Dope Thief Recap: Caught Up in Traffic

It’s the morning after Ray and Manny’s fateful robbery gone wrong. They’ve torched their van and now they’re hucking the license plates into the river. Ray evokes a bonding ritual from their shared formative years: “Bet you I could throw mine further than you.” The levity is brief: a humble filling of the canteen of the found family before heading out on the next stretch of road crumbling beneath your feet.

Dope Thief’s opening credit sequence elaborates on this theme: a lone, hooded kid rushes through the streets of Philadelphia on a bike. His pace is quick and his gait is straight and true, but the world around him is changing at an accelerated pace. Potholes morph and change places in the blink of an eye — shoes pop into existence on a telephone wire overhead — gas prices fluctuate in a frenzy on a Gas Station sign. The streets are in constant, violent flux, and Ray Driscoll is riding like the wind, not only from his past but also to stay ahead of an ever-encroaching present that’s slipping into the future faster than he can pedal.

“Now we just gotta put our heads down and hide everything we love,” Ray tells Manny at the bridge. And the first order of business on that front is getting Theresa out of her house and somewhere safe. In an anxious fury, Ray storms through her house under the auspices of winning her a free trip to Atlantic City from a radio contest. Theresa never fully buys it, but her bigger concern is that she’s paid a retainer to some lawyers for Ray’s imprisoned father (presumably with the $10,000 he lifted for her), and she’s got an appointment with them that afternoon. Quick on his feet, Ray says he’ll go to the appointment with little intention of making sure it happens. More, uh, mortal tasks are on the priority list, you know?

With a shitting Shermy the dog in tow, Ray’s next stop is the beautiful upscale home of Son Pham (Dustin Nguyen), a well-to-do Vietnamese career criminal with whom Ray and Manny occasionally do business — eliminating some of his “competition” via their fake-DEA smash-and-grab jobs. Ray takes a moment to soak in the warm, comfortable house and bustling family breakfast table and scarfs down a couple of stray pieces of bacon — scarcity mindset of the all-American lone wolf.

“You went for a capillary; you got an artery,” Son tells Ray in his office. The Aloe Vera bottles they made out with are full of liquid meth, dissolved at the conversion lab they blew up to sell in bulk, to then be converted to crystal for street distribution. Once again, the rug has been pulled from under Ray’s feet before he could brace himself for the fall. Life is a shapeshifting organism whose constant movements will not be wrangled by mortal hands. “That means all you’ve got is your heart and your wits,” elaborates Son. “And your family.”

That last part is the real stinger. It turns out that Ray’s father, Bart (Ving Rhames), isn’t just inflicting pain on him from the past. He might also be the loose lip that sank their good ship of a hustle. While moving their liquid meth and bag of money into Ray’s storage unit, Manny sees Bart’s old chair and realizes he may have been in the joint with Rick. And the look on Ray’s face when he realizes he’s gonna have to pay his old man a visit in jail is classic Brian Tyree Henry.

So is the next scene where he’s playing opposite Rhames like gangbusters. I didn’t address this in the first recap, but there’s a definite FX-show tone to this show’s drama and humor.

This isn’t the first scene where Peter Craig’s writing infuses a weighty dramatic scene with a jarring yet wholly appropriate accent of comedy, but it’s certainly the starkest so far — showcasing Henry’s signature dramatic application of the Paper Boi pathos and cadence. “You’re welcome for them cigarettes, smoke all them other fuckers at once.” (The classic Alfred exasperation and rapid-fire delivery had me cackling). Ving Rhames makes a great scene partner and more than believable absent father to Henry’s Ray — an old ghost of the young father who hurt his son. Ray shakes his fist at the ghost of his old man and it jogs loose a memory. Bart did say something about his son’s “line of work” at an AA meeting where the only non-long hauler in attendance was a white guy named Danny Loebsack.

Apparently there are a lot of Loebsacks in the greater Philadelphia area or something because it seems like quite the chore for Ray and Manny as they drive all over creation peeking at Loebsack addresses. We come upon them just as they find the right Loebsack house, though, and our second drug-house shootout goes down. Good thing our guys were wearing the Kevlar vests on loan from Son, not that it saves them from the crypto-Boschian scene of slit throats and pale corpses (even more like something out of a William Friedkin joint than our debut Ridley Scott-directed episode).

The shootout is also a bit more action-y than the one in the first episode, culminating in our first no-holds-barred fuck-yeah moment when Ray shoots the guy who’s about to shoot Manny through both windows of a truck. Queue smoking-gun money shot. Manny shows his Catholic underbelly again under pressure, yammering about closing the eyelids of and properly burying the Nazi bikers they’ve just blown away, but Ray shuts it down. “Sherry is right about you,” he tells Ray later on at the car wash. “She says you have the need to control everything.”

“Do I look like I’m in control, Manny?” Ray replies. And there is a slight misdiagnosis there on Sherry and Manny’s part. Ray is motivated less by a desire to control than by a desire to fake control until you make it. Stay on top of everything the best you can. Sift through the elusive sands beneath your feet with an ever-keener eye for the shiny kernels. Fight or flight, always. Never known or given the opportunity to know another way.

As if on command to add to Ray’s ultimate bad day, Manny isn’t answering his phone, and he’s nowhere to be found when Ray goes by his place. Has Manny already been apprehended? Instead, Ray is greeted by more Nazi biker thugs and escapes their grasp via foot chase and a gnarly run-in with a garbage truck. Props to director Jonathan Van Tulleken for exceeding the bar of the first episode in the action sequence department.

After all that, Ray still has an appointment to keep. “Sorry, I got stuck in traffic,” Ray says when he catches Theresa’s lawyer, Michelle Taylor (Nesta Cooper), on her way out of the office. Her warm welcome back into the office gives him his first beat to think in what feels like ages, and amid his uncontrollable sobs, he finds out this whole thing is about securing a compassionate release for an allegedly cancer-ridden Bart. The irony of the $10,000 being for his father runs even deeper and crueler than he thought. If life in the hollowed-out cities of America isn’t one long, arduous day with “Bat Out of Hell” screeching from your phone every 20 minutes, I don’t know what it is.

Report from the Crime Scene

• Better check in on the feds real quick before next week. Mina is still stuck in a hospital bed but no less, uh, vocal about the case. Agents Nader (Amir Arison) and Marchetti (Will Pullen) return to her bedside fresh from the latest crime scene with little to show for it except a goofy exchange with two mouthbreathing local cops for our viewing pleasure. Her demands remain as emphatic as ever, even when spoken through the voice of a comedically-timed autocorrecting iPad: she wants to keep her cover and continue the plan set forth by her departed undercover partner. And maybe track down Ray and Manny from the cloaked vantage point of an assumed criminal identity.

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