Summary
The Westies has an anachronistically fun tone in “The Houdini”, but the Irish predicament is quickly going from bad to worse.
The Westies is so much fun in Episode 2 that it’s easy to forget “The Houdini” has some pretty horrific stuff in it. The premise of the entire episode, in fact, is based around covering up the fact that Jimmy killed Vinnie by using the made man’s severed hand to stage a posthumous crime spree. The show isn’t shy about explaining how the hand got detached in the first place, either.
The whole thing’s a riot, though. And part of what’s funny about it is how dumb it all is. Initially, Jimmy’s plan makes a degree of sense, and if anyone with a brain were handling it, it would have probably turned out okay. But Jimmy’s crew, which still includes the flagrantly unstable Mickey, is all morons. Their attempts to create a ruse only end up drawing undue attention to themselves. The Italians see through it immediately.
The big question is perhaps why Sweeney goes along with it; why, while we’re on the subject, he didn’t just kill Mickey himself and have done with it. He’s clearly not afraid to put bullets in his own men, but he also seems curiously reluctant to do away with people like Jimmy, even when they mess up repeatedly. For now, I can’t quite tell if that’s inconsistent characterisation or if Sweeney genuinely cares about some of the men in his employ.
I feel the same way about Mickey. This is a guy who fought in Vietnam and has brought the memories home with him, but the sight of Vinnie’s body being chopped up turns his stomach so much that he vomits. He was going to shoot him in the head hours prior! Again, I can’t tell whether this is inconsistent characterisation or if he’s all bark and little bite. Or maybe part of his trauma is that he can’t stomach the violence in the way he once did. Time will tell.
The only way in which this is a legitimate downside is that the main threat in “The Houdini” is that Sweeney will hand Jimmy and Mickey over to the Italians if they mess up, but we never for a moment believe he actually will. As it happens, the Italians might find out for themselves regardless, since they intuit immediately that a mob capo who is currently missing after only recently having been kidnapped probably wouldn’t knock off a jewellery store. The plan doesn’t stand up to a great deal of scrutiny when you really think about it.
After the jewellery store, the gang takes Vinnie’s hand to a bar owned by one of Sweeney’s long-time associates, Liam O’Shaughnessy – I’m thinking immediately of that Key & Peele substitute teacher sketch – and trashes the place, leaving Vinnie’s prints all over the scene. They continue to goof around, get drunk, and just generally treat the whole thing like a party until they’re pulled over by a cop, whom Pat shoots in the head when he discovers the hand in the cooler. This was already going wrong, but trying to stage the crime to look like Vinnie did it is a real mess.
Sweeney orders the kids to burn the hand and be done with it, which they’re just about able to do before Mickey is jumped and taken away at gunpoint by Gotti and some of his goons, who had been pointed towards him by Erin, the prostitute who Vinnie – and indeed Mickey himself – was soft on. By the end of The Westies Episode 2, he’s in hotter water than he started in.
Anyway, there’s still stuff going on elsewhere, including Keenan’s first day working for the task force under Polk. Through her, we get a bit more of his backstory, including his two voluntary tours of Vietnam as a Force Recon Marine and his earlier heroics with the NYPD. He might be a bit of a down-and-out now, but he was once a decorated soldier and policeman, so there’s a bit of a story to unravel here, perhaps related to why his relationship with Danny is so sour. He’s not very good at subtly asking questions, either, but be that as it may.
There’s also Bridget, who has decided to hide a rocket launcher for the IRA, which seems like a massive deal relative to how much screen time it’s being given. Bridget is already on the run from the British and had to be smuggled out of Ireland, so drawing attention to herself isn’t an especially good idea, but she’s passionate about the cause and wants to do whatever she can to further it, even if that means keeping an eye on explosive ordnance. I am a bit worried about Brendan, though, who seems to be able to acquire all of her personal information at a moment’s notice and keeps turning up in places in a way that’s certain to antagonize Jimmy. Whatever collision course they’re inevitably on, though, is probably going to have to wait.
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