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.