Season 2, Episode 5: ‘A Dog With Two Tails’
Like Garth Brooks, Lee Raybon has got friends in low places. Luckily for him, he has one in the governor’s mansion as well.
This week’s episode of “The Lowdown” begins with the arrival of a get-out-of-jail-free card in the form of Donald Washberg (Kyle MacLachlan, making a welcome return to the series). Now governor of Oklahoma, the Republican politician owes the truthstorian a favor for solving the mystery of his brother’s murder while keeping some of Donald’s own secrets. Governor Washberg duly springs Lee from Sheriff Thorne’s clutches. The resulting look of smug satisfaction on Lee’s face is priceless, though I’m sure the sheriff will make him pay for it.
Lee’s mood sours somewhat when he realizes the governor wants nothing else to do with him, now that he’s repaid the favor. But when he corners Donald in a diner after getting ditched, he gets a front-row seat when a rising star in Oklahoma politics, Judge Jed Sallsman (played by John Hawkes; will this show’s well of great character actors ever run dry?), pops in to say hello
All smiles, Judge Jed is eager to show off for his political frenemy and seemingly confident that he can win over the affable but obviously politically misaligned Lee, whose work he is familiar with. The judge invites both men on an impromptu tour, an offer Donald is forced to accept for public relations reasons.
Housed on a vast estate — Sallsman is coy about where his money comes from — his palatial home is full of artifacts of the Old West. These include the gavel of the so-called “Hanging Judge,” Isaac C. Parker. “We should bring back the noose, to be honest,” Jed says casually.
The collection also includes items taken from the area’s Native people over the years. It does not seem coincidental that earlier in the episode, a furious-sounding Frog talks to Marty and Ray about how “the record of an entire human civilization … the prayers and the hopes of an entire people” have been looted, hoarded and trivialized by museums and private collectors. Tommy Lee Jones makes the words of the speech sing with bitter music that keeps ringing in your ears as the swaggering lawman brags about how the West was won.
To Lee, the most interesting of the judge’s endeavors is his diversion program for the county’s prisoners. An upbeat promotional video (narrated by Daveed Diggs) shows off the meatpacking facility where prisoners can work in lieu of serving time behind bars. Jed boasts that their dorms don’t even require guards, since these future success stories of society are simply so happy to be there. Donald has been visibly miserable throughout the day, but the ad wins over the comparatively compassionate conservative.
Lee sees through the propaganda, the smiles, even the very cool-looking horseback ride across the judge’s wide-open spaces. His hunch is that Fresh Start is a forced labor camp, one where Nathan Spence died. Moreover, he learns that the program’s supervisor, Bob (Clifton Collins, Jr.), is the husband of Sheriff Thorne, who also has her cousin McMann involved in the conspiracy. From the way Judge Jed reacts when Lee mentions the dead kid’s name — his smile goes cold as he calls Nathan’s justifiably suspicious mother “confused” — there’s little doubt he’s in on it as well.
Later that day, Lee attends Francis’s birthday party at a bowling alley, to which she has also invited his father. The two Raybons mostly succeed at not souring the mood with their feud.
After Lee joins in singing “Happy Birthday” and gives Francis an (unwrapped) Eve Babitz book as a present, he gets a call from Ginger, and the two sleuths compare notes. Ginger says that Nathan’s mother, Deborah, told her he was in the diversion program, which she suspects worked him to death. Lee tells Ginger everything he learned about the program on his fact-finding expedition to Judge Jed’s gavel-and-rifle branded ranch. Ginger is visibly delighted by Lee in this scene, despite the warning of her co-worker Darla (Lee Eddy) that when you fall for a writer, your nudes can wind up front-page news.
But when Ginger and Lee go to Deborah’s house to follow up, they find her corpse being loaded into the back of an ambulance. The cop conspirators got to her before they could, and Ginger blames herself. She rejects Lee’s offer to stand watch over her house, saying she needs to be alone.
Her night only gets worse from there. While at a gas station to buy cigarettes, she gets a call from Pookie, her foot-fetishist informant in the county lockup. He tells her the word among the prisoners is that Mekko — the man she loves and his trying to find — is the one who killed Nate.
She is still in denial when she’s interrupted by Lonnie and McMann, who force her into their trunk at gunpoint. Well, not force, exactly: She crawls in voluntarily, irritating McMann, who feels that shoving her in would have added to the intimidation factor. Lonnie’s polite “Watch your head” as he closes the trunk on her probably isn’t helpful in that regard, either.
While it’s short on the riotous mystery-comedy-thriller antics of the past couple of weeks, this episode has plenty of laughs. Hawkes’s sinister Judge Jed provides some of the funniest moments, whether he’s declaring “I’m the law!” like an Oklahoman Judge Dredd, showing off the “Dances with Wolves” poster on his wall (“Now that was a movie,” he declares) or lowering his home movie screen at a glacially slow, cringe-comedy pace. By the time it completes its descent, Governor Washberg seems on the verge of asking the judge to grab a gun and put him out of his misery.
Elsewhere, Austin Amelio and Shane McRae have terrific comedic chemistry as Lonnie and McMann, the rogue-cop Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the piece. And the inventively obscene way the sardonic Deidra (Siena East) rebuffs a teenager’s romantic advances takes more twists and turns than, well, the plot of “The Lowdown.” Finally, there’s something charmingly cheeky about putting a bowling ball in the hands of the most Dude-like character on television.
We’re also granted some intriguing insights into the season’s two biggest new players. For all his flimflammery, Frog appears genuine in his outrage about the commodification of Native American civilization by thieves and museums alike. When Francis refers to him as her grandpa, he’s visibly moved. Maybe there’s more to the old swindler than meets the eye.
At times, Ginger seems about to admit she has feelings for Lee, even though Darla points out she doesn’t know his birthday. (Ginger makes a point of asking him; it’s Nov. 14, if you want to get your shopping done.) Couple that with the shocking news she receives about Mekko, and it’s fair to wonder if perhaps the public defender needs to be more guarded with her affections.
Yet her devotion to Mekko’s case has exposed a criminal conspiracy. Ginger is as fearless and flawed in her own neurotic way as the bumbling but brave truthstorian is in his.
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