Summary
Tulsa King Season 3 finally lets the bullets fly in Episode 6, and it’s a nice injection of energy that helps to connect several subplots.
Now we’re talking. I did say that Tulsa King felt as if it was finding some first-season form, and that’s very much the takeaway from Episode 6, “Bubbles”, which finally brings Season 3’s seemingly disparate subplots into a satisfying criss-cross. It isn’t just the hail of gunfire that things end with, although that’s definitely nice, but the implications of Bill still being missing, a fearsome New York mobster thinking Dwight set him up, and Jeremiah Dunmire being willing to go further to make a point than anyone necessarily realized.
And all this over booze. Then again, anything to do with alcohol – whether you’re distilling it, selling it, or drinking it – rarely ends well. The potential profitability of selling the Montague 50 is what generated Quiet Ray’s interest in Dwight’s operation in the first place, not to mention inspiring Dunmire’s fury about missing out on it. It’s a tricky business. And it can be a deadly one, especially since the inspector Dunmire sent to shut the distillery down ended up with his head pulped beneath a giant barrel.
Dwight’s plan to stage the whole thing as an accident and have Bodhi stumble on the body to complete the illusion almost works, but it means the distillery will be shut down for the duration of the investigation and a worsening of Bodhi’s already fragile mental health. Without a legal license to move the liquor, Dwight decides to take some more drastic solutions, including selling it illegally through an eccentric old contact named Johnny Wednesday, and trying to secure national distribution by partnering with one of the many thousands of potential mainstream brands. Mitch and Cleo are sent to entreat with Wednesday, while Bodhi and Grace head to St. Louis. There’s a fun sequence of the whole gang acquiring some cars and stealing the booze back from the closed distillery before they hit the road.
But there’s a problem. Bill is still missing. And since Dwight was the last person he saw before he disappeared, and he wasn’t secretive about his destination, it looks like Dwight whacked him. Even Goodie asks, in a very roundabout way, if that might be the case. But Dwight knows Bill was alive and well the last time he saw him, so he thinks that Quiet Ray might have made a move in revenge after Bill refused to turn on Dwight. It’s time to have a conversation, which means finally calling Ray for a sit-down, which Dwight had avoided until this point, because Ray wants in on the liquor deal. The venue is set – a restaurant called Bubbles, in the neutral territory of Hot Springs, Arkansas.
There’s also another problem. Attorney General Sackrider managed to plant a tracker on Dwight’s car during the kerfuffle the previous evening, so while he continues trying to get the Montague Distillery shut down for good, Dunmire tells Cole to assemble a team to follow Dwight to his destination and take him off the board completely. Dunmire can’t resist giving Cole another few kicks in the ego on account of him wearing camouflage in his office – his brother served with distinction in Kandahar and, presumably, didn’t make it home – just to remind us how desperate this guy is to make his father proud by doing whatever he tells him to.
Tulsa King Season 3, Episode 6, balances all of these competing subplots pretty well. Mitch and Cleo get stopped by a Highway Patrol officer on Cole’s payroll and have to knock him out before finally making it to Wednesday, and Bodhi gets a call about Bill’s disappearance, which gives him and Grace the willies, but they don’t encounter any other obstacles. Even Cole’s goons fall foul of Bigfoot when they get a little too close in a gas station parking lot, so it seems like things are going pretty well for Dwight and his gang.
“Seems” being the operative word, of course. By the time Dwight, flanked by Bigfoot and Tyson, makes it to Bubbles for the sit-down, you can feel everything start to come apart. Vince is present, which doesn’t help, since Dwight takes it as the insult it’s clearly intended as, and Ray also wants 80% of the liquor proceeds. It’s a ridiculous offer, and Dwight tells him so, but he also accuses him of having done something to Bill. So, both men are offended and prideful, and they’re sitting so close together to try and have their conversation privately that it’s difficult to tell whether they’re going to headbutt one another or kiss.
Cole, who has strolled into the restaurant without anyone noticing, chooses this moment to open fire on the table. Bigfoot and Tyson fire back, and nobody is hurt, but Ray naturally assumes that Dwight was trying to have him killed, despite Dwight being the hit’s real target. He ghosts Dwight when he tries to call and explain, so he’s clearly planning to retaliate based on that assumption, which gives Dwight two things to worry about. And since he’s still working for Musso – who, by the way, has Bill, though why remains unclear – we’d better make that three.
One thing he doesn’t have to worry about is Armand, who is strongly implied to be dead, having hung himself in a flop house for reasons that are entirely unclear. The search for Armand has been so inconsequential this season that I haven’t even bothered to mention it, and based on this payoff, I’m glad I didn’t. Perhaps there’s something else afoot here that justifies how often it has been mentioned, but I’m not sure where it could be squeezed in.
Either way, things are picking up. And it’s about time.
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