‘Mad Dogs’ Recap, Episode 9: Jésus Is Just Alright With Me

You know him. You love him. You cannot live without him (if you’re part of the Belizean underworld, anyway). Ladies and gentlemen, with out further ado…Jésus!

Funny—I thought he’d be taller. Also a dude.

But hey! This is Jésus, alright, or more accurately the young woman who’s assumed his name and mantle like Wesley became the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride. She’s his daughter Jazmin, and she appears to have been in charge of his massive drug operation ever since, as she tells Joel in a surprising (maybe a little too surprising, given the circumstances) heart-to-heart, “he was strangled with a barbed wire.” Jazmin does not seem particularly broken up about this, which leads one to suspect she did the strangling, and to speculate as to why; none of the answers you might come up with are good.

Nor, to be honest, is Jazmin. By the time they meet her, our heroes have been through every conceivable calamity a writer’s room could throw at them (except a stabbing, which happens five minutes later), so perhaps a sense of anticlimax was inevitable. But after a season full of memorable villains in the form of Milo, the Cat, Capt. Moreno, Lawrence, and especially Aaron, god rest his spandex-clad soul…

…Jazmin just doesn’t measure up. She comes across like a bad guy in a bad action movie, all unpredictable mood changes, inappropriate laughter, and the overall demeanor of an ADHD kid who’s gone off her meds. One second she’s playing Luke Skywalker with a machete, the next she’s asking Joel if he’d like to fuck, and the next she’s telling him how sad his kids will be to hear that he died. This manic pixie drug kingpin schtick flattens the character into a collection of tics, and makes it hard to take Joel’s plight seriously. He’s basically being threatened by a Looney Tunes character, whether the CIA wants to recruit her services or not.

More intriguing, at least at first, is the man in the white hat. Eventually we learn he’s Conrad Tull, FBI agent, looking for poor Rochelle, but before then he’s just some weird guy wandering through funeral homes and impound lots and morgues snapping photographs and being mysterious and clearly hunting for our four heroes. He’s played by Ted Levine, who still can’t help but radiate a bit of Buffalo Bill menace after all these years, and that helps give him a gravitas that Jazmin lacks. I get that Jazmin isn’t supposed to have gravitas beyond that granted to her by her position of power, but the goofiness could stand to be offset.

But it’s not entirely Jazmin’s fault that the big confrontation the show built to all season feels a little muffled in the end. For one thing, it isn’t the end. Not even counting the tenth and final ep of the season, which follows this one, the story doesn’t end with Joel’s sit-down with the secret empress of Belize. It keeps on rolling, literally: Lex gets stabbed by a drunken local he inadvertently offended, Jazmin lets the men go so they can bring their friend to the hospital, and while his buddies sit around waiting, Gus gets pinched by Tull. Thus the rendezvous the crew had been gearing up for and working toward since the pilot winds up solving basically nothing for any of them. Considering how drum-tight the plotting had been up until now, this is a jarring misstep.

But there’s still time for the show to pull off something big. Now that Lawrence has killed Aaron—an eye for an eye, amigo…

—will either Jésus or the CIA seek revenge? Is Conrad Tull who he says he is? (I initially suspected he was Jésus.) Is some kind of reckoning in store between the four friends? Will there be a payoff, or will payment be deferred to the second season, a problem the similarly relentless but anthology-formatted Fargo never faces? Like Lex, Mad Dogs stumbled into a bit of a hole right at the end of its mission. Can the show climb back out?

[Watch Mad Dogs on Amazon Prime Video]

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island. He also recaps Showtime’s The Affair and HBO’s The Leftovers for Decider.