Episode Report Card Daniel: B- | 1 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Gonna Work It Out
By Daniel | Season 1 | Episode 15 | Aired on 02.19.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Plots, in ascending order of importance: Dixon, as usual, is led around by his penis, so I think at some point I have to refer to him as "Dick's In." A movie star and her odious producer are in Vegas shooting a movie, with the skeevy producer (you may remember him from The Wire) wanting Tommy Stone to ensure no one messes with her. Tommy, apparently a moron, hires Dixon to be her bodyguard, and he winds up seemingly smitten, and therefore shaken when he realizes she's canoodling with the much older, much uglier, much balder producer. Hollywood's heartless, Dixon.
The murder of the week is a diet Amway-like-product salesman who has two wives, one of whom is Hungarian and has a brother who discovers salesman's bigamy and shakes him down, but the killer turns out to be the head of the Amway-like company since the salesman discovered the entire operation is one big pyramid scheme, played by someone who is on The Big Bang Theory but to me will always be the teacher who sleeps with Tracey Flick in Election (and the phony tennis pro who offers his wife to Jerry Seinfeld).
Now for what everyone cares about: Jack trying to keep his girlfriend, his brother and now the FBI from knowing that he shot Rizzo. It's getting increasingly tougher, since Washington — on Kennedy's behest — has sent a Special Agent Byrne to town to set up a field office in Vegas. Byrne stops by to make his presence known to Savino. The FBI is making things difficult for our favorite casino manager, intercepting the skim — and since it's now twice what it was, this is twice the headache for Savino. He tries to enlist the help of Jack to keep the FBI and his brother distracted with a false tip about the next time the skim's going out, so Savino can get it out a different way. It's a plan that's doomed to failure, since the FBI agent would have to be a complete moron to accept a tip from the guy sleeping with the woman WHOSE JOB IT IS TO COLLECT THE SKIM IN THE FIRST PLACE.
So yes, Ralph and the FBI agent don't fall for the distraction, but Savino's pissed and threatens to tell Mia about how her father actually died. Jack launches a preemptive strike and tells her himself first. I've never told a girlfriend that I killed her father in self-defense, but I do hope it would go a little bit better for me than it does for Jack. A disconsolate Mia kicks him out.
He heads over to the sheriff's office, where Ralph is waiting for him and ready with a bottle of booze. Ralph has figured it out, having noticed that a third print on Rizzo's gun has a telltale scar like the one his baby brother suffered in a spurs-related injury. Jack comes clean — it looks like he would have anyway — and Ralph burns the fake fingerprint card Jack submitted, saying they're going to get him out of this.
Daniel is a writer in Newfoundland with a wife and a daughter. Why must the Lambs turn the sheriff's office into a house of lies? Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Oh, here we go with the man-with-guilty-conscience-tries-wash-away-his-sins-in-the-shower routine. Jack is finding that the guilt isn't coming off, no mater how long the shower or how hot the water. Also, the scars from the cattle prod are still there. Is he keeping his shirt on when he has sex with Mia? It's an important question. Then, naturally, he gets out of the shower to stare at himself in the mirror for an hour or so.
When he finally surfaces, Mia makes fun of him for taking longer than a girl, but he's not laughing. He doesn't want her to go back to work at the Savoy, but she says if Vincent was involved with her father's death, she needs to know: "He may not have been the greatest man, but he was my father." Jack wants her to leave the investigating to him, but she says he can do things his way and she'll do them hers.
And there's a new murder to investigate, too: A man shot in the forehead whilst sitting in his car on the outskirts. The Lambs are on the scene, with Ralph confidently declaring the dead man knew the shooter, pointing to the fact that there was a car parked behind the victim's, and the driver's window (er, sorry, "winda," as per Ralph) was rolled down. The watch, wallet and wedding ring were all left, so it wasn't a robbery, either. The wallet IDs him as Robert Latimer (side note: That's also the name of a Canadian man who killed his teenage daughter with carbon monoxide poisoning to end her pain with cerebral palsy. Famous case, sparked national debates on euthanasia. Just made me wonder how many Canadians watching had the same surprised reaction I did.). He's got a series of numbers in his wallet and a trunkful of Fairline "diet shakes." Dixon tries one and spits it out. Serves him right for drinking the evidence, as Ralph points out.
At the Savoy, Vincent packs up the skim and hands it off to Cota, reminding him to make sure everyone is extra-careful, which can only mean something's going to go wrong. Sure enough, after a handoff of the suitcase in a cab from a younger woman to an older woman, it's intercepted by FBI agents as the sweet old lady tries to stow it in the overhead compartment on an airplane, all while we listen to Savoy entertainment crooning about pennies from heaven.
