Ray hasn't come home in five days because of Abby bringing Mickey into their home and lives for entirely passive-aggressive reasons, so of course she gets way up into her most Carmela Soprano-type annoying register when he finally does. By the end of the episode he's bought her a pretty dress and taken her to a rich-people fundraiser, though, so she shuts up long enough for him to fuck her with his hand over his mouth. Lovely couple, as usual.
We finally figured out where that loud black-people music door is coming from: A house where black people live, specifically a rapper who has kidnapped Black Justin Bieber and needs Ray Donovan to engineer his cracky mother to sell him to the rapper… just like Usher in real life who purchased Justin Bieber from his Canadian homeland for magic beans. It's even more racist than it sounds. There are two scenes where a bunch of black people get all excited and hop around the room screaming about how cool Ray Donovan is, because you need a hood pass if you're ever gonna be as cool as John Mayer. Which is precisely how cool Showtime is, to like the fifth decimal.
How Mickey spends his day is, first he pretends to hilariously rape his son who was raped as a child, then goes to his meeting for boys who were raped to tell rape jokes about boys getting raped, then he looks up "twerk" videos at a college library, weirdly harasses Lawyer Lee with the twerk music, runs into the (amazing) FBI guy who engineered his release for snitching... and then back to the Fite Club with prostitutes so he can fuck up his fucked-up son even more with the constant sex stuff. You can see where he's coming from, but also: You are not a licensed therapist, sir. Stop helping.
(Avi and Ray are involved in some kind of plot connected to this? Or sending Mickey back to jail? I don't think I randomly lost focus when this was explained, I think I'm just confused by something. But anyway the wonderful FBI guy -- I mean, he's fantastic in a way that I can only describe as Big Love-ian -- has a whole wall of criminals to take down, which happens to include them. So I guess they will face off at some point.)
In other Bunchy news, he finally gets the actual check he's been stressing about this whole time from getting molested, but continues to act out about it and finally balks at Ray being in financial charge of him, which of course is all about Mickey -- Mickey scamming him of course, but also Mickey wanting Ray to stop being everybody's dad. It's pretty gross. Mickey has also told Bunchy about Avi beating up and stapling Other Brother Daryl and the original frame-job that put him in prison, both of which sound pretty bad out of context. On the other hand, Ray has never once pretended to anally violate Bunchy, so I think we're still on the Ray side of all this.
Oh and get this: The priest that Mickey shot in the pilot wasn't even the actual priest, it was his brother. They moved him to another parish, like they're always doing. Mickey acts like this is no big deal, but it seems like a victory for Ray: They are both happy that a priest is dead, but for very different reasons. Mostly, I just want to stop talking about little boys getting fucked. Not because it's something that shouldn’t be talked about, but because it's cheap fucking drama, same as Chloe last week: You need to actually earn your way out of privilege before you can start talking on behalf of other people, and I'm afraid this week's full-on racist outing proved the level of presumption we're working with.
Still, a pretty great episode overall, of a show that makes no bones about wishing it were more grown-up and edgy than it is. Cutest of all is Terry's ongoing attraction to Brooke Smith's housecall doctor, which takes a major step forward when he -- after no small amount of coaching from Ray and the doctor herself -- finally asks her out. They're playing it like he's less hot than he is, but that describes Brooke Smith's entire career anyway, so I guess it's good she's there to catch him. Either way, the performances make it a lot less condescending than it sounds on paper and for that we thank you.
After handing over Bieber's personhood to Usher -- get it, a black person "bought" a black person and Ray Donovan brokered it, and thanks Obama because this is something we can "all" "laugh" about now -- Ray joins wife Abby at a fundraiser for Ezra Goodman's dead wife, where Tasha Yar freaks the fuck out. But that's not even the thing that sends Ezra over the edge: That, of course, would be the sudden appearance of Mickey Donovan, with his horrible face. Ray tries to talk his mentor down (and more importantly, talk him out of blabbing everything for no reason), but the tension remains.
Oh, and just when you thought it was safe to go on an instant messaging program, Conor is presumably still chattin' with Action Tommy and now Bridget is snapchattin' pictures of her ass to Black Bieber. You'd think Ray would have outlawed "chatting with celebrities" on Day 1, but who knows. He's not the most present parent I've seen on TV.
Week: Bridget strikes out at yet another posh LA prep school because her parents are trash, Mickey takes Bunchy and Daryl to visit Daryl's mother in Palm Springs, Terry goes on his date, and apparently Mickey's latest murder investigation gets shut down.