Summary
Task is brilliantly compelling in Episode 2, exploring the consequences of the premiere’s events through the lens of its conflicted cast.
If the first episode of Brad Ingelsby’s Task was about a crime, Episode 2 is about all the other complications and consequences spilling out from it. This is an important distinction to make. A crime is simple enough. Murder, kidnapping, theft. This is what the FBI task force, led by Tom, sees; what they’re investigating. It’s impersonal. But to Robbie, the perpetrator, the murders were self-defence, the kidnapping seemed like the safest decision at the time, and the theft was an error, at least in the sense that what was stolen wasn’t the intended haul. “Family Statements” clarifies the show’s position not as a whodunit, or even as a whydunit, though there are hints at the connection between Robbie’s brother and the Dark Hearts biker gang we briefly speculated over last time. Instead, it’s something else, a consequences-of-having-dunnit, if you like.
There’s a lovely spiralling quality to the opening scenes of this episode. Robbie has taken Sam home and tucked him into bed, but that’s only delaying the inevitable. He’s going to have to explain his presence to Maeve, keep that presence a secret, prevent Cliff from spiralling out of guilt and fear, and figure out what to do with what was stolen from the Nance house, which turns out not to be money but a weapons-grade amount of uncut fentanyl. The good news is that pure drugs are worth more than the money that would have been in the duffel bag. The bad news is that they’re harder to get rid of without arousing suspicion, and any potential avenues for doing so will already be well explored by the Dark Hearts, who now know the product is missing and would very much like to retrieve it.
The Dark Hearts are central to “Family Statements”, even though we don’t know much more about them. Task does that thing in Episode 2 that crime dramas often do, where law enforcement describes the villains while we get to see them in person, letting all the information slot together. The local chapter president, Jayson, works for the gang’s leader, Perry, and neither is especially happy about the current state of affairs. But the FBI run-down lends their fury a scarier context. The Dark Hearts aren’t any old motorcycle gang. They’re ruthless and expansive, and will lop off any weak limbs without a care. Since Robbie was getting his tips from a mysterious interlocutor saved in his phone as “MZ”, it’s clear that the gang has a mole. The FBI and the Dark Hearts themselves figure this out, too. Immediately, we have this compelling internal dynamic where the gang is trying to root out the turncoat before said turncoat can help Robbie and Cliff offload the drugs. It’s a manhunt within a bigger manhunt, and is compelling despite the fact that it’s all – thus far, anyway – happening through implication and inference.
Tom Pelphrey and Raul Castillo in Task | Image via WarnerMedia
Task is smart like that. It’s smart, too, in incidental character-building conversations, like the one Tom has with Grasso in the car on the way back to the flop house HQ, or a later one Grasso has with Lizzy about his past life as a DJ, or the one Robbie has with Sam that strongly implies his brother was a member of the Dark Hearts before his mysterious murder. Remember how the best scenes in the first season of True Detective were always Marty and Rust chatting in the car on the way to and from leads? There’s a bit of that here. Every character has depth, a background waiting to be uncovered, things in it that define who they are and what they do, how their specific world-view has been shaped.
What’s interesting about Tom is that his worldview hasn’t so much been shaped as shattered. Before he was a field agent, he worked for the FBI as a chaplain, his job being to minister to people after terror attacks and catastrophes so severe that people would want an answer about how God could have possibly let them happen. His answers were boilerplate. But then he suddenly had cause to ask those questions of himself, and got only silence in return. His wife was dead, killed by her adopted son, Ethan. It’s Ethan’s sentencing that is imminent, and he has pleaded guilty to murder in the third degree. He’s looking at 15 years. Emily, his sister, is debating writing a statement on his behalf, recommending rehabilitation over incarceration. Ethan was suffering from a psychiatric condition and was off his meds at the time of the incident.
This is all revealed during a family dinner scene, including Tom, Emily, someone I assume is the family lawyer, and Tom’s older, biological daughter, Sara, who can’t help but make a nasty remark about “her” mother not really being Emily’s and Ethan’s, despite them thinking so. And it’s by far the standout scene of the episode, absolutely simmering with long-held resentment, words unsaid, and questions without any readily available answers. Everything the show has to say about family, faith, and justice is bundled up in this stretch, and Ruffalo is remarkable in it.
Plot-wise, this doesn’t have anything to do with Robbie’s kidnapping of Sam, or Maeve’s understandable but nonetheless ill-advised attempt to set him free after figuring out who he is, but thematically they’re inexplicably linked. Right and wrong aren’t binary concepts; they’re fluid, amorphous, and mean different things to different people. Is someone like Ethan really a murderer, or a victim of his own mind? Has Sam really been kidnapped, or spared from a life of disinterest and neglect? It’s compelling stuff without any easy explanations, but what we know for sure is that the Dark Hearts aren’t feeling especially thoughtful, and someone – starting with poor Kaylee, the girlfriend of Robbie and Cliff’s accomplice, Peaches – is going to have to pay.
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