Summary
The DEA’s arrival throws Edgewater into chaos in “The Gambler”, leading to major consequences for Mickey, Boone, and Wes.
Blimey, Sheriff Country isn’t kind to Boone, is it? Granted, Mickey directing Boone to the friend zone for the second time in as many episodes is really the least of anyone’s concerns, given rampant federal interference and the legal downfall of Wes Fox, which in many ways has been coming for decades. But I couldn’t help noticing Boone’s plight in Episode 18. Even in the midst of all this stress, he finally managed to pluck up the courage to tell Mickey how he feels… and she shut him down immediately. Ouch.
Truthfully, I don’t think she means it, but now isn’t really the time. Right from the word go in “The Gambler”, low-flying DEA helicopters mark a seismic shift in the scale and severity of the search for the missing DEA money, which Wes stole in the previous episode. Alec takes over most of the Sheriff’s Department to run the investigation, much to the consternation of Mickey herself and, especially, Boone, who’s not only fed up professionally but can also apparently smell the previous night’s liaison on Mickey and Alec. It’s a nightmare.
Don’t forget the personal stakes, though. The episode begins with a brief moment of togetherness for the Fox family, with Wes taking Skye and Mickey on a little hike to some land he owns, sharing some important emotional backstory about Mickey’s mother. As soon as that DEA chopper passes by overhead, the tone shifts, but this moment is important and will be called back to later.
It pains me to say it, but I think the DEA has the ghost of a point. Edgewater law enforcement got way too complacent with weed growers, legal and otherwise, and that allowed a criminal co-op – not entirely dissimilar from a cartel – to be formed under their noses. In Mickey’s case, the key conspirator was living under her roof, but nobody knows this yet. Either way, I can understand where Alec is coming from, especially since he’s also protecting his own career.
A lot of the procedural tension in Sheriff Country Episode 18 comes from the usual gang trying to investigate the murder of Lymon Ford, the lawyer representing the shady Emerald Eden conglomerate, while Alec and the DEA keep trampling over everything. The difficulty of making this work on a writing level is depicting Alec as a nuisance without being unreasonable on a cartoonish level, and it does a decent – albeit imperfect – job. After Boone goes nuts and confesses to Mickey that he’s mostly annoyed with Alec out of petty jealousy about their relationship, he and Alec become firm friends pretty much immediately, with Alec giving him the location of a safehouse that the motorcycle gang he was undercover in used, which is where a key witness in the case is hiding out.
Of course, the more progress that Mickey and Boone make, the closer they get to uncovering Wes’s involvement. The audience knows that, and so does Wes, who spends most of “The Gambler” trying to get his affairs in order. In a record amount of time, given the circumstances, he sells off everything he owns and has Travis, whom the show remembers exists solely for these legal proceedings, put it in a trust for Skye. And then he has to say his goodbyes.
Not to be too negative, but it’s impossible not to point out that the emotional sentiment of this scene is somewhat undercut by the fact that Wes and Skye have frequently disappeared for huge stretches of the show. I even did a little double-take when I saw Travis. I still think Mickey marching in with evidence that implicates Wes, Wes’s heartfelt apology, and Mickey leading him away in cuffs while Skye breaks down all works pretty well, but I also think it’d work significantly better with a bit more consistent development, certainly for Skye.
This, though, is evidently going to be the least of anyone’s problems. With Wes’s arrest, the DEA’s Deputy Director, Eva Santos, arrives in Edgewater to spearhead a new investigation into whether the sheriff’s department in general, and Mickey specifically, is corrupt. After all, the mastermind of the criminal co-op was literally living in the sheriff’s house. There are definitely going to be some difficult questions to answer here.
