth making if it exposes the crimes of the powerful, is what animates “The Lowdown,” Sterlin Harjo’s frequently hilarious, never less than marvelous Southwestern neo-noir.
Brought to life by Ethan Hawke, doing some of the finest and most fun work of his career, Lee is like the Dude from “The Big Lebowski,” if he had started solving mysteries full-time after the whole Bunny thing blew over. As “a white man who cares,” in the show’s parlance, Lee is able, if only barely, to move in worlds that are inaccessible to Tulsa’s marginalized communities, on whose behalf he serves as a pen-wielding knight errant.
Last season, Lee’s unique approach — not to mention his small army of allies and associates — helped expose a link between the Republican gubernatorial candidate Donald Washberg (Kyle MacLachlan) and a neo-Nazi militia via a crooked land deal. The scheme left Donald’s beloved, sensitive brother Dale (Tim Blake Nelson) murdered. The blockbuster story Lee wrote about it left out some names to protect the semi-innocent, but it changed the course of Oklahoma politics and made Lee one of the most celebrated “citizen journalists” in the city.
Nuts to that action, Lee thinks, and sets about torpedoing his own reputation. He shows up at the award ceremony where he is to be feted high on mushrooms, with his rowdy and deeply incompetent “security guards” Waylon (Cody Lightning) and Henry (Jude Barnett) in tow. He spends his award speech declaring everyone there, himself included, sellouts who have ignored the terrible truth about Tulsa for too long.
“The history of this country is a history of murders and cash grabs,” he declares, “and there is no forgiveness until there is accountability.” He also drops the award mid-speech, breaking it in two. In other words, there are probably more effective ways of getting his point across.
His performance is part protest, part self-sabotage. It badly embarrasses his daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), who lets him know this the next day.
“There is a dissolution of integrity the second fame kicks in,” he tells her. “I gotta protect myself!” All she wants is for him to “be normal now and again.” Poor Lee. Sellouts everywhere!
But the evening is not a total loss, no matter how intent Lee is on making it one. Briefly forgetting Vickey (Abbie Cobb), the alluring, tarot-reading real estate agent he’s dating, he makes a beeline for a beautiful woman in blue at the bar. Her name is Ginger (Betty Gilpin, making her series debut). She’s a public defender … and two scary-looking guys are following her. “Can you spot them?” she asks, testing his truthstorian mettle.
“Heck yeah,” he says, before asking “What do they look like?” That’s our Lee.
But once he notices an SS insignia tattooed on the neck of a guy in the men’s room (Austin Amelio), he knows who to watch out for. (Lee runs into Nazis with the frequency of Indiana Jones.) He helps Ginger escape by pretending to be “with her”; she plants a kiss on him for cover, leaving him completely twitterpated. Unfortunately, some of his fellow journalists take issue with his comments about their ethics during his big speech, and Lee receives the first beating of what are likely many to come.
Intent on helping Ginger out, whether she requires his help or not, Lee gets the story out of her the next day. One of her clients, Mekko Dean, has gone missing in prison, and correctional authorities are giving her the runaround. Figuring no one will suspect a humble member of the press visiting a prison, Lee pays the place a visit to investigate himself.
But he realizes, eventually, that the man presented to him as Mekko is an impostor; the technical term is “rupidoop,” as his friends Cyrus (Michael Render, better known as Killer Mike) and Damon (Derrick J. Haywood) inform him, aghast at his ignorance. Ginger, too, wonders how Lee could have missed a classic rupidoop scenario right in front of his face. (“Rupidoop” is an invention of the show, as best I can tell.) What’s worse, Lee tells Ginger, one of the men following her is a prison guard (Shane McRae) who confronted him in the parking lot. The more she learns about Lee’s big prison investigation, the more she drinks.
Fortunately, she’s sober enough to put two bullets in the creep with the SS tattoo, who tries to break into her house the moment Lee pulls away. When the reporter returns, he heedlessly gropes her through her Weezer T-shirt, checking for bullet wounds. “I don’t have bullets in my [expletive], Lee!” she screams in irritation.
But she confides in him eventually. It seems she’s fallen in love with Mekko, her client, and that this would destroy her career if word gets out. Lee vows to keep her secret and starts up a new conspiracy board on his wall to get to the bottom of his disappearance. The only clues on it at first are Mekko’s mug shot and the Four of Cups — a tarot card shown to him by Vickey that he associates with Ginger in a colorful “Lebowski”-esque dream sequence. Ginger is literally the woman of his dreams.
Lee Raybon Sr. (Tommy Lee Jones, also new to the show) is the man of his nightmares. A former preacher-slash-grifter, he is found wandering on the highway in a state of semi-dementia. He is then delivered to Lee’s doorstep by homophobic, liberal-hating cops happy to add to Lee’s woes. The episode ends with Junior staring daggers at Senior. Clearly, there’s plenty of history there. But with Lee, isn’t that always the case?
On a thematic level, “The Lowdown” remains concerned with the intersection between state power and white power. Like the GOP politicos from last season, the prison guards are in with the skinheads, and overt racism and right-wing extremism from a group that wields that kind of power is clearly as intolerable to Harjo, who wrote the episode, as it is to Lee. The opening narration by Keith David, who plays Lee’s ex–private detective friend Marty, makes this case explicitly, referencing the Tulsa Race Massacre and its decades-long coverup. Lee brings it up in his speech as well; it’s one of the reasons he feels his peers are cowards.
But Harjo is also an entertainer. The mystery of Mekko and Ginger is instantly engaging, and the jokes fly from every direction. I can’t decide if my favorite is the conversation between Lee and his lawyer neighbor, Dan (Macon Blair), about Dan’s “throuple trouble,” or Ginger ending an angry telephone call with a client photographed with cocaine all over his face with an incongruous “I love you too.”
Actually, no, scrap that: I’m giving it to Ginger, because Gilpin is the best actor on television. She never makes a boring, predictable or unnatural choice, and she is good in everything she has ever been in, elevating shows by dint of her presence in them. After Jeanne Tripplehorn’s formidable and complex romantic foil for Lee in Season 1, Gilpin has a tough act to follow. But she and Jones, as Lee Senior, are the kind of performers who can power “The Lowdown” to new heights.
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