‘Task’ Episode 6 Recap

0:00Andy Greenwald:I need supports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk. Now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at TheRinger.com and joining me on the other line, it's his house. He'll smoke if he wants to. It's Andy Greenwald! that's literally you yeah first of all i think that this is a very incredible episode of task and a a serious one and we need to treat it with the seriousness that it deserves yes but i must say at the outset that grasso's house did in some way remind me of the apartment that you and your not yet wife shared in brooklyn in which that the constant factor whether it was summer or the dead of winter at your beautiful Christmas party is the cracked kitchen window.

0:49Andy Greenwald:Oh yeah. Everyone smoked. Yes. There were rules. They were respected. Andy, we are going to talk about episode six of task, which was huge, which was momentous, which had a lot of stuff going on. So if you, for some reason are tuning into the watch and have not watched task yet, stop what you're doing, go watch task, and then you can come back and check us out. Um, I want to get right into it, man. I have no banter i have no amusing anecdotes my amusing anecdote is this is one of my favorite shows of the year uh this was i think the best episode of this series so far it's called out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing there is a river is that a song's ohio song like what you think it's actually a line from a poem by the 13th century persian poet rumi that's so weird That was my second guess.

1:40Andy Greenwald:That's one of the odds. This one was written by Brad Inglesby and it was directed by Sally Richardson-Woodfield, who also appears as the prosecutor when Maeve is being interrogated by Tom midway through the episode. Shout out to Sally. Excellent work on both sides of the camera. She's wearing two hats in this episode. And it continues right where episode five left off with the standoff in the woods. And, you know, one of the more unrelenting, breathless 15-minute sequences that I've seen on TV in a long time, or at least since the standalone episode of Adolescence in the interrogation room. But just an incredible 15 minutes of a standoff in the woods.

2:22Andy Greenwald:I believe the title card appears at the 18-minute mark. So sick. That is such a sick move. Devastating. If you're doing the SportsCenter version of it, Kathleen McGinty gets shot in the shoulder. Robbie is fatally stabbed by Jason. Lizzie is run over by an escaping Jason and Perry in a truck. And she dies in Grosso's arms despite him betraying the task force and everyone else. Moments that this show has been building towards. And it really, really delivers. Last episode was the heat diner scene, essentially, with Robbie and Tom in the car heading out towards this spot where Robbie had grown up and spent time with Billy as a kid on the Lehigh or in Lehigh.

3:15No, no, no, no. Honestly, the use of lakes and rivers, I'm getting a little confused, but it is Bushkill. I honestly have never been to Bushkill. But this was the kind of action set piece that this show hadn't really touched on since Tom and Ray wrestling in a basement kind of. I mean, we haven't really, we've done a lot of talking and then we had some serious action. I kind of complained a little bit about, oh, you know, I think people have expected ending the episode with a bang and they start the episode with a bang. So much to go over here, man. We want to just do general thoughts and impressions first.

3:51Andy Greenwald:Yeah, I mean, I do want to talk about obviously the consequential moments of the episode and in terms of the plot, in terms of the surprises, in terms of the masterful orchestra conducting that Brad Inglesby does here regarding when, how, and where he deploys certain events. Certain things that are inevitable but feel surprising because of where they're placed, maybe. Surprising, but the flip side of inevitable is that dangerous word, earned. And it also helps clarify what show we've been watching in a way that I found very significant. um you know it was it's glib to say that task is philly heat um i think there were they were clear clearly it's not just that but i think you to use the previous episodes um car ride with tom and robbie as the um comparison point to the diner scene like the diner scene is a lot of it's i mean it's it's michael man men right like they're kind of like eyeing each other up and they're they're gauging each other and it's kind of like a dick measuring contest in the best way with those actors.

4:58Andy Greenwald:This is about two broken men, like connecting over their shared humanity, which is a little bit more my speed. But then again, I've been to a diner a minute. Um, so the fact that this show isn't about necessarily the mano a mano collision between these two guys, it's about the spider web crack tendrils of violence and community and loss and regret and guilt is really meaningful to me in watching it and also, um, feels exactly where the show should be and, and what the show should be. And the thing that I wrote down after watching most of it was, and this is my, this is my top down a hundred thousand foot statement that I kind of want to get your perspective on is that I just think there's something both beautiful and really, really healthy at this moment about a TV show that doesn't look away from the consequences of terrible things.

5:49Yeah.

