Summary
It’s only Episode 1, but it’s immediately obvious that Task is a very good show, boasting truly human-feeling characters and a compelling cat-and-mouse premise.
With some TV shows, you can just tell they’re good. I don’t mean “decent”, either – I mean properly, prestige, talk-of-the-town good. Task seems very much like one of them, which is perhaps unsurprising, since Mare of Easttown was also one, and Brad Ingelsby is responsible for both. After Episode 1, “Crossings”, I’m totally and utterly hooked, completely unsure of who I’m rooting for, and desperate to know more. And it’s clear that there’s a lot more to find out, since these are all characters with obvious depth and lingering trauma, which is why the cast has to be so good to bring them to life.
At the head of that billing is Mark Ruffalo, who plays Tom Brandis, an FBI agent whose son is in prison awaiting sentencing for an unknown crime, whose daughter is rightly sick of him moping around the place and occasionally drinking himself into oblivion, whose wife is dead, and whose former career as a priest has been replaced by pitching the upsides of the FBI at local career fairs. Brandis used to be a field agent, but he has since semi-retired from proper policework on account of the above personal issues.
But Brandis isn’t the main character, at least not in my view. That honor goes to Tom Pelphrey’s Robbie Pendergrast, a put-upon garbage man who, by night, moonlights as a home invader. But the people he’s robbing are local drug dealers, most of them gang-affiliated, so he doesn’t qualify as a bad guy. In fact, he seems like more of a good guy than Brandis does. He, too, is reeling from traumatic personal circumstances, including the death of his brother, Billy, who was murdered in as-yet unknown circumstances, and the absence of his wife, who walked out on the family almost a year ago. Robbie is living with his own kids and Billy’s daughter, Maeve, who is having to step up and play doting mother despite barely being an adult herself.
You understand immediately, then, why Robbie would be so keen to better his circumstances. His crime spree puts him on Brandis’s radar since the gangs he’s robbing are seeking retribution that could very quickly escalate into a turf war. One gang in particular, a motorcycle club called the Dark Hearts, seems to be particularly suffering. There’s a chance their exploits could be connected to Billy’s death, but that’s unconfirmed for now.
Brandis is assigned a team to take Robbie and his small gang down. It comprises an organized crime straight-shooter named Anthony Grasso, a detective named Aleah Clinton, and a ditzy State Trooper named Elizabeth Stover, who seems to be going through a messy breakup and can’t get her emails to work. I suspect all of these people have hidden layers that will be peeled away as we go, but Stover in particular seems ripe for some examination, since it’s a bit improbable that she’s as daft as she looks. For instance, when the team is called out from their ramshackle base of operations to the scene of the latest robbery, while everyone is wondering where she is, she has already gone out and discovered important information from canvassing the neighbours. She’s smarter than she looks, that’s for sure.
As for that “latest robbery”, it’s the point when Task Episode 1 goes badly wrong for Robbie. What should be his and Cliff’s biggest score yet turns disastrous. The occupants fight back, the money is missing, their young accomplice gets killed by a returning biker, and after killing everyone inside, Robbie discovers that a young boy was asleep in the basement. Robbie isn’t the type to kill a kid, but that means taking him home to his brother’s house, adding to Maeve’s confusion and obligations. It also raises the stakes from robbery to murder and kidnapping.
None of this is new for the genre. But it’s exceedingly well done. The home invasion scenes are shot for maximal tension, complete with Robbie and Cliff wearing creepy Halloween masks to give the whole thing a horror-adjacent aesthetic, but the characterisation is extremely strong, and everyone on both sides of the legal aisle immediately seems like fully-fledged, three-dimensional human beings. I suspect there’s a lot more to come from this show than even the premiere suggests, and I, for one, can’t wait to uncover more of it. I just hope Robbie manages to escape the thoroughly miserable fate I’m imagining he’s in for. And hopefully, Brandis curbs the drinking a bit. Bird-watching is much better for the liver.
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