Dope Thief Recap: The Old Head-in-a-Box Routine

Every Robin Hood for himself. The inherent spiritual (and mortal) paradox of American life. It’s not only easy but nigh on downright justifiable to consider your criminal deeds for the greater good when you and yours are a ragtag few in dire need of an inhabitable life.

Dope Thief’s third chapter is mostly a utilitarian one, in a good way — filling out the scale and scope of the world and mortal stakes for the characters while massaging an urban-western-type vibe into the proceedings, culminating in a good old-fashioned head-in-a-box routine for your trouble. Ray Driscoll is stuck in Philly, and the heat is closing in. Business as usual, other than the mysterious, immediate big-time drug-dealing threat on his life and the life of everyone he knows.

Two days have passed since the robbery, and Manny is still nowhere to be found. Ray scopes out the old haunts and doesn’t find much outside confirmation that the killer Aryan meth-running biker gang is still on the hunt for both of them. “Everybody you get close to is in the crosshairs with you,” Son tells him under the bridge along his morning jog. “Everybody you care about.” Best to exit the scene and give the rest of us a fighting chance away from the line of fire.

But it isn’t just the heat closing in that’s keeping Ray around. There’s still the notion of being your own personal Robin Hood — parlaying a lifetime of loss into one big win. The golden nugget that’ll take you and yours out of the rat race.

And that’s the angle he tries to sell to Theresa when he finds her safe at home and ready to do a one-woman intervention on his ass. Not much time to argue his point though, seeing how Manny is hiding up in his attic room and Theresa just got a call from prison saying Bart’s been stabbed. Manny’s in a relapsed panic, and Theresa is frantic about getting to the prison in time to be with her lover on his deathbed. So, with at least the knowledge that Manny is alive and relatively in one piece, Ray drives Theresa to prison with every intention of hanging back in the car. A flash of black-and-white memories of being rousted out of bed and abused by prison guards reminds us that Ray is even more familiar with the hell behind U.S. prison bars than even his father.

Shoutout to director Tanya Hamilton and crew for staging and shooting the next scene like the riveting suspense sequence it is: rooting the viewer in the geographical positioning of Ray and Michelle, the lawyer at the nearest road-side bar, speaking in code as the Aryan biker boys surround them — a table of day-drinking prison guards the only thing between them and oblivion. In this episode alone, Brian Tyree Henry has had plenty of moments to work his old Paper Boi rhythm on the drama as well as the humor (thinking of his physical reaction to Theresa demanding he sit down and hear out her shaky intervention), but this scene in particular sees him exercising his peerless emotional communication in the eyes, making the well-pitched coded dialogue sing as he and Michelle find the right moment to escape the bar with the prison guards. A-plus acting that serves a thrilling and dramatic purpose in equal measure.

However, it seems like Ray’s luck has run out after a heavy confrontation with Bart in the infirmary. It turns out Bart was stabbed as bait to bring Ray out of hiding, and a whole platoon of bikers is waiting for Ray just outside the prison gates. Inside the prison walls, there is an emotional stalemate between the two men. A father who, as Ray points out, has no right to be disappointed in his son, but in so expressing it, taps into Ray’s disappointment in himself. So when he steps onto the other side of those prison gates and the DEA swoops in and saves him from what was surely set to be a Sergio Leone–style criminal execution (the timing strains credibility a bit here, even for a show that mixes straight drama with pulp like this one does — nevertheless, kick-ass spaghetti-western LARP-ing shit), Ray takes his second chance at life to make all the amends he can — parlay a lifetime of bad decisions into priceless nuggets of love.

And for his first miracle, St. Ray manages to bring Manny back to Sherry, tell her they have to destroy her car because it’s been spotted, and propose to her on Manny’s behalf with the engagement ring he found hidden in Manny’s apartment. It’s a rough-and-tumble show (it was a bit rushed over in the edit, but it definitely had me chuckling out loud), but I’ll be damned if Ray doesn’t pull it off.

Unfortunately, no half-good deed goes unpunished. Just as these crazy kids are about to celebrate their engagement, the meth-runners saddle them with the old head-in-a-box routine. An insanely brutal end for a local pawn shop owner who didn’t do anything except sell Manny a firearm and call the Aryan bikers a trio of dumbasses to their faces. Meanwhile, the feds are getting the names of every visitor to the prison that day, and Mina has recognized a composite sketch of Ray in his fake DEA cap. A big old unjust pile of shit to fall on any small–time Robin Hood when every day feels more and more like it’s a crime to be alive.