Summary
Lucky shifts into its final phase by properly reckoning with its moral point of view, springing John from prison, and turning the tables. But it still has some work to do in its final episodes.
I’m not sure how many near-death experiences you can survive and how many loved ones you can lose before the name “Lucky” starts to feel a bit grimly ironic. We’ve got to be getting close, though. After Cary’s surprising demise, Anya Taylor-Joy’s beleaguered title character is on the run again, having to pretend that an old lady badly injured in the crash she caused is her grandmother so she can catch a ride to the hospital. She’s not in good shape, mentally or physically, and for the first time in Episode 5 we start to see both her cover stories come apart at the seams and her sense of morality take a pretty serious knock.
Titled “Are We Bad People?”, this episode at least asks the relevant question, the same one I’ve been asking throughout Season 1. Unsurprisingly, it was Lucky’s father who instilled in her a sense of morality that was simply a matter of degree. Just as cold is only the absence of heat and thus temperature is only determined by one’s distance from the sun, so too is “bad” just keeping “good” at a bit of a remove. It’s a convenient excuse for behaving however one wants, and one that Lucky has clearly used throughout her life to justify anything she has had to do. But the whole thing is starting to lose its lustre.
This isn’t just subtext. It’s Lucky’s arc throughout the entire episode. You can only see so many pensioners on death’s door before you start asking yourself some serious questions, and you see the guilt start to manifest in real-time. First, she consoles Rand’s daughter when she bumps into her in the hospital bathroom, and you can tell she means it. Later, when she makes it to a cheap hotel, she fully unburdens herself at the bar to a man who would otherwise be a typical mark. She needs to believe she’s not a terrible person. His counterpoint is that worrying about it means she almost certainly isn’t, but the evidence generally supports her point of view.
I’m glad of this. I’ve been pointing out Lucky’s cavalier approach to the people she encounters repeatedly, unsure of whether it was a writing oversight or a tactical play. “Are We Bad People?” proves it’s the latter. We were always heading towards this point, to this kind of episode, a natural reset point where everyone is forced to take a bit of a break and reassess where they stand. While Lucky is in the hotel, Rand is in the hospital with a cranial contusion, still obsessing over the case, and Priscilla is angrily shooting bottles in her grief, instructing Dutch to invite Wayne to Cary’s funeral. Everyone’s at a crossroads. Where they choose to turn next will define the remainder of the season.
Wayne doesn’t attend Cary’s funeral — doesn’t even send flowers. Lucky herself arrives, though, to tell Priscilla the truth that she doesn’t have the missing money; Cary was the only person who knew where it was hidden, and he’s now dead. Unless Lucky can guess the seed phrase on his laptop to access the digitized currency, she can’t do anything to get Wayne off Priscilla’s back, and thus Priscilla will keep pursuing her. Luckily, it turns out she doesn’t have to guess the seed phrase. When she returns to her car and angrily slaps Cary’s stuffed bear around, it plays the seed phrase out loud. He hid a recording inside it. Maybe Lucky is living up to her name after all.
Or perhaps not. Dana, Rand’s daughter, recognises Lucky’s ID from their brief encounter at the hospital, so Rand’s convalescence suddenly takes a working turn. And Wayne, who we learn was Cary’s father, hasn’t exactly softened on the missing money thing, so the two parties who were pursuing Lucky are still actively pursuing her. Newfound moral clarity isn’t going to keep her alive.
But her dad might. John is unexpectedly released from prison under highly mysterious circumstances, given he still has eight years left until he’s eligible for parole. He’s rightly suspicious about who might have sprung him, but the audience can put the pieces together. Since Dana happened to mention that Lucky had told her she would do anything for her dad, and Rand asked Gates to pull in a favour from the DOJ, it’s obvious that she’s behind this, and Lucky jumps to the same conclusion when John calls her. But she also sees an opportunity. Rand doesn’t hold all the cards; she just thinks she does. Lucky has a plan. Episode 5 doesn’t make us privy to all the details, of course, but it involves Lucky and John both surrendering themselves to the authorities. Rand thinks she has her win. But I imagine it’s going to turn out to be anything but.