There's a guy in the suit watching the show at the Savoy, and Savino -- apparently a terrible judge of people -- sidles up and says the guy looks like a man who knows his way around a card table. The man introduces himself as "Byrne" and after explaining he's from Washington and likes "watching money" he has to explicitly say he's from the FBI for Savino to clue in. Byrne tells him they've seized the skim and Grandma's in lock up (you'd think Savino already knew that). He warns Savino that no money is going to make it back to the bosses in Chicago, which ought to make things difficult for him, and strolls out, complimenting him on how good the casino looks. "Shame it can't last forever," he says. And maybe Savino doesn't know who the guy is, but he's a well-known Canadian actor, especially out here in Newfoundland, where he was born and raised.
After the opening credits, Tommy Stone is watching the chorus line rehearse, and looks disgusted by some indiscernible difference that makes Rita much worse than the other dancers. "I could have gone to Tahiti in the time it took you to make that dunk," he tells her. We can only presume Rita goes back to her dressing room to binge and purge.
When Mia comes up to him, he dismissively assumes she's here to audition, and when he finds out she's actually his boss, he's only marginally more respectful, since he blows her off quickly to glad-hand with some big shot movie producer (played by Paul Ben-Victor from The Wire) with a starlet (played by Anna Camp, recently on The Mindy Project, which you should all be watching, if you're not) on his arm and entourage in tow. He mistakes the producer's declaration that the starlet, Violet Mills, sleeps only on violet sheets for a joke, and then recovers, when he sees the producer isn't laughing, by promising to get some custom made.
Vincent fills Mia in: The producer, Barry Silver, is shooting a Western in the desert, and Tommy thought bringing the bigwigs to the casino would be good publicity or something? You know, the way mob-run casinos are always looking for the limelight. Anyway, he's glad to see her back at work. If Mia really wants to find out what's going on, it's probably best if she acted a little more naturally instead of so obviously suspicious.
Over at Bert Latimer's house, the widow Latimer can't understand who would kill him. He loved his job. He was always traveling for Fairline, crossing the country and setting up franchises, but that changed recently when doctors found an arrhythmia in her heart. She's going to have this newfangled doodad called a pacemaker put in -- the time-period touch points can often be handled quite clunkily on this show -- and there's only a few places in the country that can do it; they were supposed to head to Buffalo soon to get it done. Bert was supposed to have been in Pittsburgh until tomorrow, though, a fact that furrows the Lambs' brows.
Outside, the brothers note the nice house and new Cadillac and figure that a lot of diet shakes must have been sold. Ralph tells Jack to look into Fairline, while he goes to lunch with Catherine. That doesn't seem like a fair distribution of duties, until Ralph points out that they're discussing the Rizzo murder.
Still, he's thrown for a loop when he arrives at -- where else? -- the diner and finds Catherine there with Agent Byrne, and it turns out that under Kennedy's direction the FBI is setting up a field office in the city, since there's just a tad of mob activity here. Ralph gets a little growly at what he seems to feel is someone encroaching on his turf (professional and romantic).
Byrne also brought the fingerprint analysis, but they don't have a match for the third man yet. Then he launches into a tired chess metaphor in the service of explaining how he's going to take Savino down, with the skim guys being the pawns, and... anyway, Catherine certainly seems turned on.
Anyway, over at Savino's office, the movie producer -- after he finishes with an "I am bald and have a tiny penis and here's how I compensate" story about fishing for sharks -- grossly tells Savino that he's worried about the "unsavory element" that might go sniffing around Violet when he's back in L.A. He's concerned merely as he would be for his own daughters, of course. Vincent volunteers Tommy to keep an eye on her, which Silver appreciates, even as it takes Tommy by surprise.
Mia comes in, toting the now cash-free suitcase used for the skim, thoughtfully left downstairs by the FBI. Savino's got to figure something out: "No way this wingtip puts me out of business," he says.
And as Fairline boss Dr. Thrane (played by Mark Harelik, who had sex with Tracey Flick) explains, Fairline partners buy at a discount and then sell to friends and family. So it's an Amway-type thing, so suddenly justifiable homicide seems a real possibility. The Lambs, though, are confused to learn that contrary to what Mrs. Latimer thought, Bert didn't travel at all. His boss explains that in the last few months, Bert's sales started dropping, and he missed meetings, and he was periodically getting threatening phone calls from someone with a Russian accent. In fairness, doesn't anything spoken with a Russian accent sound threatening? Or did I just watch too much Rocky IV as a child? [Note: Works for The Americans -- Rachel.]
Over at the Savoy, Tommy is already doing a shitty job of keeping watch over Violet because Mia happily gets to inform him Violet just left in a new sports car.
She's whipping through the desert, where of course Dixon is set up to catch all the speeders on this deserted stretch of highway. He has to top a hundred miles per hour to chase her down, and when he does, she gets the special kind of justice reserved for pretty women sto