5:49Andy Greenwald:Um, we are insensitive, desensitized to so much because of the scroll, because of just the nature of what's popular, what's grabby. And this is a show that gives us and earns, again, that tricky word, Robbie's would-be father-daughter dance with Harper and shows Harper sobbing because her father has, as we learned at the end of the episode, essentially sacrificed himself for her future. Yeah. Grasso is a full human who has done something unforgivable and has now in the last episode, you know, with the last episode ahead of us, has evolved into the show's villain in a very strong way. Even Jason, who is, you know, unequivocally the show's villain, who has murdered both Prendergrass brothers with his bare hands, basically.

6:37He's still a wife guy.

6:38Andy Greenwald:He's still a wife guy. I, big picture, and maybe this is also like international picture, like I just found at this moment in history and in also my travel schedule, I found the just like unshakable humanity of the show, both affecting, but also like a restorative. Yeah. I wonder whether or not some of it is just the uncommon settings of some of these real breakthrough moments. I mean, I, I think I, I went into this series and I was like, Oh, this is going to be the urban crime drama that Philadelphia has never really truly gotten. Like it's going to, there's, I don't know if I thought there was going to be a shootout on Broad street or a chase, through the Italian market.

7:23Andy Greenwald:There almost was after Sean Payton's behavior on Sunday. Sure.

7:28But this show largely takes place in the natural world. And many of the insert shots, many of the cutaways are to birds and water and trees. And the connection that these characters have to these places being places of peace for them. You know, in the previous episode, Ruffalo talked a lot.

7:50Andy Greenwald:They have places of peace, right? Even that is so fragile. Yeah, and the idea that Ruffalo is trying to relate to Robbie by describing the patterns of behavior of a bird that shouldn't be where it is but could still find its way home or the way that Robbie releases Tom by sending him to a beautiful place that he has to get through by walking for a mile in the woods. Let me just say as someone who's not much of a hiker, that's not an easy walk, like a mile. the woods. It's more the woods part than the mile, I think. But yeah. In any case, there's just, you know, this is also the setting obviously for this incredibly violent exchange between the bikers, Robbie and the task force.

8:35But it's really striking how much of this show has decided to take place in an incredibly idyllic setting and what it's trying to do with that. I thought that a lot of the repeated imagery robbie jumping into the quarry of birds flying of whatever like obviously get brought back up in his last few seconds of life in a way that i thought was quite beautiful and quite earned you know like that can often be that like ah yes i'm touching wheat as i walk into you know valhalla um but this was this felt very much like they did the work to get to that moment of release and also even more so the fact that robbie had been basically like asking tom what happens when you die like what do you see what do people seem to behave like because he fucking knows in the backseat of that car he might as well have basketballs in that duffel bag he is not bringing drugs he does not expect to get out of this thing alive he knows that he's signing up for his, that's his plan.

9:38So his interest in how do people feel when they die? What do you do when people die? Like that's real because he knows that's what's about to happen.

9:46Andy Greenwald:I also think it's significant that his dream of escape, a dream that you, I think really smartly pointed out is just punctured like a balloon instantly by a 21 year old when he says it out loud to her, the dream of going to Canada, like an unspoiled green wilderness. Um, it really made me reconsider all of that because he lives in an abundant green beautiful wilderness or he grew up in one so it's really about returning to the the innocent self it's about returning to a time of before sin basically yes and that place doesn't really exist it's in brochures or it's in the bible maybe you know i i find like when people i have seen like online some people casually dismissing the show Not that they don't like it, but that it's just like a HBO classed up version of a more typical procedural.

10:39Andy Greenwald:And I just think that that's to be to be, you know, with all due respect, I think that's really missing the point. Yeah, I think that this show is a very, very thoughtful and at times beautiful and profound meditation on life and loss. And it supports and allows this kind of like the kind of stuff that we used to like to do in college English classes. go well this imagery is significant because it represents a prelapsarian time when like all that bullshit that we don't do anymore because we don't even write we just talk on podcasts but um it does feel like we could go back to some of that i mean you're reading spirituality books you know because yeah the fucking episode is named after a line from a roomie poem come on that you know that tom talks about this bird and then a bird distracts robbie um is it is that earthly business or is that inevitable like the way of the natural world goes i don't know but um i think it's worth talking about because we've been praising brad's um architecture skills throughout the whole season and so i feel like it's worth diving into just exactly what he did here because in addition to playing you know i've been saying this for years and i'm not the only one saying it playing one of the most effective and still underutilized cards in the show running deck which is um show your hand early or kill someone before you think it's time or you know time is really the thing that that that is still most potent i think for showrunners in terms of breaking through to a jaded audience um in addition to doing all of that and you know along with sally and the crew like designing this incredible action sequence he also rope-a-doped us because everything was so full-on i can't be the only one who didn't really think about shelly I didn't think about that business.

