Dope Thief Recap: Continue the Case

Dope Thief is a classic crime story that deals in reveals — of criminal plots and character motivations in equal measure. The big exterior mystery is revealed piecemeal through the slow-burn interior reveals of our two leads on either side of this criminal saga’s coin: Ray and Mina. Holding out on all the information and slowly doling it out throughout the story is always tricky without frustrating a viewer or losing their interest too early. Fortunately, Dope Thief also moves at an economical pace. And it helps that the show’s other pillar of modus operandi is the pulpy, Boschian lizard-brainy imagery and moments that tend to make the best American crime stories sing.

All to say, Dope Thief’s fourth episode is chock-full of choice reveals and lizard-brain shit — you might say a greatest-hits compilation for the series thus far. It’s not its finest, but it’s an incredibly affecting and entertaining hour of TV.

We start with a killer flashback that reveals some big missing pieces to Mina’s side of the puzzle. “He was a prick,” Mina had said to Nader outside her partner Jack’s funeral service in episode three. At the top of “Philadelphia Lawyer,” we’re four months back before the robbery and starting to get a picture, however foggy, of the kind of prick Jack was — running a dangerous undercover op on his own time, taking advantage of his emotionally fragile partner (with whom he’s also having a casual affair) and reeling her into his shady machinations.

Just how far down the rabbit hole of his rogue cover has this cat gone? It’s hard to say, but his pitch to Mina also gives us a clear summary of the game board. I haven’t yet addressed how this show takes place in 2021, in no way a reflection of a damned inspired choice in adapting the 2009 novel on Peter Craig’s part. As Jack explains to Mina, COVID changed the whole economic landscape of the drug trade. A big shipment came across the southern border ahead of closure, and then the usual networks of runners, cookers, and managers broke down. “The regular supply chain’s a fucking mess! Why would the drug trade be any different?” So, the way Jack figures it, the cartels started hiring the old bikers in the area as third-party contractors to convert and move the big load of liquid meth. “It’s a fucking quarantine stash,” acknowledges Mina. The stash. For the whole East Coast. The supply chain evolves with the shifting tides, however sudden and swift. Profit finds a way.

As Mina explains through her shattered, unhealed voice box later on in her testimony (Marin Ireland absolutely crushing every painful moment of perseverance with our wounded warbird), Jack was working under the delusion of the “one big case” — the white hat rides out and lassos all the big baddies in one go. Winning wars with one clear shot. And she took the bait. But now that he’s gone, and she’s the one left to answer for the risks they both took, the same war is all that’s left. “My goal is to continue the case,” she says. A blunt refraction of Al Pacino’s raspy cop’s refrain from Michael Mann’s Heat: “All I am is what I’m going after.”

And as Mina admonishes Nader from her Rust Cole–style motorhome adorned with a disconcerting amount of case file papers and photos, they’ve identified Ray Driscoll as the DEA-poser who shot her. Bringing to light the story of a small-time crook successfully posting as DEA will surely be bad for the DEA-ing business, but it’s now or never if they want to roll their colossal misfire into a war-winning final blow.

Meanwhile, Ray has set up a hideout camp with Manny, Theresa, and our beloved Shermy, the dog, in a couple of motel rooms and rigged a makeshift camera set up so he can keep a watchful eye on the inconsolable, doped-up Manny. I wouldn’t call Manny’s current state a particularly complex or culturally sensitive characterization. But Wagner Moura plays it with a complimentary grunge-pop Shakespearean pathos, and there’s a compelling dramatic conflict brewing between Ray’s unwavering drive to and Manny’s Catholic-guilt-ridden inability to push down the old moral cognitive dissonance without shooting up and shutting out the incessant noise of the fire alarms both real and deep in his psyche.

So Ray manages to instigate a meetup with Sherry to cut the Manny problem off at the head. It’s unnerving at best to watch Ray frame Sherry, and Manny’s relationship and rather impromptu engagement in the coldest, if not most honest of terms, but the logic is undeniable: The sooner Sherry and Manny are out of contact with one another, the safer Sherry will be and the sooner he can get Manny back up on his feet. Time, after all, remains of the essence — what with the biker gang closing in on everyone involved (including Son Pham, whose dogs get a lethal visit from a mysterious face-tatted dude in a cowboy hat) and the DEA closing in on Ray and Manny via Michelle. At the end of the episode, Ray meets up with her to clear the air at a designated bar, only to see feds with earpieces surrounding the crowded room and Michelle trying to signal him to back off.

Back off he does to survive another day on the run, but not before the bang-pow True Detective LARPing shootout between the Aryan biker gang and Ray and Manny’s new friends, “Professor Mein Kampf” Cyrus (Adam Petchel) and the Joker boys. (Henry’s reaction to the offer to paint his face before the battle is priceless — “No fu— no man, I don’t need to fuckin’ whiteface.”)

“How many different ways do we have to go to Hell, Ray?” Manny asked his best friend in the church right before they rolled up on this Batman-villain-ass gang of thieves. Apparently enough to get what might be the most effective lizard-brainy action scene thus far under our belt. As for Petchel’s more than memorable camp performance, even for me, we might have jumped the shark here. At the same time, once he popped up and sort of took over the aura of the show for a stretch, the stakes couldn’t have been more immediate and mortal. You really didn’t know what was going to happen next.

Fortunately, Ray and Manny make it out of this unexpected shootout alive, with just enough time to close out the episode with an extra heart attack. The image of Ray gripping Manny’s suicidal grenade for both their lives is on the nose, but it works like gangbusters. Riding the white line between life and death, Manny reveals his core regret, the resounding siren’s song of every God-fearing blue-collar American criminal: “I just wanted to have a normal life.”

But life, such as it’s been granted them, has trained them both to swim forever in the seas of fight-or-flight. And Ray’s will to survive is only magnified under pressure, however steeply it mounts.