Dope Thief Series-Finale Recap: Do You Want to Be Alive?

Try as I might to keep my default-movie-guy bias in check when swimming in the waters of TV — blurred as the lines are between the things we used to call “television” and “cinema” in the 21st-century “content” colonization of art and categories — sometimes you gotta bite the bullet, dig your heels into what you know, and call a thing what it is. And Dope Thief’s final episode proves that some crime stories are better suited for a feature-length investigation.

This may come as a surprise to anyone who’s been following along with me week to week. My notes have been largely on the positive-to-glowing scale, particularly due to the strength of both writing and cast (the disciplines for whom TV arguably finds its anchor as a medium). And it was only last week that I really started to recognize a drag in the momentum. Hell, maybe that just means this should’ve been a six-episode series instead of eight. With Ray’s interior journey largely resolved in episode six’s gangrene-induced fever dream/vision quest and Mina’s emotional fight to return to the world of the living also mostly won before episode seven, we end on the nuts-and-bolts resolve of the investigation strung out over two chapters, the final of which manages to add an extra ten minutes to the average runtime (not doing itself any extra favors there). No TV show fires on all cylinders if it’s that over-extended on time before its final minutes.

It’s a shame because all the mandate-tinged filler doesn’t do justice to the stuff in “Innocent People” that still rips. We open with Manny’s funeral, where Ray and Theresa exchange expository table-setting dialogue. Not the stuff that still rips yet, more along the lines of once again giving Manny the short end of the narrative stick. But then Sherry gets up to sing with her rosary beads in hand, and Ray can’t dab a tear from his face in handcuffs. Henry plays the scene with his signature, pitch-perfect mix of pathos and humor, and that’s something that still rips (literally till the show’s final moments).

Outside the funeral, Mina is watching the proceedings from a parked car. “I wouldn’t break any rules” or “bend them too far,” Marchetti tells her. Cut to Ray’s knee bending slowly and arduously in physical therapy — a neat bit of cinematic editing that connects our two protagonists’ physical, emotional, and “criminal” struggle in a well-placed flash of visual synapse. Ray and Mina have shaken off the atrophy of the dead as much as they can from their respective corners. Time to combine their investigative powers and auras and hard-earned scar tissue for the final stretch of the case. Bryan Tyree Henry and Marin Ireland have likewise been holding down the powerhouse lead performance on their respective sides of the dramatic trajectory, which pays dividends in their hospital-room reunion. Ray’s apology comes gushing out of him, but Mina cuts through the fog on its outskirts to the heart of darkness from which they’ve both climbed. “I thought I knew everything about you,” says Mina, “but now I need to start over with one question: Do you want to be alive?”

With nothing left to protect but the truth, Ray chooses the path forward among the living. Just in time for our disembodied Boston-Jigsaw-voice of a big bad to finally show his face. I should have known way sooner than tonight that this guy was gonna be a crooked cop, Special Agent in charge of the Boston office no less. Veteran character actor Peter McRobbie puts in the necessary effort to distinguish the daytime, office-bound Bill McKinty’s voice from his bad-guy alter ego’s, and he cuts an appropriate difference between bland and menacing from the get-go, but it’s immediately obvious that this is our man the second he starts talking at the big DEA office meeting where everyone’s weighing in on how to proceed. The audience is at risk of being too many steps ahead of the action, and the time between McRobbie’s first appearance and the official on-screen reveal is too long to keep up the appropriate amount of suspense.

That said, it doesn’t take long for the investigation’s explosive final stretch to come together once they instate Ray as an expert witness/amateur detective. The latter title is less official and more because Ray is “full of facts,” having crossed all the necessary T’s and dotted I’s and blown the case wide open for the DEA. He begins his rundown of the case with another Michael Mannian Western-urban haiku: “My father was a born liar, but he died to give me the truth.” See, the way Ray figures it, Rick heard about Ray and Manny’s phony DEA operation in prison and facilitated a setup. Rick was meant to blow up the meth operation, and Ray and Manny were meant to be scapegoats: “a DEA buy-and-bust.”

As for the “Alliance,” the shadowy drug-running operation that seems to include everyone on the criminal side of the trade (including Son Pham, who remains in custody but under the care of big-brother guardian angel McKinty), Ray’s kept tabs on them, put surveillance on Theresa’s house, put trackers on their cars. They even found their headquarters and got their tags, phone numbers, you name it. Put all the pieces together, and the picture is of the late Special Agent Jack Cross as a crooked fed (high on his own supply by Ray’s read: “This is all some very methy shit to do”) who knew something was coming for him. So he scattered the coordinates to his stash-and-evidence trailer on the series of two-dollar bills. Ray puts the coordinates together for Mina and the DEA, and it’s off to the unmarked gravesite in the woods for the final heart-of-darkness confrontation.

For Son Pham’s sins — playing a major role in the setup while also sticking his neck out as much as he could for Ray — our guy is forced to stand literally naked at the bridge between alliances. A poetic but relatively small price to pay in comparison to Nader and his DEA crew, who’re forced to pay for their lack of investigative prowess with their lives. Can’t deny I indulged in a little “fuck yeah, bad guys are awesome” moment when McKinty snuck up behind Nader in the winter pissoir and put a meaty hole in the back of his head.

And hey, this is, ultimately, a justice-oriented universe we’re working in here. It turns out that Son Pham was the initial (and oddly benevolent) author of Ray and Manny’s setup, having put Rick together with Manny in order to scare off Jack Cross, a narc who was becoming a problem. But the aftermath got out of control fast and hit the news, and McKinty — the bigger operator in this whole conspiracy — reacted swiftly and violently.

McKinty pays just as swiftly and violently for all of his crimes, not only with his life but a painful, fiery death at Ray’s hand. The conclusion is neat, stark, and poetic in equal measure, but it comes too late to land with the intensity that it should. Writer and showrunner Peter Craig’s crime-capital-m-Movie bona fides and sensibilities were already on display in his previous credits. Ultimately, Dope Thief should have been a movie, but it filled out around 70 percent of its runtime with solid American crime storytelling that suited the medium and the massive talent involved. And that’s the high note on which the show ends. Ray and Mina chow down on fast food from the unlikely cradle of their redemption. Mina helps Ray clean a big old dab of sauce from the corner of his mouth. “There, you’re clean,” she says. Ray’s exasperated and deflated “hallelujah” caps a performance that makes Dope Thief a big win for any of us who recognize him as the best of the best of his generation. And for those who like a resonant, modern American crime story told with a touch of redemption.