Banshee Season 1 Episode 7
Stetson Saenz
On a week to week basis, Banshee regularly manages to deliver explosive, exciting and thrilling TV, often in episodes that would generally be considered filler yet still manage to have enough pulp panache to make it all seem worthwhile. Take the third episode of this season; an hour that did very little to advance the overarching plot of the war with the Redbones, yet still managed to feel like a series best for its combination of beautifully batty ideas and one of the best fight scenes ever delivered on television. Then we get an episode like this one; an episode that delivered a legitimate game changer and yet still felt oddly quiet and reserved, and in some ways a little anticlimactic.
Banshee is an American crime drama television series created by Jonathan Tropper and David Schickler for Cinemax. The series takes place in the fictional small town of Banshee, Pennsylvania. After serving 15 years in prison for stealing diamonds from Ukrainian gangster Rabbit (Ben Cross), the unnamed protagonist (Antony Starr) travels to Banshee to find his heist accomplice and former lover, Anastasia (Ivana Miličević). When he finds her, the protagonist learns that she is now a married mother of two living under the assumed identity of Carrie Hopewell. Later, when the incoming Sheriff is killed, the protagonist takes on his identity as Lucas Hood, becoming the town's new Sheriff, using his own brand of unorthodox methods. Banshee sees Hood struggle with adapting to his new identity while dealing with the machinations of local crime lord Kai Proctor (Ulrich Thomsen), and remaining hidden from Rabbit.[1][2] The series premiered on January 11, 2013. During the course of the series, 38 episodes of Banshee aired over four seasons, between January 11, 2013, and May 20, 2016.
In February 2015, Banshee was renewed for a fourth and final season of 8 episodes. This was two fewer than the 10 episodes in each of the first three seasons. Originally scheduled to premiere on January 29, 2016, the start of the season was delayed to April 1, 2016.[30]
Calvin Bunker brings a large posse of men to Proctor's house, and threatens to kill him, but Senator Mitchum, a secret leader of the Brotherhood, emerges from the house, removes Calvin from authority, and sends the men away.
Agent Dawson interrogates Bode's wife about the murder of Rebecca Bowman, and concludes that Rebecca's killer is still free, as her murder falls outside of the cultists' established pattern. Upon arrival at Proctor's house and finding no one home, Hood and Dawson find a hidden basement in his toolshed, where they find bloodstained instruments of torture. Hood also finds Rebecca's necklace, and concludes that Proctor must have killed her. He does not reveal this to Dawson, and leaves without her.
Meanwhile, Proctor and his aide, Burton, are carrying out their drug deal with Emilio Loera of the Colombian cartel, when they are surprised by Carrie and Job, who have slaughtered Proctor's men in order to undermine the cartel's confidence in him. As they try to leave, the Colombians attempt to kill them, but Brock destroys the truck full of drugs with an RPG, giving Carrie and Job a chance to escape. Loera attempts to shoot Proctor, but Proctor kills him first. Burton executes the remaining cartel henchmen. As they drive away, Hood T-bones their vehicle, sending them into a ravine. Hood confronts Proctor about his involvement in Rebecca's death, upon-which Burton reveals himself as Rebecca's murderer, shocking Proctor. Hood and Burton face off, resulting in Burton nearly strangling him to death, but Hood ultimately prevails. Hood leaves a bloodied and crippled Burton for Proctor to finish off. Burton tells Proctor that he murdered Rebecca for Proctor's benefit, and apologizes. Proctor kills Burton and wails.
At Brock's cabin, Calvin confronts Kurt, who attempts to subdue him in a fistfight, but is finally compelled to shoot him dead, having realised it was the only way that Calvin's wife and son would ever be safe. Brock later forgives him this transgression, assuring him that this is how policing must be done in Banshee.
I'll be the first to admit that when Banshee, Cinemax's insanity-fueled homage to pulp, premiered around this time last year, it didn't exactly wind my watch. There was a tremendous amount of plot trotted out in that initial outing, and after sifting through a ton of exposition, none of it seemed to make the characters interesting as anything outside of rudimentary tools for progressing that plot. That is to say: There was a lot of potential in the premise, but the individuals caught up in that premise fell a little flat.
As the season progressed, however, and the story of an unnamed, recently paroled (and seemingly indestructible) ex-con who'd assumed the identity of a recently deceased sheriff began to spin its wild narrative vortex, leaving a path of destruction in its wake, there emerged an intriguing and entertaining tension around the newly christened Sheriff Lucas Hood (Antony Starr) and his involvement in the dark Pennsylvania town that bears the program's name.
