Ray Donovan recap: The past is back to haunt the Donovans
So far this season of Ray Donovan is dealing with a lot of things popping up from the past. Mickey rose from the dead, some severed heads surfaced, an old family friend came back into Ray’s life, and Claudette is now around and maybe causing problems for Mickey in order to protect her son. It hasn’t all been interesting, but at least there’s some thematic coherence here.
This week’s episode begins not with the past, but with a present moment of intense grief. Bunchy tries to talk to the mother of the kid he shot, but she only lashes out at him, and understandably so. Bunchy apologizes, but there’s no acceptance here. He’s going to have to live with what he did and find other ways to atone for it. When he goes to leave the hospital, he’s approached by a security guard who sympathizes with what he did, and who invites him to a meeting of the Knights of Manhattan. Bunchy goes to the meeting, populated by MAGA racists wanting to preserve the white race, but it doesn’t seem like the message sticks with him. Sure, he’s isolated right now, but deep down he’s not a terrible person who’d go in for that sort of thing.
Meanwhile, Ray’s office gets stormed by the cops, his car is towed, and it’s all because of Feratti. He wants to be paid $9 million by Kevin Sullivan’s father, and then he’ll get his hospital deal at the original lesser price. I have no idea how any of this matters, but it does get Jim Sullivan involved in the story, and that goes to some interesting places later on in the episode.
While Terry continues to ponder if this whole alternate treatment thing is for him or if he should just walk into a lake with rocks in his pockets — he delays the latter option for now, but I’m already tired of this whole dull storyline — Bridget takes a surprising step into her father’s shoes. When her producer fling calls for help because a bunch of people are accusing JWH of knowingly giving them herpes, she takes on the role of fixer. She has JWH dress as Smitty, and Smitty dress as the pop star, and then she sneaks them out of the studio and suggests crafting a statement that would get them ahead of the scandal. Ray smirks when he hears about how it all went down, proud of his daughter for learning a few tricks along the way. With that said, the less we get into the actual use of the word “hispes” the better.
This is an episode that feels like a bit of a reset after all the chaos that stemmed from the events in the season premiere. The longer arc of the season is beginning to show, and it involves a lot of different people and twists. For instance, it turns out Mickey isn’t in the Maldives — consider me not at all shocked — and is still in town, trying to figure out his next racket. He’s about to give up when Sandy, who’s just finished a job for Ray where she had to get into Jim Sullivan’s safe deposit box, finds him on the pier and shows him a gold coin. Apparently, it’s part of the heist that he and Sullivan did back in 1977, the one that saw Mickey go to jail.
Now, Mickey wants to start over again. He takes that coin to Daryll’s place and shows it to Claudette, and tells her they can go live the life they imagined when they were younger. She refuses and asks Mickey to please keep Daryll out of this mess. By the end of the episode though, Daryll is driving off with Mickey, and Claudette is calling Detective Perry with information about her former lover.
Who knows where this all goes from here, but everyone is tangled up in it, what with Ray being involved with Feratti, who’s in turn involved with Kevin Sullivan. And now, as the episode comes to a close, Ray is also getting involved with Kevin’s sister, Molly. She likes him, he kisses her, that kind of thing. It could, and will, get complicated, and then hopefully this season will really get rolling.
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