The Lowdown is the most fun show going during a bleak season for America, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t often bleak itself. That bleakness has picked up a great deal since last week’s introduction of Pastor Mark, played with genuine menace and mania by the great Paul Sparks. This white supremacist is secretly the whole season’s Big Bad and — as the previously presumed Big Bad, Frank White, puts it in this episode — “crazier than a shithouse rat.” But his kind of crazy runs the country now.
That’s the future that the great crime writer Walter Mosley and director Danis Goulet predict with such disturbing accuracy in the mightily disturbing opening sequence. On one hand there’s Donald Washberg, respectable Republican, running for governor in Will Rogers cosplay while reenacting the theft of Native land with dressed-up white schoolchildren. On the other there’s Pastor Mark, openly preaching to his flock about the need for racial resegregation so that white people can once again rule, unquestioned and unchallenged, as God intended. This is the man Donald’s selling his land to, in exchange for his political support. It’s the kind of transaction Faust would recognize.
By this point in 2025, the Donald Washbergs and the Pastor Marks have have fully merged. Every respectable Republican in America is running cover for the most concentrated effort to legalize racism as law since the institution of Jim Crow. Goulet and Mosley’s seamless crosscutting from the genteel form of hatred to its full unmasked flourishing makes this point with all the subtlety it deserves, which is none.
It’s not like things get much happier from there. Betty Jo Washberg now appears at least to have been playing Lee the whole time they were together. (I’m not so sure, but let’s hear it out.) Last week, Lee tipped her off to her late husband Dale’s secret will, ceding his share of the family’s stolen land back to the descendants of its original and rightful indigenous owners. Betty Jo delivers this info not to her ex-lover Donald, but to his paymaster, Frank White, with whom she seems to have a long acquaintance. Even so, she’s ever the canny operator, making small talk with a bartender and a customer to make it look like she brought backup before she leaves.
Frank, a blustering piece of shit who’s not used to hearing “no,” flips the fuck out when the real landowner, Graham Greene’s sad-eyed Arthur, proves either too senile or too stubborn to surrender the will. Rather than fork it over after getting pushed to the ground, the old man remembers the death of his grandfather at Donald’s ancestor’s hands, and reaches for a gun. In an unseen struggle, Frank shoots Arthur instead and grabs the will. The murdder causes an outcry in the apartment complex — and a blind rage in both Lee and his newfound ally, Donald’s (former?) friend and security honcho, Marty.
“Former?” deserves some unpacking. Earlier in the episode, Marty breaks into Pastor Mark’s church and discovers exactly the kind of operation he’s running. Then he encounters one of the skinheads from earlier in the season, screaming as he runs through the forest, burning alive after being literally tarred and feathered for his transgressions against the brotherhood. It shows Marty the true extremes to which Pastor Mark will go in his racial holy war.
Marty rescues the man off-camera, rushing him to a hospital. There, Marty shows and tells Lee everything. The two very different investigators team up to take the whole operation down. Even so, Marty’s of the (correct) belief that Donald didn’t know the kind of people he was dealing with until it was too late to back out without getting killed, and that Frank was the real mastermind behind the deal. Neither Marty nor Lee seem to any inkling about Tripp, the younger classy-looking Nazi to whom Frank answers. Tripp orders the terrified Frank to return to Pastor Mark’s church.
Once Lee and Marty get on Frank’s tail, a thrilling action sequence ensues, in a year that seems to be chock full of such things. (Seriously: the footrace in 28 Years Later, the battle episode of Chief of War, the car chase in One Battle After Another, the forest hunt in Task — it’s a good year for nail-biters!) Spotting Frank as he pulls away in his gas-guzzling pickup truck, Lee and Marty give chase in his beat-up white van, flooring it to 100mph. Frank is so flustered by, and to his minimal credit upset about, killing Arthur that he’s unable to outrun them. Only Lee’s overheating engine allows him to escape. Even during the pursuit Marty calls the cops and reports the whole thing, but they appear to turn a blind eye because of Frank’s clout and connections.
Once they get the van cooled down enough to run again, they take it straight to Pastor Mark’s church at Marty’s suggestion, and that indeed is where Lee finds Frank. But apparently either Marty didn’t sufficiently warn Lee what kind of place this was, or Lee was too wired to listen. Whatever the case, Lee unwisely bursts in, accuses Frank of murdering someone — an accusation he weakly deflects by citing stand-your-ground laws, which probably don’t apply during a home invasion, Frank — and pulls a gun on him. Only then does he realize where these people’s sympathies lie. The episode ends with him impotently screaming that Frank is the bad guy, not him, at white supremacists carrying automatic rifles who’ve been given orders to kill.
It kinda feels like that sometimes, doesn’t it?
That The Lowdown, like Andor before it, can now be called “a show for our times” is mightily depressing, at least if you are predisposed to care about the kinds of things it cares about. (If you’re not, why are you reading this?) It’s a show for people who see that bad things are happening and just kind of instinctively react against it, the way your body rejects poison. It’s about someone who goes beyond shuddering and vomiting, and tries to turn himself into a one-man vaccine.
“If I see an injustice, and I don’t do anything,” Lee says to his one-eyed editor Cyrus’s lawyer cousin, “what’s that make me?” You know what that question is? The sound of a functioning conscience. Some people still fucking have them in this country!
Lee is a genuinely admirable figure, to have this innate hatred of hatred inside himself. There’s a lot of things this episode shows Lee isn’t particularly admirable for, though. He’s not a great ex-husband, seemingly intent on undermining her new marriage by torpedoing their kid Francis’s relationship with her new stepdad. “You’re gonna call him that?” he asks angrily. What else is she supposed to call him, Lee? Her great aunt?
He’s not a great friend, constantly maxing out his emotional-energy credit with every ally and editor and neighbor he has. At one point, he bursts in on his lawyer pal Dan, interrupts a meeting with a prospective client, demands info about wills, and then leaves, explaining “I gotta get a good lawyer.” “I am a good lawyer,” Dan says weakly to his would-be client, but the damage is done.
As for his antiques-dealer buddy Ray, he’s grown exasperated with Lee’s whole “Hillbilly Indiana Jones” schtick. In a world as “effed up” as ours, he says, the truth is not worth dying for, and it’s certainly not worth drawing the people you care about, like his daughter Francis, into the crossfire. (The speech is a bookend to an equal and opposite one delivered by Cyrus, decrying the world’s injustices, claiming the smart way forward is to look out for what’s right in front of you.)
Francis doesn’t agree with Ray that fighting for truth, justice, etc. is a dead end and a bad idea because bad things will never stop happening. She respects her dad’s work. That said, it would be nice if he could take a break from the never-ending battle once in a while to, you know, show up on time for parent-teacher conferences. He’s so busy trying to be a Good Man that he has forgotten to be a good dad, which he wears almost like a badge of honor.
“I’m not gonna be ‘a good parent,’” he tells her outside her school, with tears in his eyes, as if even he can hear how hollow this sounds. “I am gonna parent you by trying to show you what a good man looks like! I am gonna show you how to follow your dreams!” Keep in mind Francis knows full well he’s been kidnapped, beaten up, and threatened with death multiple times in the past week. Some dreams.
“I wanna be someone worth admiring,” Lee finally explains to her. With sadness, she reassures him — but it’s not really her he’s trying to convince, is it?
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.