Thankfully, the series’ newcomers own the episode, because Lee’s antics are even more repulsive than usual.
Photo: Shane Brown/FX
Ethan Hawke continues to repulse/delight as The Lowdown’s gross/hot, dumb/talented, obnoxious/charming anti-hero, but “Raw Milk” belongs to the series’ newcomers. Betty Gilpin’s plucky oddball Ginger hits a personal high-water mark of desperation now that she knows Mekko is on the run from something dangerous. Steve Earle reappears as a small-town journalist holding a mirror up to Lee’s devil-may-care, anything-for-the-story style of local journalism. Tommy Lee Jones, previously confined to the immediate vicinity of Hoot Owl Books, finally gets somewhere to go and something to do.
And we get our first glimpse of Martha Plimpton — impeccably cast as Woodrell County sheriff Vela Thorne. Vela’s bottle-blonde hair is shellacked into a helmet; her cowboy boots are made for walking down Main Street USA. She’s a woman in a man’s job. She’s a stone-cold bitch thriving in a sea of corruption. Tulsa might be rotten just below the surface, but in Woodrell, the snakes don’t even bother to hide in the brush.
“Raw Milk” is a fun ride, but there are elements of the nonsensical to the hour, which I found distracting. The first is the pairing of Marty, Ray, and Frog. Like Lee before him, Marty is finding the dig story a little dry for his taste. But he is intrigued by a related scoop: archeological looting. According to Ray — the bitchy antiques dealer — there’s a highly illicit, highly lucrative black market for misappropriated Native American artifacts in Tulsa. Tonight, Ray and Marty are attending an auction run out of the same private members’ club from which Lee lifted a Joe Brainard sketch in season one.
They’re doing preliminary research in the stacks of Hoot Owl when Frog comes in looking for a copy of As I Lay Dying, which he finds shelved in the “Lee’s Picks” section. (The Lowdown loves to intimate that the fallen apple overestimates its distance from the tree.) Frog regales Marty and Ray, who already make an exceptionally odd couple, with what must be a bullshit account of the time he spent as a runaway in Durango, Mexico, on the set of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Frog insists that the John Huston classic was an elaborate cover for unauthorized excavation. Intrigued, Ray and Marty invite Frog to come along to the soirée.
Marty needs Ray to get into the auction, but why do either of them want an eccentric like Frog there? He capably poses as a swaggering archeologist, but before long he’s visiting the open bar too often, lingering too long over the curios of pottery shards and Mississippian carvings. Frog has such palpable “I’m gonna take something” energy that it’s shocking he’s able to walk out of the place with the owl-shaped shell gorget he’s been eyeing since they walked in. Ray is scandalized, but Marty doesn’t mind — he leaves the auction with enough sources to pick up his story. As for Frog, you can’t really steal something that’s already stolen, can you? He wants to see Marty take the Tulsa robber barons down in print and make a little trouble for his son at the same time. In place of the repurloined gorget, Frog leaves a Hoot Owl Books promotional pin under glass at the auction.
That Lee is graceless under pressure is well established on The Lowdown, but even so, his bungling of the Lonnie predicament is so extreme that the story line felt like it was scripted chiefly for laughs. (In which case, touché. I did laugh a lot.) At the end of episode three, Johnny and Lee were left wondering what to do with the cop lying unconscious by Johnny’s shed. In the minutes between then and when “Raw Milk” picks up, they apparently decided the best course of action was to load said cop into the trunk of Johnny’s car and drive him over to Cyrus’s office. Except he’s not that unconscious — he’s yelling to be let out. And when they arrive at Tulsa Beat, Cyrus is yelling because it’s bad manners to bring the cop you battered to someone else’s yard. Lee wants Cyrus’s help to interrogate Lonnie, and Draymond agrees to join Lee’s legal team for a retainer. Lee doesn’t live by the code of “act first, think later.” It’s act, act, act, act, act all the time.
