Review: The Lowdown, “This Land?” | Season 1, Episode 5

In last week’s review, I failed to mention the episode’s director, Macon Blair, who also plays Lee Raybon’s lawyer neighbor (and occasional accomplice) Dan Kane. Blair’s a talented writer, producer and director, best known for his collaborations with the indie pulp cinema auteur Jeremy Saulnier. Blair directed this week’s “This Land?” too, and while it’s usually a mistake to attribute any particular visual element of a television show to a director who’s not the series’ creator, I definitely got flashbacks to Saulnier’s Green Room (produced by and starring Blair) in the episode’s spectacular final minutes.

We close this week with Lee getting dragged out of a nightclub by thuggish local cops, who drive him to a rowdy rural house party, lousy with police. As Lee gets pushed and pulled through the front yard, through the house, and into the backyard, the camera and the soundtrack catch the violent mayhem of the partygoers, shouting and shoving, firing guns and setting off explosives. It’s a nightmarish vision of what an authoritarian goon squad might act like after tapping a few kegs: rowdy, threatening, inescapable. At the end of this hell-journey, Lee finds Donald Washberg, under the cover of a gazebo, lit a satanic red by some creep’s bomb. The scene really pops.

This ending also puts an emphatic explanation point on an episode that clarifies who this show’s bad guys are. After Lee cozied up to Betty Jo Washberg last week, I wondered if he was going to spend each Lowdown learning that his sworn enemies actually weren’t so bad. But no. Donald, it turns out, couldn’t be much more awful.

Anyway, Lee doesn’t really spend much time with any nemeses this week. Instead he fulfills an annual obligation by hanging out with an old friend he kind of hates. 

The friend, Wendell, is played by Peter Dinklage, which is a relief to all of us who have been seeing Dinklage in nearly every Lowdown commercial for the past few months and wondering when he was going to show up. (Just about every Fox baseball and football broadcast I’ve watched since August has featured multiple Lowdown ads. Credit where it’s due to the promo department.) Dinklage makes a hell of an entrance too, as Wendell walks out of Lee’s upstairs bathroom having just taken a dump he describes as “treacherous.”

Throughout The Lowdown, Sterlin Harjo and his writers—this episode is credited to Olivia Purnell—have excelled at making sure we know all we need to about the characters’ histories, without any scenes becoming merely dry recitations of backstory. The same is true here with Wendell. Just through a few lines of bickering back and forth, we get the lowdown (so to speak) on his relationship with Lee. They apparently used to be partners in the bookstore, until Lee bought Wendell out. They had a bitter falling out after the death of their drummer friend Jesus, who OD’d while Lee was supposed to be looking after him. Ever since then, Lee and Wendell get together once a year to go on on a bender, in celebration of Jesus… although, to Lee, the anniversary feels more and more like an excuse for the increasingly embittered Wendell to berate him.

Both to placate the dogged investigative journalist Lee and for the sake of The Lowdown’s plot, the duo’s day together turns into a work trip. Lee’s anxious to find out more about the late Dale Washberg’s disagreement with Donald over the mysterious “Indian Head Hills.” Wendell—who fancies himself to be much more of a Tulsa expert than his buddy—wagers he can find the location faster than Lee can. So the both drive out into the Skiatook boonies, to pester an exhausted assessor’s office clerk for some old maps. Then they make their way to a plot of land in the middle of nowhere that “White Elk LLC” is selling.

There is some light sprinkling of neo-noir action in the Lee/Wendell scenes. After they find the Indian Head Hills plot, Lee and Wendell have to duck out of sight when two machine gun toting meatheads roll up behind their van. Later, when they return to the bookstore, they’re accosted by three of Blackie’s associates—including Phil (Kerry Malloy), who first met Lee as “Johnny” at Bonnie’s house in Episode 2. (Waylon’s Cousin Henry chases the creeps away, but they will surely return.) There’s some plot-relevant information revealed during these scenes too, as Lee gets his realtor pal Vicky to look up White Elk and discovers a company called One Well has been wildly over-paying for White Elk properties—effectively funneling money to gubernatorial candidate Donald Washberg.

But the real purpose of this big Lee/Wendell hang-out is to explore the thorny nature of their relationship, to track what it has evolved into, and to consider what it means. As I’ve mentioned before, Lee thinks of himself as a hepcat badass, which he definitely is in comparison to a Washberg, but which he is not in comparison to a real rough-living rogue. Wendell essentially accuses Lee of being a poseur, who uses Google as his chief investigate tool and takes it way too easy on “the Oklahoma illuminati” in his articles.

