Summary
Tyson proves a liability again in “The G and the OG”, and you have to wonder how many chances he’s going to get before the consequences end up being permanent.
I’m getting a bit sick of Tyson. To be fair, I was sick of him throughout most of Tulsa King’s second season, too, but I thought he might have learned his lesson in time for Season 3. But no such luck. His dad almost getting blown to bits should have been a sobering reminder that his exaggerated ideas of being a gangster are likely to get him and everyone around him killed. Never is this more true than in Episode 3, “The G and the OG”, in which his idiocy is at peak levels.
This is what happens when Dwight is indisposed and trusts his compatriots to handle things on their own. But Dwight made a deal with the devil in the premiere, and he comes to collect here. Musso gives Dwight no choice in the matter, literally locking him in a self-driving car to make sure he gets to their rendezvous, so the rest of the gang are left to focus on bottling up Theo Montague’s super-secret liquor, which Cleo revealed to them in the previous episode. It doesn’t go well.
Dwight, then, spends the bulk of this episode on an uncomfortable road trip with Musso. The FBI man is enlisting him to form a business arrangement with a particularly problematic criminal by the name of Dexter Deacon, presumably in the hopes of catching him in the midst of something illicit. Dwight isn’t keen on the idea of being a rat, but his hands are tied. In the meantime, Musso keeps trying to tempt him into revealing more information – that he can no doubt leverage against him down the line – but Dwight isn’t falling for that, either.
I’m not sure where all this is going, honestly. There’s a scene included where Dwight and Musso get pulled over by the local authorities, and Dwight’s smooth talking and bribery work, whereas Musso’s badge doesn’t. There’s an element of grudging respect developing here that makes me wonder, but it’s much likelier that Musso is using Dwight for off-the-books hits of a kind that he’d never be able to justify or explain, which means he’ll never be able to let Dwight off the hook even if he completes them. I reckon before the season’s out, Musso will have helped Dwight out of a jam, or Musso will be dead. One or the other.
But with Dwight otherwise occupied, this leaves the rest of his operation to fend for themselves, and they almost all come up wanting. Take Mitch and Cleo, for example. They enjoy a road trip of their own in Tulsa King Season 3, Episode 3, but it goes off the rails pretty quickly. It’s a tough relationship to buy into, since they continuously reference a personal past that we haven’t seen any of, and it turns out Cleo is a bit nuts. She drives like a maniac, shoplifts, drinks, and then takes it upon herself to drive right into Jeremiah Dunmire’s house and try to set it alight.
Now, granted, she has her reasons, but as Mitch explains to her – in the manner of a parent dealing with a recalcitrant child, not like a lover – Dwight’s working on getting revenge for her in a much more sophisticated way. If she threatens to undermine that by going rogue, all bets are off. She claims to get the message, but I’m not so sure. I’d be more inclined to think this whole sequence is present to plant the idea that Cleo is liable to destroy everything at a moment’s notice.
And she isn’t the only one. Oh, Tyson. As if it wasn’t conspicuous enough that he insists on driving a Cybertruck around, he’s also continuously coming up with terrible ideas. His latest in “The G and the OG” is to tail Cole on a fact-finding mission to learn more about their new adversaries, tracking him, along with Grace, Bodhi, and eventually Goodie, to a warehouse where he’s hosting a bingo night for the elderly. It’s a scam designed to defraud the old folks, implying the Dunmire finances might be a bit tenuous, which would explain their eagerness to acquire the Montague Fifty, but instead of leaving it there, the gang decides to make a giant scene out of winning the prize money – which they then decide to blow at a strip club.
As if this wasn’t stupid enough, Tyson also falls for the oldest trick in the book. A stripper named Serenity starts throwing herself at him and leads him away to a private dance that quickly reveals itself to be an ambush, leaving him completely at the mercy of Cole and his goons. Now, to be fair to Tyson, he doesn’t fold under questioning. But as soon as Cole threatens Serenity, a woman he has just met who helped to get him in this predicament in the first place, he immediately gives up the location of the secret whiskey. Just like that, the entire stash is emptied, Tyson is left bloodied, bruised, and embarrassed – though, thanks to the bulletproof qualities of the Cybertruck, not dead – and Dwight is angrier than ever. And why wouldn’t he be? He’s the only person he knows who seems to have a clue what they’re doing.
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