‘11.22.63’ Recap, Episode 6: “Happy Birthday, Lee Harvey Oswald”

“Looks like we’re locked in here.”

It’s been a solid four episodes since some good ol’ boys have either threatened to or committed to beating the tar out of Jake Epping (James Franco), and it looks like his time was due. The scene that climaxes the sixth episode of 11.22.63 has taken a cue from Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s landmark episode, “The Body”: The ominous music fades out and we witness a full diegetic beatdown. Punches, threats, begging, and the disaffected sound of crickets are all that accompany what might be the last stand of Jake Epping, and the scene is all that much more intense for it.

It’s been six months since “The Truth,” and Sadie (Sarah Gadon) is still recovering from her ex-husband’s impromptu surgery on her face. In fact, she’s going in for some reconstructive surgery this episode to make her look “normal” again. It’s less vanity and more the act of a woman preparing to move past the most traumatic event of her life…but the past isn’t about to let that happen. The first appearance of the Yellow Card Man (aka the shambling figure on the past side of the Rabbit Hole who tried to stop Jake before even his mission even started) since the premiere calls the whole enterprise of Sadie’s surgery into question. This kicks off an oddly specific undercurrent throughout the episode: the hospitals of 11.22.63 are no longer places to get better; They seem, on the whole, places to get worse. Sadie, Bill, Miz Mimi, and finally Jake — in a surreal Jacob’s Ladder sequence — experience the trauma of trauma in the worst ways.

Part of that is Jake’s doing, as we witness the lengths to which he will go to stay on mission. Bill and he have their first knock-down, drag-out fight since “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” and Jake realizes for the first time how deeply embedded in his life Bill has become, and how thoroughly the past is willing to use Bill to stay on its own mission. Jake reminds Bill that when “you mess with the past, it messes back,” but for Bill, this isn’t the past. It’s just his life. And unfortunately, he has the terrible luck to live in a place and time in which it’s super easy to get committed for talking about conspiracy theories and people from the future, especially once he starts making time with Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife and going shooting with Lee himself. Though he does have a pretty good point that Jake gets to have his cake and eat it too (in his metaphor, the cake is his relationship with Sadie and the eating of it is apparently stopping the president from being murdered; this was not a well thought-out comparison), his general sloppiness and potential as a second shooter win him the hardest “Bye, Felicia” from this show since Epping spearheaded the ending of Sadie’s ex.

Speaking of which, we’re treated to a very interesting flashback with Chris Cooper this time out. The further we move from the premiere episode, the more incongruously antique these flashbacks seem, as if the future existed a long, long time ago. Jake’s hesitancy to even consider killing Oswald back when he’s first told of the Rabbit Hole seems positively quaint in an episode in which he nearly garrotes a man in broad daylight just to get information. If the past has given Jake Epping his great love and his great purpose, it has also made him harder and more cynical. The past giveth, and the past taketh away.

I’d like to take a moment to applaud Daniel Webber as Lee Harvey Oswald; Webber does a very good job of humanizing one of the most infamous players in American history without making the dramatic mistake of over-sympathizing him. Webber invites us to watch him, study him, maybe even like him…but his erratic behavior and his hair-trigger temper make it impossible to understand him. Webber’s vocal cadence and struggle to appear “normal” always feel a little false, like that of a monster trying on human skin. What’s interesting is that he begins this episode with the hints of a goatee, similar to the one Jake wore at the start of the story. Is this a hint that the enemy we see is, indeed, us?

We get a little bit more of the Deke Simmons/Miz Mimi story, which has been played with such awesome subtlety over the course of this show. That they are a couple has been hinted at since episode two, but only here do we get confirmation…and the sour realization that, by necessity of time and place, it’s a relationship with limits. “Deke and I have spent our lives next to one another,” she tells Jake in one of the episode’s emotional high points, “not with one another.” Not only are we brought home, once again, to the prejudices of the past, it also serves as a double echo to Jake’s failed, interracial marriage — an echo slammed home by visions of Christy Epping intermingled by those of Sadie Dunhill. “I love you, now and in the future,” Jake tells Sadie, but how can he be so sure when his first future marriage had ended so definitively?

Nitpick time: During Lee Harvey Oswald’s birthday party, we’re treated to the great television stand-in for “Happy Birthday,” “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” which has never, ever been sung at a real birthday party in the actual world. “Happy Birthday” finally went into public domain last month after over 120 years, but my guess is that Lee Harvey Oswald’s family wasn’t told. Also: Cherry Jones plays Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother in this series, and so far she’s spoken a total of five lines. We’ve got two episodes left, and they’re just begging for a major scene with one of our best actresses…although at this point, she’s going to have to compete with the flawless Sarah Gadon (Sadie), Lucy Fry (Marina Oswald), and Tonya Pinkins (Miz Mimi). Give us what we want, 11.22.63!

The final scene of the last episode saw Jake Epping watching over the love of his life as she lay in the hospital, unsure of what the future will hold. In this episode, the roles are reversed. The past is just going to keep pushing back. Despite Sadie’s repeated entreaties to Jake to tell her about the future, his evasions are the right answer. At this point, the future is anyone’s guess.

[Watch 11.22.63 on Hulu]

Kevin Quigley is an author whose novel I’m On Fire and short fiction collection This Terrestrial Hell are currently available as an e-book at fine digital establishments everywhere. He has also written several books on Stephen King, including The Chart of Darkness, Blood in Your Ears, and Ink in the Veins, all available from publisher Cemetery Dance.

[Photos: Hulu]