Photo: Brian Douglas/Paramount+
Now, this is a Tulsa King worth bending the knee for. With refreshingly nuanced, twisty plotting and sharp dialogue courtesy of writer David Flebotte, the somewhat misleadingly titled “Life Support” (more on that in a second) is, appropriately, the first time in a long time that this show has shown signs of real, creative life.
The entire episode deals with the aftermath of the bombing of Dwight and Tyson’s car, which succeeded only in badly injuring Tyson’s father, Mark. Fortunately, it wasn’t an ignition-triggered explosive, which would have seen him completely seated within the car and thus obliterated; it was a remote-controlled situation that went off accidentally, which is the only reason Mark became collateral damage.
The explosion sends shock waves through four separate criminal organizations. In Tulsa, Dwight sets out to track down the white Prius that Tyson reported seeing repeatedly before it peeled away from the explosion. Bodhi and his employees discuss various security measures they could take, including shutting down the weed store, which they decide against. Tyson, whose mother will no longer see or speak to him because she blames him (correctly, as he himself admits) for Mark’s plight, vows revenge.
In Kansas City, Bill Bevilaqua debates what to do next. Despite his tough talk at the end of the previous episode, he has no intention of reneging on his deal with Dwight in the near term, not when Dwight is earning for them with relatively little hassle on their part. But he knows that he’s Manfredi’s top suspect, particularly because car bombs have been the K.C. mob’s stock-in-trade historically. (Dwight and his boys are actually pretty shrewd here: Car bombs being a Kansas City trademark is one of the reasons they think it wasn’t Kansas City, because it’d be too obvious.) Still, even as some of his captains propose killing Dwight and Tyson and seizing Tulsa’s operations for themselves, Bill backs them down.
In New York, the schism between boss Chickie and underboss Vince widens. Domenick Lombardozzi delivers a fine performance as a guy in the big chair who has no business being there, because he blames other people for his own bad decisions. Case in point: Still fuming that Vince attended the Atlanta sit-down last episode without him, Chickie nevertheless relents when Dwight asks to speak to Vince on the phone since he was the New York guy in attendance … then complains how he doesn’t like Dwight talking to Vince directly. Vince, exasperated, tells Chickie he shouldn’t have put him on the phone then. It’s like a textbook study in bad, passive-aggressive leadership.
And Vince has had enough of it. In a fluidly written and acted scene featuring a complement of enjoyable actors on the goombah end of the scale (Guy Nardulli, Ron Castellano, Paul Carafotes, and Bobby Costanzo), Vince makes the semi-formal request from captains from New York’s four other families to remove Chickie, take over the family, and make both peace and business with Dwight. The assembled heavies seem receptive to the idea, especially after Vince confirms the rumor that Chickie killed his own father to become the boss, though they have to take it to their own bosses for approval. It’s scenes like this in which you remember actor Vincent Piazza not just as Sylvester Stallone’s punching bag but as Lucky-fucking-Luciano from Boardwalk Empire. (Like Piazza and head writer Terence Winter, this episode’s writer, Flebotte, is a Boardwalk alum.)
The final outfit involved is Cal Thresher’s. When Dwight and his boys gradually lean away from the theory that one of their rival Mafia outfits was responsible, the black-hatted weed baron is the natural next suspect up. First, Dwight braces Armand, whom he (correctly) suspects has been feeding Cal information, however reluctantly. Next, Dwight and his hulking bodyguard, Bigfoot, show up at Thresher’s weed farm itself, slinging accusations, which Thresher denies with apparent sincerity.
But that sincerity is a tricky thing. While Cal can confidently say he had nothing to do with the bombing, he can’t say the same of Jackie, his Triad partner. Sure enough, the gangster has the telltale Prius stashed under a tarp behind Cal’s greenhouses. As Cal rants and raves about how Manfredi is bound to discover the car and the driver, Jackie kills two birds with one stone by plugging the driver and having the whole mess compacted. That’s one loose end tied down.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of Tyson. Midway through the episode, he’s the recipient of a stern talking-to from Mitch, a man who has actually killed someone and actually done hard time for it. Set in the show’s most sumptuously lit set — the casino with its rich reds and blues and golds — the conversation may be my favorite in the history of the show.