12:29Andy Greenwald:I just, I was the only reason I thought about it really more than once is that Mickey Sumner is very good. And why would you have her do one and a half scenes? You know, but she had came, but she, and this is, she's there for what she has one line, but the fact that everything about the, like I found, you know, a minute ago, I'm talking about how, how beautiful and profound and how moved I was by how like bleak at the show sometimes is, um, no moment maybe more so than when robbie has his revenge and then he too gets killed by the same monster that ruined his life yeah um only to find out as you were alluding to that this entire thing was a suicide play uh and that the money was already secured and it was about keeping his family clean maybe there was a maybe he hoped to get out of those woods i don't think he seemed surprised by the amount of motorcycle guys who showed up.

13:25I do think he was surprised that the task force found him. And I do think he was hindered by the fact that Grosso was doing Chip Kelly hand signals all over the place to get guys to do this, don't do that, do not take a shot at Lizzie. Talk about traitors

13:43Andy Greenwald:to Philadelphia. Yeah, you know what? There's something about how a lot of what happens in this episode feels inevitable. I did not assume Robbie was going to get out of this series alive. Right. And I didn't think everybody from the task force was going to live. I don't think I foresaw it being as not random, but seemingly arbitrary in terms of its circumstances, the way that Lizzie died. But the connection that she and Grasso I think sincerely had, I don't think that that was part of the assignment. I think all he had to do is just be like they're coming for you here you're you know like he obviously opens himself up to her the arbitrary nature of the way that she dies in a car crash rather than in a shootout you know i mean not crash but she she gets run over she is run over uh and she can't and the reason she gets run over is because she can't hear the truck coming because grosso is fired off a gun right by her head.

14:44So she's lost her own.

14:45Andy Greenwald:Ruptured eardrum. I kind of, you know, I figured Aaliyah or Lizzie would probably die out there or McGinty. But this show isn't about those kinds of moments. It's about the moments afterwards. And that's what you're hitting at. The reconciling and dealing with violence. The set piece works better because we are now going to spend an hour and a half thinking about and talking about what happened. And there may be some shootout in the finale and it may be Jason versus Perry versus Grosso versus Tom versus Aaliyah. But I think that it's so much more effective to think about it in terms of like, these people's, these characters' lives go on even if the series ends, you know?

15:32And even when Maeve gets that money at the end, which would be the end of any, of 90 % of versions of this show, is Maeve gets a huge bag of money in it. I think Maeve's in trouble, man. Yeah, she's 21 years old raising these kids. Maeve has a lot of fucking drug money now. And a lot of people are watching it or looking for it. And it was so important to Jason that Jason was like still out there eating Perry trout. You know, trout a la Perry.

16:01Andy Greenwald:Do you think, I have two quick side questions for you, digressive questions for you. One, are you excited for the day in 20 years when Brad Inglesby announces that he's making task two with Leonardo DiCaprio in the Maeve part about what happens to the money? I feel like that's just, yeah, let's just book it in advance. Get your tickets in VistaVision. And the second question, as I did wonder, like sometimes, you know, often around where I am right now in the beautiful city of London, you and I will like indulge little fantasies of like, oh, what if just two chums shared a flat for a time? and split the G together on occasion or whatever.

16:39Andy Greenwald:Do you think we could have hung in a Perry and Jason type way? I feel like that would be a recipe for the end of a 29-year friendship. I do think it would be really funny if I was just a... You just keep getting on your phone. Why are you doing that? I'm trying to make you dinner. Show some respect. Just some wet fish straight from the river. That's not where I saw this show going. I didn't see this show going in a weird... All of these people are trapped with their own decisions now. Grasso is... There are people, there are writers, I'm sure in any medium, but let's talk specifically about television.

