Provided you’re the sort of viewer who doesn’t mind when characters say cartoonishly crime drama things like “Shit just got real” or “Here’s $100 — go buy yourself a life,” there’s actually a lot to like in this week’s episode of Tulsa King. Granted, that’s a big ask, considering the number of truly excellent crime shows that have aired this year. (Fargo season five didn’t wrap until January, and that’s just for starters!)
It’s also a tall order when you compare and contrast a lot of this stuff to what head Terence Winter, who co-wrote the episode with William Schmidt, served up on The Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire. Winter has not lost his fastball, as we’ll discuss, but he is playing a less rewarding game. If the remit is “Help Stallone look tough and have a good time,” well, that’s a less exciting mission to accomplish than “chronicle the way America produces joyless sociopaths able only to hurt and steal from others until they die.”
But I said there’s good stuff in this episode, and I mean it. For instance, the story of Armand, the accidental turncoat semi-ex-mafia guy played by Max Casella, could easily have come from either of the crime masterpieces Winter worked on. One by one, everyone Armand counts on to help him dodge the inevitable wrath of Dwight: The boss knows Armand’s the one who fed key intel to his rival, Cal Thresher, and payback is just a matter of time.
Armand calls his ex, but when she sees that he’s half in the bag at 9 a.m. and wants her to join witness protection with him, she tells him to lose her number. Enraged, he blows up at Spencer, his underling at the ranch, leading to an argument with his boss, Margaret, that ends in his firing. He turns to his erstwhile benefactor, Thresher, who pretty much laughs in his face; if Dwight’s onto him, he’s no longer useful.
Casella packs a wallop in his final pair of scenes. First, in an underpass, he leaves a tearful, uncomfortably candid message for one of his sons, in which the pain of life as a perpetual fuckup is etched into his face. Then, with desperation visible in his eyes and his pained grimace, he sticks up Tulsa’s consigliere, Goodie, and makes off with a sack of the outfit’s cash. His bluster on the way out the door seems like a cover-up for the knowledge he’s a dead man walking.
Less emotional but equally effective dramatically is the apparent denouement of the Vince/Chickie power struggle back in New York. With the approval of the rest of Chickie’s capos and the bosses of the other families, Vince makes his move. But it’s not a hit — it’s a firing. His fellow bosses and his own men simply tell him, “You’re out,” and that’s that, he’s out. “Obviously, this coulda gone a different way, but we didn’t wanna do that,” comes the explanation, and the implication that it could still go that different way if Chickie resists.
“You lost the locker room, pal,” says one of the assembled wise guys. “That’s the bottom line.” Indeed, what can he do? If everyone’s in agreement that he’s no longer the boss, the reality is he’s no longer the boss. But Vince — perhaps patronizingly, perhaps not — leaves the door open for a potential new role for the dethroned don: “Get the drinking under control, couple of months, we’ll see what’s what.” I think Chickie should count his lucky stars, but he’s got to find it humiliating, perhaps even worse than getting whacked — same as Mitch telling the reckless Tyson that getting arrested is worse than getting killed because it puts everyone in jeopardy. Like the Armand material, it all plays out like a late-season Sopranos mini-arc, which is high praise.
(Side note: Earlier in the episode, Chickie made a pact with Dwight to leave his daughter and grandkids alone now that they’re moving back to New York City for safety’s sake. Vince, however, was out at the time making plans, and never got the message. Since going after family members is considered taboo by these guys anyway, though, I’m not sure if that omission will come into play.)
Chickie’s not the only king who falls to an uprising in this episode. Cal Thresher is barely done big-dogging Armand when the same fate befalls him. His Triad partner, Jackie Ming, simply decides to take over the whole operation, and again, that’s that, he takes over. I mean, Cal gets the classic offer he can’t refuse, where either his signature or his brains will be on the contract signing over his weed farm to this group of gangsters. What else can he do?
His best bet, he figures, is to look to his business associate Bill Bevilaqua for assistance. If Ming can steamroll him, Thresher argues, then anyone else with interests in the sector is in jeopardy. But Bevilaqua will have none of it — he’s enraged to learn that Ming planted the car bomb that sent him and Dwight to their battle stations, and blames Thresher for dragging them into the war.
That war has claimed another Tulsa casualty. While Tyson’s father, Mark, improves in the hospital after the car bombing, Dwight’s weed gurus Bodhi and Jimmy are shot at by Kansas City hitters, in retaliation for Tyson wounding one of their own in the previous episode. Bodhi escapes harm, but Jimmy winds up with a serious-looking chest wound. Then again, it sure looked like Mark was blown to smithereens, so “serious-looking” is a relative thing on this show.
Wars take on a terrible life of their own, and persist long after there’s any point in fighting, if there even was a point to begin with. (This is the subject of sword-and-sorcery writer Robert E. Howard’s best story about his iconic barbarian Conan, “Red Nails,” just fyi.) If I’m Bill Bevilaqua, I’m getting on the horn with Dwight right away — if he’ll take my calls — to clear the air, maybe even forge an alliance against the guy who ratfucked them into this escalating tit-for-tat. (If you want to be technical about it, Bill started it all way back when he sent his guy to assassinate Dwight, only for Dwight to have the guy killed instead. They seem to be taking a mulligan on all that.)
But if the attack on Jimmy was fatal, that screws everything up. Dwight is not a forgiving guy, and he’ll go eye-for-eye on murder. And just like that, my hopes for a classic Terence Winter multi-faction bloodbath go up another notch.