Needless to say, by season's end, there was certainly enough going on with Hood, his lost love Ana/Carrie (Ivana Milicevic), and Rabbit (Ben Cross), her violent, Ukrainian crime boss of a father, to serve as fuel for the show, but somehow, Banshee also managed to throw in a feud between the town's own crime boss, the excommunicated Amish slaughterhouse owner, Kai Proctor (Ulrich Tomsen), and Alex Longshadow (Anthony Ruivivar), the soon-to-be chief of the Kinaho Tribe.
Meanwhile, the rest of the town's four-person police force is given little more than a slap on the wrist because, as Racine puts it when confronting Agent Xavier (Derek Cecil), these "small townshenanigans" are "little fish" compared to capturing the very much still alive Mr. Rabbit.
But it hasn't exactly found the essence behind the conman pretending to be Sheriff Hood, either. As durable and single-minded as he is (and as convincingly hardened as Starr's performance is), Hood remains something of a cipher. A certain amount of uncertainty is expected when you're setting an entire series around a man with no name, but deliberate ambiguity doesn't necessarily translate into a compelling mystery. For all his supposed love of Ana/Carrie, it can sometimes come off less like genuine affection and more like the only thing he actually knows.
Now that's a storyline or character aspect worth investigating, if it's true, but considering he practically beds every pretty face he sees in that ramshackle storage room he calls home, there's precious little evidence that the man everyone calls Hood is his own worst enemy when it comes to finding some kind of anchor in the world. There's plenty of suggestion that Deva (Ryann Shane) will be the next thing keeping Hood in Banshee, so as the season progresses, it will be important for the character to see how that dynamic shakes out.
In the end, the season 2 premiere feels like the series premiere in many ways and yet, surprisingly, for a show that made its name largely off a depiction of brutal violence and sex, there's little of that here (with the exception of Hood's tryst with Odette Annabel's Kinaho assassin, Nola). 'Little Fish' is an exposition-heavy episode of television that manages to make intimations for some of its major characters, without offering much in the way of actual progression. (Thankfully, in the coming episodes, the show does manage to play out some of what it's hinting at here in interesting ways.)
When I reviewed Banshee's third season for Collider a few weeks ago, I only had the first two episodes of the Cinemax series at my disposal. From what I saw, it seemed like Banshee was going to keep doing what it's great at doing; mixing extreme violence with an emotional drama, but not (at that time) in any new way. The story had left Rabbit behind, and the war was now home in Banshee between Kai Proctor and the Redbones. The new mark for Lucas, Sugar, and Job seemed to be a cash-filled military compound guarded by mercs, which would presumably be ramping up the violence.
Starting with its third episode this season, though, Banshee began making some hard choices that really escalated the series on all fronts. Since those episodes, I've wanted to come back and write about it, lauding it for not just sticking with what it has always done well, but for raising its stakes to the highest possible level both physically and emotionally for its characters.
Banshee has always traded in brutal violence, but in "A Fixer of Sorts," the fight between Nola and Burton was truly extreme in its visceral nature. It's also probably one of the best, most horrific fight scenes that has ever aired. Though there had been some potential in a new bond between Nola and Carrie, that was eliminated after her brazen sparing with Burton, who she maimed deeply, and paid dearly for it.
But as is also typical of Banshee, Burton is not a one-dimensional figure. His flashbacks alluded to a torturous horror from his past, yet his character really gained depth in the way he flinched away from Emily when she came over to help sew him up after the fight.
The next week, in "Real Life is a Nightmare," we saw the unexpected team of Burton and Rebecca connect to retaliate on the Redbones for the attack on Proctor's night club. Though the fatal game of chicken, the car flips, and the ultimate explosion (and yet another gruesome death) were the fireworks of that interaction, the best moments were small: again, particularly when Burton reached up to hold on as Rebecca accelerated the car. He smiled. These two -- one who has chosen to leave her humanity behind, and the other who had it beaten out of him -- are in many ways even more terrifying than Chayton. They are the nihilists to Chayton's violent passions.
Speaking of Chayton, of course, none of these themes came together in a more intense way than in "Tribal," which was extremely focused on telling one particular narrative. There was plenty of violence -- and a pile Redbones to show for it -- which even included a machete and a crossbow alongside the more familiar gunfire of Banshee. But "Tribal" mostly played out in accordance to Banshee's moral code: those who are killed are part of the war. Innocents are usually safe. (In a recent example, for instance, how the secretary survived in the rig violence during "A Fixer of Sorts"). Major and even most minor characters aren't usually in true mortal peril, either (not really), which is one reason why Nola's death was so surprising.
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