In other words: Wendell is a walking, talking, binge-drinking bullshit detector, determined to keep his old friend honest. But… He’s also mean, and broken. When Lee gets tired of being shat on all day, he lashes out and says Wendell’s become someone they never wanted to be: “One of those people who doesn’t like anything.” In a bracingly intimate and honest exchange, the two take turns passing around Jesus’s picture and saying how they really feel, with no posturing or point-scoring. They both admit to being “a mess,” at imminent risk of hurting the people they love. Then Lee really cuts to the heart of the matter, telling Wendell that it’s “scary” to be the friend of someone so angry and self-destructive. Lee emphasizes every word of this plea: “I Do Not Want You To Die.”

As I noted earlier, it’s kind of remarkable, given how much of the episode is devoted to Lee and Wendell—and how full those scenes are—that “This Land?” doesn’t feel like it’s spinning its wheels or setting the season’s main story aside. It helps that two of the show’s most signifiant supporting characters get a lot of screen-time.

We get several scenes of Marty on a date with Elizabeth (Tisha Campbell), a nice lady who seems to enjoy his particular idea of romance: a film noir matinee at Circle Cinema, followed by an early dinner at Sweet Emily’s. What she does not like is how he keeps checking his phone every time Donald texts him. He explains to her—as he explained to Lee—that Donald is an old friend who now stands at the opposite end of “a great divide, getting wider.” Hearing him say that, it’s hard not to think about Lee and Wendell, needing each other even as they keep drifting apart. Nevertheless, when Marty drops Elizabeth off and then texts Donald about his latest job offer, I have to wonder if he’s actually planning to keep working for the Washbergs or if the romantic, two-fisted noir hero in him is about to emerge.

Our other major minor character is Frank Martin, the Akron land-development honcho, who is preparing for a big speech to “The 46,” an Oklahoma political and business organization devoted to gobbling up all of the land they can get. Frank’s speech is chilling, recoding many of the same white supremacist ideas shared by the local skinheads into the language of contract law. “It’s not about race,” he insists, as he tells the gathering that they need to start putting political pressure on the indigenous tribes. “It’s about governing our state fairly.”

Like Lee and Wendell and like Marty and Donald, Frank too has a friend occupying his mind on this day: Allen Murphy, shot to death at the end of last week’s episode. Frank seems hurt and confused as he tries to figure out if some of his and Allen’s (and Donald's!) unsavory associates might be responsible for the assassination. I suspect that sometime soon Frank might find himself facing off against his supposed ally Donald, who is currently costing Frank a lot of money by not closing a big deal.

This brings us back to how the episode ends, with Donald and Lee about to face off. We learn a little bit more about Donald this week. We already knew from Betty Jo that he has cash-flow problems, but his conversation with Frank suggests the money woes run much deeper. And while we all surely suspected that Donald was an irredeemable louse (despite his good taste in chili dogs), those bad vibes are confirmed when we see him getting violently threatening with Betty Jo. 

We’ll have to wait until next week to see whether Lee has what it takes to stand up to Donald. As for me, I’m going to spend a little time in the interim reflecting on this episode’s title, which partly refers to Indian Head Hills and partly quotes the great Oakie Woody Guthrie. As The 46 gets busy carving up the state, it’s going to take folks like Lee—perhaps with Wendell’s nagging voice in his ear—to remind his neighbors of one of their native son’s most righteous, radical verses:

As I went walking that ribbon of highway
And I saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me
I roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
All around me a voice was a-sounding
This land was made for you and me
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
Sign was painted, said, "Private Property"
But on the back side, it didn't say nothing
This land was made for you and me

Stray observations

• Early in the episode, Deidra hands Lee a pamphlet for a wellness retreat called Sunyata (“white ladies doing sweat lodges and shit,” she sneers), which comes in handy when Lee tells Betty Jo she needs to hide out from Donald for a while. She’s Sunyata-bound! Very few wasted moments in this episode.
• Francis is excited to see on the news that “the red-headed stranger” Allen was killed. Lee’s just excited that she watches the news. (“That’s cool,” he says. “They lie sometimes.”)
• How did the skinheads find their way to Hoot Owl? Blame Waylon and Cousin Henry’s rap video in front of Blackie’s burning car. Phil recognized the car, then followed a trail through Waylon’s social media.
• I can’t overstate how much fun it is to watch Dinklage make an absolute meal out of his every moment on screen as Wendell. He’s a font of funny lines, especially with every explanation he gives for why his foot is in a brace. “Had to put it in someone’s ass,” he tells Lee—though later he tells Vicky that he injured it in a kick-flip skateboard accident. As for the skinheads who threaten him at Hoot Owl, he hisses back at them that, “You cum-stains are so lucky my foot is fucked up.”
• Among the needle-drops this week are X’s on-point punk classic “Sex And Dying In High Society,” which is made all the more appropriate by John Doe’s recent guest shot on the show.