Episode Report Card 22 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT Human Garbage
By Tippi Blevins | Season 1 | Episode 9/10 | Aired on 10.06.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.In the first part of this two-part finale, Frank Agnew takes us on nonlinear trip to witness his mental breakdown. At first it seems like maybe he's in Chicago, getting picked up by cops after losing his unholy shit at the cam house. As time goes by, it becomes clear that the episode started off somewhere in the middle of the story, and then backtracked. How did he get to this point? And why are his eyes so grossly bloodshot?
Lieutenant Dawson and the rest of the DPD are looking for him, so he holes up in a diner and cooks up a plan to make everything all right. He's sick of the lies, you see, and he knows that Dawson helped cover up Brendan and Joe's dirty work. Frank has Sean bring him all his files from home, then sets about calling the family members of those whose deaths were wrongly ruled suicides. He tells them that cops covered up the murders, and that they should hire up some lawyers to help them. He even tells Billy Hobson's mother that it was Damon Callis who killed her son, and that Billy wasn't a murderer. Then he decides he's going to turn in both himself and Joe.
Then he changes his mind for some reason and decides he's going to flee to Germany. What the hell? He's so stressed out, though, that he has a heart attack. Veins in his eyes pop under the pressure. He soldiers on somehow and makes it to his ex-wife's house in Ann Arbor. They have a tense, emotional scene in which we learn that the ex has a restraining order against Frank, because he's a goddamned loon. Depressed, insane, still woozy from his coronary, he almost shoots himself in the head. The ex talks him down and he allows local police to take him away. This is where we started off the episode.
When he gets back to HQ, Dawson and Geddes have good news: Sean the helpful hobo has confessed to all the murders! At some point during the drive back from Ann Arbor, Frank must have decided not to turn himself in, because although he gets a lawyer for Sean, he doesn't do the one thing that would get his friend off the hook. Which is, you know, to tell the truth. Instead, he tells Maya to fake an alibi for her ex-husband, but Sean steadfastly refuses to accept her help. Frank eventually (in about 20 seconds) decides to further incriminate Sean by planting evidence on him. What a pal, right?
Boyd takes his case against Frank and Joe to the Deputy Mayor and APA, but nobody believes him. Frank, for some reason, continues to tell the lies of which he professed to be so sick. What changed his mind? Did this show somehow get renewed for another season? Boyd throws a major hissyfit to no avail.
In the subplot, Damon and Nick kill Skelos and hole up in Flint for a while. Maya's pissed, because he went against her wishes and put her kids in danger. Even still, she's pretty devastated when she learns that Damon was then shot dead by some guy in a mask. Turns out it's one of Reverend Lowdown's crew. How did he knew Damon was in Flint? Who knows? But it was killing Skelos that put the nail in Damon's coffin, because the old man was the only thing protecting against retribution.
To finish out the season, Frank returns to Chicago to claim Katia's body. The coroner asks him for her name, and he can't answer because he doesn't know. His stares of lost bewilderment started the season, and they ended it as well. Stay tuned for the full recap.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We pick up an undetermined amount of time after Frank's tirade at the cam house. It's a gray and rainy morning in... whatever place this. Frank sits in the back of a squad car, chatting with the young cop behind the wheel. He offers driving advice, and how to deal with one's nerves, and, dude, if you ever want to murder another cop you should really plan that shit out! Frank notices that local police dispatch is rather more polite than its Detroit equivalent. From the way Frank talks, the young cop realizes that Frank is also a cop -- a detective, in fact. It's odd that he wouldn't have realized this sooner, given that they probably patted Frank down and found his badge and ID.
The cop's partner emerges from the house, where he's been interviewing all the people that Frank beat up and/or terrorized. The cops have been told to drive Frank all the way back to Detroit, like maybe Detroit is too cheap to pick up Frank themselves. Frank looks glum, but he always looks glum. He could be surrounded by fat, happy puppies on a bed made of rainbows and he would still look like the saddest man in the world. Happy puppies or death of his girlfriend, there's really no emotional difference. The only notable difference is that one of his eyes is very, very bloodshot. Cue opening credits.
After getting down, down, down with Bettye LaVette, we join Frank in his car as he's tooling around Detroit, listening to the radio. He just drives and listens, listens and drives. It's so... gripping. His eye is no longer bloodshot, which means this is taking place sometime later, or sometime earlier than the previous scene. There's a sort of surreal element to the scene, perhaps in the quality of light or something about the way because Frank seems unusually happy. He even laughs when the guy on the radio makes a joke about underpaid bus drivers deciding to drive into the river. He laughs harder when the guy rails about salary cuts in the city budget being responsible for turning cops dirty. Maybe he's having one of those "been there, done that" moments.
His journey takes him to the cemetery where Brendan McCann is buried. He calls Joe, but gets his voice mail. "They buried Brendan between two Polacks," he says. He thinks for a while, like he's writing in his diary instead of leaving a message for Joe. "I haven't eaten, I haven't slept. I feel like a god." Uh, okay, weirdo. When he's done with that, he checks his own messages. Trey the boxer has been trying to reach him. Frank apparently hasn't given Trey back his sweet, sweet ride. The last message is from Lieutenant Dawson: "Call me when you get this, no matter what time it is. We gotta talk, and we gotta talk now."