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Judging by Joe's flashbacks, he was either telling Frank the truth about Katia, or he's lying even to himself. He was supposed to kill her, but decides at the last moment to drive her to Canada and set her free. In the present day, he's urinating blood and clumps of organ tissue in the aftermath of his fight with Frank. Frank decides that the best way to find out what Boyd has is to give up Joe. You'd think Joe be mad at Frank about that, but maybe he pissed away some of his bad attitude along with his kidneys. So he goes along with it, and Frank gives up just enough to find out that Boyd... isn't going to share much with him. Oh well.
City Hall is putting the pressure on to arraign someone by the end of the week. Frank's idea is to just call in a bunch of useless suspects until the case goes cold. Then a witness shows up, saying he saw McCann being dumped into the river. He can ID the makes of the cars, and that the killers were a black man and a taller white man. He doesn't recognize Frank and Joe specifically, though, so they lead him into thinking the white man was actually Middle Eastern. Frank also brings Skelos in for questioning, but Skelos is an old hand at this, and arrives with a lawyer and a ream of alibis.
Skelos is unnerved just enough to put the brakes on his various businesses for a while, though. He warns Maya to lay low, as well, and to pass the word on to Damon. But Damon, eager to get his blind pig up and running, ignores the warning. The one bit of advice he does take from Maya, however, is to hire Nick (the guy I kept calling Steven last week, for some reason) to help out with putting up drywall and stealing generators. Nick looks miserable about the whole thing, and his presences causes tension among the crew, but he earns his continued employment and a room to sleep in.
In between all this, Frank takes trips to the local boxing gym to spar with various opponents. If he had any sense left, it gets knocked out of him many times over when he faces off with a much younger, stronger boxer. This doesn't satisfy his inner glutton for punishment, though, so he decides to drive across the border to search for Katia. That should end well, right? Stay tuned for the full recap.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previouslies: Frank Agnew and Joe Geddes offed fellow detective Brendan McCann, then stuffed him into his car and drove it right through a bunch of plot holes and into the river. Simon Boyd from Internal Affairs showed up at police headquarters to make everyone even grumpier than usual. Boyd's investigation had centered on McCann, but he soon turned his focus on Joe. Joe would have been pissed, but he realized it would give him a lot of opportunities to make Very Dramatic Speeches. Small-time thugs Damon and Michael decided to open up a "blind pig," which sounds like the subject of a nursery rhyme, but is actually a one-stop shop for booze, drugs and hookers. To make everything square with a neighboring gangster named Reverend Lowdown, they paid him off with cocaine and invited his crew to sample the wares. Frank beat the stuffing out of Joe until he confessed that Frank's girlfriend Katia was still alive and hanging out in Canada.
This week's episode opens with a black screen and the sound of something scraping... scraping... A man grunts and pants with effort. When the light comes up, it's on Joe's utterly lost expression. He stares at something with a feeling beyond horror and dismay. He looks like he might start crying at any moment if he can remember to. Finally, we see what he's seeing: Brendan McCann sawing the hands off Butterball's fresh corpse. McCann notices Joe staring at him. "You got something to contribute?" he snarks, bloody sweat dripping from his brow. "Then stop gawking," he says at Joe's silence. Joe starts to wander away, but McCann follows after him. "You don't wanna cut this prick up, and then take care of that gash." He gestures at Katia, who's been bound and gagged to her bed. Joe starts to protest that she's innocent, but McCann doesn't care. He tells Joe to shoot her in the head and dump her in the river.
McCann goes back to work with the hacksaw. It's quite the dinky little hacksaw, too. If you're serious about cutting up dead bodies, you should really invest in a reciprocating saw. You get all the cutting ease of a chainsaw, with the convenient portability of a handsaw! Katia looks at Joe with pleading eyes. Joe utters a quiet refusal to do as he's told, which seems to surprise him as much as it does McCann. So McCann tries a little logic: "If she lives, we die." When that doesn't work, he just outright threatens to saw Joe to pieces, too, like he's going to have any energy left after finishing with Butterball. Joe thinks for a long time while Katia cries and begs the best she can around her gag. It's considerably harder to watch than the gory dissection. Joe takes out his gun...