17:12Andy Greenwald:There are writers who are obsessed with plot, and there are writers who are obsessed with aesthetics, and there are writers who are obsessed with style, and there are writers who are obsessed with surprises. And those are all valid, and there are examples in each category of shows that I love. What's clear about Brad Inglesby is he's obsessed with life. he can't stop drinking from the cup of life like in some sort of dramatic religious analogy that i can't quite pull off here everyone is given a full life everyone exists in uh always all at once like you're saying jason is a wife guy but like everyone is the totality of their experience tom and robbie didn't need to get along but they did and their behavior afterwards reflected that You know, Grasso absolutely really cared about Lizzie, but he also is a flawed and failed person who is trying to have everything all at once and make it work out, which doesn't seem to ever work out for anyone at any point in the show.

18:08Andy Greenwald:You said that, and you're right, that the Lizzie death felt sort of random, but I have to say that. I'm not really ready to talk about it yet. Well, I'm going to check in. I just wanted to say that I was more prepared maybe than you were because early in the episode, like super early, Grasso says, Lizzie, stick with me. and I was like ah shit that's the McBain moment right there that's that's a wrap on that's a wrap on her so talk me through your feelings well I thought I thought it was a great character and I think it speaks to a larger conversation that probably people are going to have after this episode of like why were these people put on a task force in the first place you know because with the exception of Aaliyah they seem to have some some questions about their red flags preparedness yeah aliyah obviously like all about her business has this sharp shooting background seems like she's a pretty good detective investigator badge and her nickname yeah um but lizzie has a bad reputation among her fellow state troopers as being a little bit of a nervous nelly when it comes to when when shit goes down and grasso has something in his file that is known to possibly tip off dark hearts, FYI.

19:27Andy Greenwald:There's two strands of thought there, right? One is being asked to join a task force is not nearly as special as you and I may have thought it was. Sure. That everyone's always getting pulled into task forces. It's like being a sophomore in college and someone saying, I want to join my band. Right. Like everybody does the time. Everybody picks up a bass once in a while. Who among us did not play psychedelic country for two great weeks, you know? do the best weeks of your life um the other alternative and this is something that i'm legitimately asking you because i haven't read anything about this episode yet and i also am in the dark and i don't know if that's good or bad is is mcginty still sus because we felt that way and then it seemed to she seemed to be cleared a little bit by the grasso stuff but doesn't her still being a little bit compromised cover for the motley makeup of the task force i feel like possibly i mean i think that i'm i'm open to anything happening i would say that the difference between task and merit is is found in this kind of construction where task is a crime show and a lot of a lot of what is happening is evident to viewers if it's not evident to the characters So the viewers know that Grosso is the mole before Tom does.

20:43I think the viewers know Cliff is dead before Robbie does. You know, like there's... We see it. It's a totality of like this sort of these dozen characters and what they're going through and what they're doing and what they're thinking. We know that Aaron's dead before Jason does. Still isn't. Who killed Aaron and Jason does not. Mare was more of a detective show.

21:05Andy Greenwald:You're talking about Mare of Easttown, Brad's first show. Mayor of Easttown was more about this woman looking for the killer of a young girl. And as things were revealed, they usually happened in the order that Mayor herself was finding them. The viewer and Mayor were on the same page. So I think that there's elements of it that may make you second guess. And one thing that Inglesby is doing in this show that I think is successful sometimes, and every once in a while I bump against is the, someone is about to find out a very important piece of information, but the show is going to cut away from that.

21:42Andy Greenwald:Well, yeah, but that's TV 101. Sure. I get it. I hear you. I mean, for me, stuff like that is baked into the concept when you make a detective or a crime show, and it's just a question of how artfully you hide it. And, you know, look, there's a character on the show who's a magician. And so maybe there's some projection there. That's how Brad sees himself. You know, please come to my show. One thing I wanted to finish. My point was really more that the way that he is making it and the way that we are being given this information, sometimes before the characters, is that it creates more of a sense of inevitability and tragedy about it.

22:17Because you're like, hey man, Robbie, this is about to be the most popular woods in America. Please don't go here. But he's got a destiny. He's got something he's moving towards. And I think, you know, the idea that the show is going to be about Tom finding Robbie and instead it's almost going to be Tom finding peace for Robbie.

22:39Andy Greenwald:Yes. It's pretty amazing. Yes. I think two quick things. Well, one quick thing and one longer thing. The quick thing is just there was a really artful reprise of the crazy Robbie thing. Crazy Robbie always trying to find a way to, what was it? To save his life, to change his life. I wrote it down. I just can't find it in my notes. People are who they are. Which is what Perry referred to him as in episode five. Yes, and you're like, wait, what? Yeah. And then that's how people see him because we're introduced to him as someone who is quirky and interesting and maybe biting off a little bit more than he can chew, but the nature of television is we're right there with him, so we just kind of trust him.