As Jay Will’s Tyson fumes and ruminates on his responsibility for the attack and his need to seek revenge, Garrett Hedlund’s Mitch consistently reacts like a man who simply will not tolerate hearing any bullshit. When Tyson bitterly asks himself why he gave his dad the car, Mitch replies, “Because it was a beautiful fuckin’ gesture!” When Tyson starts hinting at vengeance, Mitch shuts it down with an exasperated “Look, shut up.” He concludes the speech with its most impassioned line, straight from the heart: “When you kill a man, a little piece of you dies too.” It’s a terrific little scene.
It leads to the episode’s climax, in which Tyson ignores all advice and goes to Bill Bevilaqua’s house to lie in wait. As Tyson sits in the parked car, his face defined for the camera by the blue-purple haze of the night, Dwight frantically calls at Mark’s behest. He explains to Tyson that he tracked down the owner of the Prius and that whatever Tyson’s thinking about doing, he shouldn’t. But by now, one of Bevilaqua’s men has spotted him parked outside the estate and drives at him down the driveway, guns blazing. Tyson wounds the guy and escapes, but this almost certainly means war between Dwight and Bill, two guys who don’t particularly want to fight at this juncture.
Oh, also, Dwight calls things off with the gorgeous rancher Margaret — the reason Thresher was so pissed about a minor player like Dwight in the first place — but then immediately takes it back, and she responds by inviting him back to her place. It’s good to be the Tulsa King.
I suppose that if you asked me to sketch a best-case scenario for what Tulsa King could be, it’s this episode. This is never going to be a hard-hitting autopsy of the evil that men do. I accept that. It’s also always going to have scenes in which everyone laughs at how funny and cool Dwight is. I accept that, too.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t be clever, surprising, even witty. I love how no one involved in the great debate over the attempted assassination via car bomb — not Dwight, not Chickie, not Bill, not Cal, not Vince, not Tyson — has a clear line on what to do next. Everyone involved debates it, questions it, talks it over, and tries to get to the bottom of it. It’s just Cal’s bad luck that his man Jackie happened to be the perpetrator. Until then, though, I found myself genuinely interested in finding out who rigged the bomb and how the falsely suspected parties would pull themselves out of Dwight and Tyson’s crosshairs.
The cast is terrific across the board this time too. Stallone does some of his most effectively menacing work as Dwight, letting actual anger show through the big aw-shucks smile, at one point stopping himself mid-sentence because he knows he’s too angry to keep talking without a break. Hedlund’s skill at conveying Mitch’s hard-earned wisdom and regret to Tyson is a series high point. It’s simply wild how at home Max Casella looks dressed as a mustachioed ranch hand while still coming across like a low-level New York hood on the lam. Lombardozzi and Piazza’s interplay is like watching the golden age of HBO dramas come back to life in front of your eyes. Jay Will makes Tyson’s determination to be a tough guy seem like the tragedy it is.
Even comic character actor Steve Witting gets in on the act as Donnie Shore, who responds to Tyson’s request to drive off his car lot in “whatever the fuck you got” with “All right, well, that’s what the fuck I’ve got!” in his genial shitkicker car-salesman accent. And Dwight’s old-fashionedness, often implied to be a source of folksy insight, is mocked by one of the FBI agents who comes to his door to ask about the bombing. When Dwight tells him not to wait by his phone for a call, the agent (Aaron Cavette) snarkily replies, “You’re showing your age, Dwight. Nobody waits by the phone anymore.” Touché!
Add it all up and you have the most entertaining episode of the season so far. Flebotte and director Kevin Dowling — the guy whose job it is to capture both the lush lighting in the casino and the indecision of conflicted wise guys — made their bones on this one.
