Michael Suarez
The following recap contains spoilers for Lucky S1E3, “Read the Room” (written by Ariel Levine and directed by Greg Yaitanes)
Things continue to get interesting for Lucky, as well as those hot on her trail, even as she uses her wits to keep surviving. The ending of Episode 3 does seem to show her making a mistake her father warned her not to make, but we’ll get to that.
It turns out that the “bad guys” are perfectly capable of making mistakes, in that the guy they abducted in Episode 2 did not know Cary. We learn this after he was tortured for hours in Priscilla’s horse stables. We also now know that Priscilla is not perfect, nor the crime boss she presented herself as. She’s under William Fichtner’s character, Wayne, and she seems understandably afraid of him, given his tone and threats, but most importantly, she seems very worried and scared for her son.
Her second, Dutch, tells her, after she’s admitted to being sloppy, that the abduction and torture didn’t work out:
“Your son is missing… Anything goes, until he ain’t.”
Does their heart-to-heart change my feelings about Priscilla or Dutch? I appreciated the show giving these characters the right amount of time to make them human beings capable of making mistakes, answering to those in higher positions, and extending empathy to one another. That said, they are still criminals who have no problem firing guns in public, running down F.B.I. agents in broad daylight, and shooting someone in the foot. Still, things like this make these “bad guys” a lot more interesting than if they were simply after Lucky.
Speaking of those chasing Lucky, as well as Cary (and I’ll get to him), it does look like Agent Rand really is just out to bust Priscilla. She needs to find Lucky or Cary because either, or both, will lead her to Priscilla. Not that she doesn’t know where Priscilla is. In fact, I was kind of struck when Rand walked right through Priscilla’s property and the two had a little conversation. Again, Priscilla seems more worried for Cary than anything else, and Rand seems more focused on busting Priscilla for something than even following protocol. She’s not even willing to follow a lead that would take her to Cary, but thankfully, she has Agent Gates take it upon himself to do so, and his work pays off.
Is Agent Rand really just so focused on Priscilla that she’s willing to do things alone and not do the things she should be doing, or is there something else going on? At this point, it looks like she’s just a classic F.B.I. agent who wants the person they’ve been after for a long time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she really is involved in what’s going on. My original thought was that she was on Priscilla’s side, but now I’m open to the idea that she’s in league with Lucky’s father. Perhaps he made a deal with her to give her Priscilla in exchange for walking, maybe even with some money. We’ll see.
As for Lucky’s father, John is still in prison, making phone calls to his daughter, but we also get some more flashbacks of the two of them as he shows a young Lucky how to rob a kid’s birthday party, something adult Lucky uses to clean up and get some cash to continue her own search for Cary. It’s stuff like this that adds much-needed dimension to Lucky. She was raised to be a criminal by her father, who seems to love her very much, but we’re also shown at the start of the episode that this is not the life she wants. Although, given his teachings, she’s been able to survive fairly well since Vegas.
Still, I can’t help but assume that Lucky, despite how happy she looked driving away from that family in Episode 2 and the kid’s birthday party she robbed in this episode, feels guilty about the things she’s done to survive. Yes, she hates that people are getting hurt and killed, as she essentially tells her father during one of the phone calls in this episode, but more than that, in back-to-back episodes, Lucky has done something that has affected families, specifically children.
In Episode 2, she manipulated and lied to two young girls, and as she drove away, seeing a stuffed animal in the vehicle she stole seemed to undercut the joy she felt in getting away. Here in Episode 3, I can’t help but feel that her taking away gifts from a child, whether or not that child came from a wealthy family, was the wrong thing to do, and yet, she was taught this. And she needs to do something to continue to survive long enough to find Cary and get the money he stole.
Now we come to the episode’s end. Lucky has found Cary’s new identity and residence, as have Priscilla and the F.B.I. Luckily, no pun intended, Lucky has gotten to him first. She sneaks into his place after she sees him head to the beach for a swim. She ransacks his place, and lets out a lot of frustration on his furniture as a result. Ultimately, the cash is gone, and she’s going to need Cary to get the money back from where he’s placed it.
In the last call with her father, he tells her to be in and out of Cary’s place, and there’s a part of me that believes she would’ve done so if the cash had been there. But it wasn’t. As such, she must wait for Cary to return, and as the two meet face-to-face, in silence (which was a nice choice), for the first time since he drugged her back in Episode 1, Episode 3 comes to a close.
Overall, “Read the Room” deepens my understanding of the show’s major players in a way that doesn’t get me to necessarily change my opinion of any of them but helps me to understand who they are. I can’t honestly say I like any of the characters, and that’s okay, because I don’t need to like them. However, I find myself wanting to know what happens to everyone. Whether it’s the “bad guys,” the F.B.I., Cary, or Lucky and her father, I’m all in on this show now.
I’m curious as to whether or not the writers have some twists up their sleeves, because if things really are as simple as they’re being presented, Lucky is a fine show about criminals. If things aren’t quite as simple? Well, I’ll be delighted. Until then, I’m more than happy to stick with this show.