23:20Andy Greenwald:Oh, Cliff likes him, we like him too. That added an air of tragedy and inevitability to his art, for sure. realizing that everyone was kind of like this guy's this guy's just going to keep trying and we don't think he's ever going to get there um this the subtle reveal that the show actually isn't a two-hander um it's the tom show uh was i think kind of beautiful and felt surprising in a way and i don't say that to diminish tom felfree's performance because it's one of the best performances of the year and i think emmy voters are going to agree with me on that um yeah all they have to do is watch watch his scene with uh margarita la veva when he finds out cliff's dead this is such a sneaky good ruffalo performance and one of the things that is a hallmark of ruffalo's you know 25 year career is that you could say that about all of his best performances because he's such an unshowy actor the spotlight speech aside like he is just he just sinks into things and he just embodies a kind of conflicted morality but always erring towards good that I think is really, really compelling.

24:31Andy Greenwald:And so his performance, the pairing of the two we've talked about is so brilliant. He's just such a steady, speaking of bass, like a steady bass drum underneath the more frantic snare of what Robbie's doing with Cliff. And to have it emerge into the solo and realize that this has been about, I mean, everyone's the main character of their own story, but he becomes the main character and his story becomes the main story of the show, of one, of redemption. and I think that Ruffalo is astonishing in this episode like he has big action moments and it's clobbering the shit out of Perry and it's like whoa I didn't know Tom had that in his bag but what he then goes through in the aftermath and you see the priest emerge again in terms of like giving Robbie last rites and then there is a moment and I know I feel like you had you lost Allison Oliver's performance and so you went through your grieving process and you were emotional maybe uncharacteristically so it could be the jet lag I miss my kids um but when he when tom comes home with sam and again like we were joking over text last night we both watched the episode and you were like well the inevitable happened in a compelling way and i was like oh it's tom adopting sam which felt inevitable from the beginning i don't have receipts i didn't say it on the podcast it just felt like something that we were headed towards but he shows up and he's got a batman lego and he goes in the kitchen to make peanut butter and jelly and his daughters who are now united in a really beautiful way and again this is a subtle thing.

25:55Andy Greenwald:Clearly Brad has multiple children because a sign of a healthy home is the children conspiring against the adult and not being on the adult side anymore, being like on each other's side, which is sort of beautiful and subtle and definitely recognizable, I would say as a hashtag girl dad, but he's making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And they're, they're saying like, why are you doing this? Is this a, why did you do this? Are you sure this is a good idea? And I'm sure the audience is saying that as well. And he basically says, I saw him in this place, this awful hopeless place and i thought about your mother and i thought what would she do and the best answer i could come up with was to bring him home that is anyone else doesn't he say something like there's no way she would let him be there like she would never let she would never stay in this place yeah and now does anyone else want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and uh it got super dusty in this london executive apartment it's just like and the totality the totality of the experience of watching Tom basically get this second lease on life from Robbie because Robbie is, you know, they do this car ride.

26:58They talk about Team Susan or Team Tom and what happens after you die and birds. And Tom thinks he's going to be killed. He's going to be executed out in the woods by Robbie. And he's just like, just let me talk to my kids. Let me talk to my kids. and Robbie's like, I'm going to actually send you somewhere beautiful. And he lets him go and he makes him walk through the woods and that his emergence from those woods seems to revive not only his ability to be a police, a law enforcement officer or an agent, but also a father and also a communicator and somebody who's like opening up his heart. And maybe that's also what happens after Robbie dies in his arms.

27:42You know what I mean? like he's given this gift that allows him to return to who he was. I mean, think about like, he's now got two kids in his house. He has now got another third child that he is essentially fostering. He's pursuing this case outside of like, what is just the bare minimum of what is required from him in his job. He's like, no, I'm going to go to Kathleen's house. I'm going to keep looking after this. And then he goes after Grosso. And what was a, I thought a wonderful scene. And like, yes, it is the third time Grasso has pointedly asked about the Catholic church. But I actually thought it was pretty cool that Grasso wasn't like, I didn't do anything.

28:20No, I love that. That he was like, is that a rhetorical question? Or are you really asking me? And it's like, what can you prove versus what do you know is the whole thing.