Summary
Sheriff Country feels more muddled than usual in “Exit Interview”, but the focus on Wes is a nice change, even if the Boone dilemma feels obvious.
When it’s firing on all cylinders, Sheriff Country is a superb procedural, as evidenced by its previous outing. But it isn’t firing on all cylinders in Episode 6, which feels like a weird transitory episode marked by Skye’s conspicuous and sudden absence – she’s off backpacking, apparently – and much ado about Boone’s pending departure, which turns out to be all for naught.
Don’t get me wrong, none of this is bad – it still has some very nice character moments, and the A-plot focusing on Wes is solid stuff, capably shouldered by an excellent W. Earl Brown. But for perhaps the first time in “Exit Interview”, the show feels like just a procedural instead of a really good one.
After the last-minute reveal in the previous episode that Boone is secretly married, we get a whole thing involving his very cagey relationship with his wife, Nora, that feels inauthentic since it’s collapsed into a single episode. There wasn’t any prior build-up; something tells me there won’t be a great deal of focus on it afterwards, and since his resignation is contingent on this dynamic, there’s no tension surrounding his departure. We know he isn’t going to leave since all this stuff is too hasty to matter.
The “twist” regarding Boone’s marriage is novel, if nothing else. His “wife” is only really his wife on paper, the widow of his former partner whom he has been financially and emotionally supporting. This goes some way towards explaining the secrecy, but it’s hardly an adequate reason for why it wasn’t even obliquely mentioned until this point. And at the end of “Exit Interview”, Boone decides not to leave, but without any explanation. I hope this is returned to in subsequent episodes, or it’s going to feel really weird (also: Why is Mickey crying about this guy? Is there more to their relationship than there seems to be?)
This is the kind of subplot that makes you feel like you’ve missed a few episodes, and to be fair, everything involving Cassie and Travis is the same. They’re still on the rocks after the whole Skye debacle, and that’s fine, but Travis’s ill-advised efforts to try and win her over – by ambushing her in court representing a guy she’s given a ticket to – backfire pretty considerably. But the thing is, if Travis and Cassie break up, which they do here, albeit amicably, then I’m not sure what purpose either of them really has in the show. Travis has been hanging on by a thread, pulled into the orbit of Skye’s accusation, but without his relationship with Cassie, he’s mostly just a hanger-on, and his relationship with Mickey is just too civil to feel like it has legs (unless some kind of spark rekindles between them, but that seems a stretch).
Sheriff Country Episode 6 spends most of its time on an A-plot involving Wes’s long-time friend being murdered by another long-time friend over a pretty paltry dispute, but this is decent stuff. Wes isn’t just Mickey’s father in this; he provides a bridge between the more civilised parts of Edgewater and the riskier, more far-flung territory that he helped to grow – no pun intended – into a flourishing little sub-community. The difficulties he has had adapting to his new surroundings and leaving his past behind have been fairly consistent, and this subplot is a nice outgrowth of them.
There’s also a more serialised plot building here with the cartels muscling in on the territory and a mysterious third party getting involved to leave threatening messages all over the place – a mystery still not solved by the end of the episode. W. Earl Brown really sells this character and provides him with a lot of lived-in texture, and I like that he’s a fundamental part of the cast and not just a supporting player. I’m sure there’s more to come from him, and from this angle, as we go, just hopefully in a more interesting overall episode.
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