But when the gang heads back outside to grab Lonnie, he’s already escaped the trunk. To me, this seems like a good outcome. Lee didn’t have any actual questions to ask. Cyrus wasn’t interested in becoming an accessory to cop-napping. Draymond, the only level head among them, points out that Tulsa isn’t in Woodrell County, where Lonnie’s badge is from, so he likely wasn’t creeping around Johnny’s hot tub in a professional capacity. (Also, Lee did pants Lonnie before throwing him in the trunk — an “intimidation” tactic — so if he was super keen to question him, he could overtake Lonnie waddling down the street with his jeans at his ankles.)
By the time Lee recounts the night’s events for Ginger, they’ve been embellished with his half-true heroics. This particular strain of Lee’s sleaziness comes off as harmless, though, because Ginger doesn’t hang on his every word. To the extent she even likes Lee, it’s in spite of her better judgment. She’s a public defender, professionally trained to perceive when people have drifted from the truth. There’s more to any case than the facts.
Luckily for their floundering investigation, Lee did stumble onto a critical point of coincidence. Mekko had told Angie that he’d been forced to remain with a dead body in prison, but when Ginger looked into it, the only recent inmate death had been Nathan Spence, a young offender being held at county lockup in Woodrell. The Woodrell sheriff’s office maintains that particular jail — the same office where Lonnie serves as deputy. The good news is that they have a fresh lead. The bad news is that the home intruder with the SS neck tattoo Ginger shot a few episodes back is actually a cop.
Lee wants to rush up to Woodrell and start peppering people with questions. Which questions? He doesn’t say. Which people? He’ll know them when he sees them. But first, Johnny is going to fix up the tooth Lee half-lost during his fisticuffs with Lonnie. He’s never been to the dentist before, and he’s hoping Ginger will stick around to offer moral support. Their relationship is evolving. Lee is helping Ginger to find her AWOL fugitive boyfriend; Ginger spends the morning with Lee and Lee’s ex-wife’s husband ripping nitrous. There’s a give and a take, I suppose. It’s entertaining, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that the scene was reverse-engineered from its gruesome end shot: Lee laughing maniacally into the camera, his teeth hopelessly mangled.
“Raw Milk” finally hits its stride when it gets out of Tulsa. Ginger has a connection in Woodrell. With Lee’s smile refreshed, they drive out to meet her old colleague, Jeff, at the depressing roadhouse that doubles as his office. As they wait for him, Lee and Ginger get to talking about something other than the case. Last time Lee saw Frog, Frog went off his meds, and Lee was compelled to have his old man hospitalized. But those are just the facts. Ginger asks if father and son were ever close, which makes Lee laugh. How can you be close to a guy as unreliable and irascible and egomaniacal as that? Ginger’s a public defender, though, professionally trained to cut to the chase. She wants to know: Is it possible to be close to Lee?
Jeff’s belated arrival saves Lee from having to answer the question. Crucially, it saves him from having to think too hard about the question and about the tendencies he may have inherited from a man he despises. It also gives Ginger and Lee another chance to introduce themselves as a non-couple. They were a hit at the dentist’s office; Johnny loved Ginger for his buddy. And Jeff, who was transferred out of the Tulsa PD’s office — probably for drinking on the job, but perhaps just for being horny and inappropriate — gives Lee his meaningless nod of approval. The series seems to be slow-building the case for this odd coupling.
Jeff represented Nathan. He claims to have gotten the kid a good plea deal — placement in a diversion program where he could work off his sentence. But Nathan died in county lockup before ever making it to his placement. The sheriff’s office is calling it a medical emergency, but that doesn’t satisfy Nathan’s mother. Jeff warns them that Sheriff Thorne is a cunt, but, equally, he seems like he might say that about any woman in power.
Usually, it’s a bad sign when the good guys split up, but so far it’s taken Lee and Ginger half a television season just to discover that the man they’re looking for is missing by choice. They’re not exactly making great inroads together. Ginger and Jeff head to see Nathan’s mom, who overcomes her initial wariness to confide in Ginger that she thinks someone murdered her son.
