Right-wing regimes are the political version of rap ciphers. They’re not a uniform group, aligned behind necessarily uniform goals; rather, everyone takes turns on the mic. Sometimes it’s big business’s turn. Sometimes it’s the messianic tech bros. Sometimes it’s the billionaire-backed podcasters and their state-mandated grieving periods. Sometimes it’s rank-and-file Republican politicians elected in red districts by promising to make abortion physically impossible. Sometimes it’s the cops. Sometimes it’s ICE and its minders. On very rare occasions it’s the actual senile old sex creep who’s nominally in charge of the country. And sometimes it’s the just-plain Nazis.
The Oklahoma of The Lowdown founds itself presided over by just such a reactionary chimera. When this episode starts, it seems clear who’s in charge: oil-and-cattle man and Republican gubernatorial candidate Donald Washberg, backed up by a small army of badly behaved Tulsa cops. (“It’s a cookout,” Donald deadpans when Lee Raybon asks him what the hell kind of party the pigs are having. “It’s really wonderful seeing our tax dollars going to good use,” he quips in reply.) And it’s true that Donald implies an “accident” may befall him if he continues his investigation into the Washberg family. If asked, the cops will of course report whatever version of the conversation Donald tells them to.
But it isn’t that simple, and not just because after punching Lee in the face, Donald seems to feel badly enough about it to offer the guy a hankie for his nosebleed. (“There’s hot dogs,” he says after their conversation concludes. “Lee, seriously — have a hot dog.”)
No, the issue is that Donald’s not truly calling the shots either. Driven by Marty to what they both believe is a routine megachurch meet-and-greet, Donald instead winds up in the ass-end of nowhere at a run-down one-room country church. But it’s much more than that. As its sinister leader, Pastor Mark (Paul Sparks, who you’ll recall as being brilliant in every show he’s ever been in), makes clear. With a fly audibly buzzing around him as he’s introduced — he’s the Lord of the Flies, if you will — he demonstrates to Donald they’re building a locked-and-loaded army of God out here in the woods. What they want is Indian Head Hills, the adjacent land owned by the Washbergs. There they will build their new homeland, from which one presumes they will begin conducting offense.
Okay, so fine, Donald Washberg’s not the shot-caller he thinks he is, at least not in this world. That’s what his right-wing big-business liaison with these people, Frank Martin, is for, right? Wrong! Donald’s not alone in getting menaced by Pastor Mark; in fact, Frank gets it worse. He’s marched out by Pastor Mark to a burn pit, where the skinheads murdered by the late, unlamented Allen are being disposed of. Taking credit for Allen’s death, too, Pastor Mark warns Frank he’s next if the Indian Head Hills sale doesn’t go through in a timely fashion. It’s all Frank’s younger superior, Trip (Tom McCarthy, who like Frank’s Tracy Letts is one of several prominent hyphenate actor-writer-directors in this cast), can do to talk him down off the ledge.
But here’s the other reason why I think that for all his sins, Donald Washberg is not ultimately our man for the death of his brother Dale. After he freaks Lee out and roughs Lee up, he tells Lee it wasn’t a murder — Dale, he says, was driven to suicide by a young Native street artist with whom, Donald believes, he was having an affair.
However you feel about it in the moment, Lee, at least, buys what Donald’s selling here. With the help of his sole employee, Deirdra — Lee feels uncomfortable visiting Native-run places as a lone white guy — Lee asks around at the Indian Store and the Indian Center about the artist until Deirdra herself tracks him down.
HIs name, it turns out, is Chutto (Reservation Dogs composer and alum Mato Wayuhi), and no, he and Dale were not an item. Dale was just a lonely guy who nervously loitered outside the same gay club where Chutto draws paid sketches of the buzzed night-time passers-by. Eventually Dale struck up a conversation, then something like a friendship, with the artist — but he really hit it off with Chutto’s senile grandpa Arthur (the late great Graham Greene), of all people.
But there’s a method to this madness. Lee learns that Dale rewrote his will to bequeath his share of the Washberg land — the very area Pastor Mark and his Nazis are trying to turn into the New Zion — to Arthur. Turns out Dale’s ancestors stole it from Arthur’s grandpa generations earlier. They straight-up murdered him for it and signed the deal with a fingerprint from his dead hand, in fact. Dale sees his own death as a chance to make right this grievous historical wrong.
(Side note: Does this make it more possible Dale really did kill himself, in order to facilitate the reparation of the land? But if that were the case, wouldn’t he try to make things as official and notarized as possible, instead of, as Chutto puts it, leaving a handwritten piece of paper in the hands of a street artist and his crazy grandpa?)
Electrified by this new information, Lee takes it directly to the woman who’s both the most involved other person involved and the one he seems to implicitly trust among everyone involved in the case: Betty Jo, Dale’s widow and Donald’s ex-lover. In hiding at the corny New Age retreat he recommended to her, Betty Jo acknowledges the call…then dials up Donald to relay the news. Disappointing, but understandable: If you’re just trying to survive for yourself and your semi-estranged daughter, as Betty Jo is, does Lee or Donald look like the safer bet long-term?
Watching this episode in October 2025, when there are open Nazis and Christian Nationalists at the highest levels of government and the rule of law is being rewritten to favor white people and punish everyone else more or less openly, is…bittersweet. Nevertheless, it is bracing and necessary for art to address these people for who and what they are. Lee Raybon and his compatriots are up against people who prattle about an imaginary America, even as they attempt to replace it with the Confederacy, Jim Crow, the Third Reich. A story in which fractures in the right-wing coalition can be exploited like rap beefs until, hopefully, someone emerges from the fascist cipher a clear-cut loser is a story worth telling.
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.