In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.
I have got to learn some synonyms for heroin, you guys. Okay. So after Mike follows Briggs to an NA meeting, Briggs confesses how he came to be a heroin addict: it was those evil cartel fellows who kidnapped him and shot him up with junk over and over! And then they just let him go, as evil cartel fellows are known to do. But then Briggs got clean and he's kept his addiction a secret from the bureau, because otherwise all the cases he closed would be reopened and the bad guys he put away freed, because junkies are inherently untrustworthy.
Mike swallows this whole story and returns to his investigation of Bello. After seeing that Bello is having his drug-packing underlings cut the heroin he has with fentanyl (since he's low on product after losing the torpedo full o' smack), Mike is eager to bust him now before the compromised drugs can kill anyone. Briggs convinces him to hold off so they can bring down the whole vertically integrated drug apparatus.
After Charlie confesses her recent heroin troubles to the whole house in a fit of honesty, against Briggs's wishes because he's all "private business stays private," he ropes her in to set up a three-way meeting of Briggs, Odin Rossi and Bello. At the meet, Briggs's comms unit goes silent, so Paige, Johnny and Mike, listening in, don't hear Briggs telling Bello that he is, in fact, Odin Rossi. DRAMATIC CHIPMUNK.
In less smacky plots, we find out that Jakes has a seven-year-old son who doesn't know him; apparently Jakes broke up with Daniel's mother, Cassandra, because his shifty DEA agent life is not conducive to having a family. With the not knowing of his son in mind, Jakes advises Mike not to break up with Abby if he's serious about her, even after Paige and Johnny tell him he absolutely has to end the relationship.
Think you've got game? Prove it! Check out Games Without Pity, our new area featuring trivia, puzzle, card, strategy, action and word games -- all free to play and guaranteed to help pass the time until your show starts.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously on Graceland: Charlie got high, and then got high again. Johnny almost got blown up finding a torpedo full of drugs for Bello. And it turns out Briggs's big secret is that he's a junkie. Five dollars to anyone who didn't see that coming.
We pick up in the NA meeting Mike followed Briggs to. Briggs is speaking, telling the other folks about how he's a junkie liar. Mike sits down and sees the bag Briggs was carrying when he left the FBI building, the one he thinks holds half the drugs that should've been in that torpedo. At the end of his speech, Briggs greets Mike and congratulates him on the skill it took to follow him. Mike's all, yeah, I'm awesome.
At the coffee table, Briggs opens the gym bag and hands one of the other meeting attendees…a coffeemaker. Mike says he assumes the FBI doesn't know Briggs attends these meetings. He and Briggs walk down to the beach and Briggs starts expounding on how surfing gives him the closest thing to a heroin high he can get legally.
Flashback. In voiceover, Briggs explains that he was undercover with the Caza cartel several years ago. He was young and wanted to move up in the FBI, and he was in love. He refrains from telling Mike about the woman he was in love with—was it Charlie?—but mentions his training officer, Roberto, who was undercover on the Mexican side of the cartel. ("Major cojones," Briggs says, which brilliant closed-caption folks at Fios transcribe as "Major colonies.")
Briggs says the Caza family loved Roberto, treated them as one of his own. In the flashback, Briggs and Roberto talk about a dead body in the morgue; Briggs flips through a file and asks if this body is indeed Jimmy, an aspiring drug supplier to the cartel. Roberto pulls back the sheet to expose a dismembered body. It lacks fingers, so they don't know who it is. In the present Briggs tells Mike this was the third chopped-up body connected to the Caza cartel in just a few months, and they'd been attributing them all to a boogeyman everyone called "El Hombre Llave," the Key Man, also called Jangles by the FBI.
Mike says he's heard of him, and Briggs continues, saying the bureau pulled him from the case because they didn't want him getting chopped up. Roberto stayed undercover and Briggs went on vacation—in Tecate. Where one of his CIs set up a meeting with the cartel. At the meeting, Briggs tells Mike, something felt off—his CI had been killed, and he was captured.