Summary
Anya Taylor-Joy remains commanding in Lucky, but the show feels like it’s going through a motions a little in “Read the Room”, although a last-minute cliffhanger doesn’t promise to liven things up.
It seems a bit early for Lucky to be going through the motions, but Episode 3, “Read the Room”, does have that vibe about it. The big developments happen at the very end, which is a good sign for next week, but doesn’t do much for us in the meantime. Anya Taylor-Joy continues to very charismatically command the room, and also continues to be a bit of a monster, which is an interesting trait for a protagonist to have. But this trajectory had already started, and in the absence of Cary, who hasn’t been seen since the premiere, she’s stuck in a bit of a holding pattern.
The good news is that Cary turns up again at the end of “Read the Room”, and I do imagine there’s a bit more going on than we have been led to believe. It may even be that Lucky and Cary end up teaming up to take down Priscilla and Wayne, but that’ll have to wait. For now, the formula is obvious enough. Lucky goes somewhere, does some deception, gets a call from her dad, and goes somewhere else. Repeat that a couple of times, and have Agent Rand playing catch-up, and you’ve got the majority of the episode.
The Rand thing goes back a ways. This episode opens with a flashback showing John making a deal for Priscilla while Rand watches from afar and Lucky warns him rather prophetically that things aren’t going to end well. Later, when Rand finally gets some face time with Priscilla, she implies that her crusade against her stems from the loss of one of her agents. It’s personal, which Kershaw already implied in the previous episode. But Rand is invariably a step behind Lucky. Here, she literally follows a trail that Lucky already took, using the gas station CCTV to lead her to Priscilla’s farm, but ages after Lucky has already left. It’s Gates who makes the major breakthrough, tracking Cary’s purchase of a car to a fake ID and a new address.
That farm is the first place Lucky ends up. She has to remain hidden while Dutch tortures and then kills Noah on Priscilla’s instructions, but he doesn’t seem to know anything about making fake IDs, which Dutch seems to suspect him of. When the others leave, Lucky steals Noah’s ID from his corpse, but before heading to his address, she stops off at a kid’s birthday party to acquire some supplies.
Lucky’s facility for deception, for blending in and showing initiative, is easily the best thing about Lucky so far, and that’s true in Episode 3, too. But it doesn’t exactly endear her to the audience. It’s cool watching her find a classy new outfit and make a friend, but it’s a bit more worrying when another flashback kicks in, this one to John telling her how best to steal from a kid’s birthday party. Envelopes unattached to presents are the ones containing money. Take the purses when nobody’s watching. By the time Lucky leaves, she has acquired a new outfit, enough cash to tip the valet and then some, and a new car.
Newly outfitted, Lucky heads to Noah’s place. Now, granted, I’m not one to nitpick, but the fact that his session of Call of Duty is still paused despite the fact that his Xbox One S is visibly switched off and attached to a PlayStation controller is such a ridiculous abandonment of detail that it makes me a bit worried. Nobody tried to make this believable; it’s like the set was constructed entirely from random bits of technology people had to hand. It doesn’t make any difference to anything, but it bothered me enough to mention it.
As it turns out, it’s Noah’s neighbor who makes the fake IDs. Lucky pays her a visit and gets one made, and while looking through some samples, she also notices that Cary was a former customer, which explains why his rental car went to Noah’s place. His new name is Colson Smith. Armed with his new address, Lucky heads there, but her dad cautions her against rushing to get the money back when she’s clearly still emotional. She claims not to be, but evidence suggests otherwise.
The standout sequence of “Read the Room” is probably Taylor-Joy doing a great drunk impression to seduce some real estate agent who tries to force himself on her. She shakes him down in exchange for access to one of his rental properties, which, of course, happens to be the one that Cary is staying in. While he swims in the sea, Lucky tears the place apart looking for the money. She eventually discovers a bag containing a gun and a laptop, locked with a 12-word seed phrase. The episode ends with Cary returning to find his place in ruins, and Lucky looking rather unhappy to see him. Considering that Wayne also calls Priscilla to tell her that he has figured out Cary’s location himself — does he have a mole in the FBI, I wonder? — Cary would do well to get used to being greeted this way.