But that’s not what’s being reported in the Woodrell County Monitor. Lee separately heads to the newspaper’s offices to confront their columnist, Dale Slater — the same guy who gave Lee a safe ride home from McMann’s house last episode. Dale didn’t tell Lee about his day job then, but he did recognize Lee from his car-crash acceptance speech at the Tulsa journalism awards, which has gone low-key viral in a very small corner of Oklahoma. Dale wasn’t impressed. In fact, he sees the project of local journalism very differently.
Dale practices selective journalism: Tell only the productive truths. If there’s no responsible way to tell the story of Nathan Spence’s tragic, mysterious death, then it shouldn’t be told. It’s no wonder that Dale believes that “Truth’s Easy”; he’s only telling the easy truths! But Dale’s conservative journalism is so toothless as to be misleading. If the town paper ignores the suspicious death of a young inmate, how can a community hold its leaders to account?
Luckily for the people of Woodrell, Lee Raybon Jr., Tulsa truthstorian, is here to do some good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. He follows Dale over to the 4-H Fair to uncover police corruption at the market lamb competition, which will be judged by Sheriff Thorne. Thorne is something of a celebrity in town. When Lee finds her, she’s coaching her daughter, who worries that one of the boys is destined to win the lamb contest. Thorne tells her that steady eye contact and a firm handshake are the secret to being a woman in a man’s world, but I’m pretty sure being the sheriff’s daughter can’t hurt. As Thorne progresses through the livestock tent with her husband’s arm slung over her shoulders, she gets pulled into grip-and-grins with her constituents. Lee, standing nearby, offers to take the photos.
Vela’s already heard about Lee, the busybody out-of-towner who’s been hanging out at the Boontill strip club. Just beyond the lamb pen, Lee asks to see the coroner’s report for Nathan Spence, but Vela counters that she’d be happy to sit down for a Heartland Press interview at a later date at a more appropriate venue. She’s brushing him off. Even after Lee mentions her deputy Lonnie turning up at his ex-wife’s house, she won’t be intimidated.
Neither is Lee cowed by the sheriff’s bravado, though he is obliged to accept her terms. Because, well, he has the shits. Since arriving at the fair, Lee’s been haphazardly guzzling down unpasteurized milk. Now, at the critical moment, his digestive tract is rebelling. Just when he should be screaming truth to power, he finds himself holed up in a porta-potty. Many of you will delight in these high jinks, but Lee is already too gross and greasy for me. From the moment I saw him dribbling raw milk down his beard, I lived in fear of how this would end up.
Lee is still imprisoned in the porta-potty when Deputy Lonnie arrives at the fair, asking for his badge and gun. Lee hands him back his wallet, but the gun he’s left in Dan’s safekeeping. So Lonnie hauls Lee in. This isn’t Tulsa. We’re in Lonnie’s neck of the woods now. When Lee wants to know what he’s being charged with, Vela teases the murder of Chili Franks. Or maybe she’ll just charge Lee with harboring a fugitive. See, Woodrell is a small town. The head prison guard McMann is Vela’s cousin, and he thinks Lee knows exactly where Mekko is.
Eventually, Lee asks for his phone call and reveals he’s got the phone number for “Big D” written on the inside of his boot. At first, I assumed he must be about to call Draymond, the most recent addition to his investigative team, but there’s an even bigger D in Oklahoma who owes him a favor after season one.
Either way, my takeaway from “Raw Milk” is that Ginger and Lee really should never split up. It’s not just that Lee finds himself in trouble in her absence, but that the series itself feels less rich when she’s missing from action. We’ve already watched Lee successfully swagger his way through a season of reckless reporting. We’ve turned up every week to be charmed and repulsed by the same guy, rooting for him to win in spite of ourselves. But Lee’s bluster is less grating on the audience when Ginger is there to contradict him or, even better, simply ignore him.
