‘Bloodline’ Recap, Season 2 Finale: Of All the People in the World

The one question we find ourselves asking after watching “Part 23,” the season finale of Bloodline, is “why now?”

Why does Eva choose today to reveal to Sally that Robert (Sam Shepard, making an encore appearance) visited Miami more than once to visit Danny? He has a late afternoon chat in Danny’s restaurant – and is there anything more gorgeous than a restaurant at the magic hour, before the guests arrive, sun warming the white tablecloths, every place setting just so? He sits back with the same dry, limp reserve we’ve always recognized in him, a reserve that we now know holds unimaginable depths of coldness, and pronounces his Solomonic judgment: if Danny wanted money for the restaurant, it would come out of Eva’s allowance for Nolan.

This late revelation makes some sense. Until she spent a few weeks sniffing around Islamorada, Eva didn’t know how much Robert kept secret from Sally, or how much Sally regretted her cold rejection of Danny. So she holds onto it until Sally pries Danny’s history with Ozzy out of her – how Danny robbed a pharmacy with Ozzy because Robert wouldn’t lend him the money.

Next question: why is Eric O’Bannon turning himself in now?

He’s carried this secret with him for the entire season – the seahorse necklace, proof that John met Danny the morning after the Red Reef Motel incident. He spent a few episodes hiding from Wayne Lowry’s housecleaning, but that passed eventually. So why put himself behind a microphone, or on the other end of John Rayburn’s steely glare, and offer this up now? Why not three weeks ago, or never?

I haven’t devoted too much space to Jamie McShane’s excellent performance this season. He portrays Eric with just the right amount of sullen resentment: shrugging and rolling his eyes as the cops question him again, sneering at the Rayburns, being kicked out of his sister’s house with mute despondence. He’s the not-quite-beautiful loser, the man who no longer expects more out of life than a couple beers and maybe a bump of coke on the weekend.

So what has prompted Eric to throw that all away and play hero? Danny was a friend, sure. But, as John points out in a pivotal scene, that friendship didn’t hinge on much besides running a few petty schemes, kicking back some brews, and making fun of Danny’s family. Maybe that was enough. But it still sits uneasy with me that a man who’s spent his entire life ducking trouble would stand up and point the finger at the biggest family in town.

Speaking of: why doesn’t John shoot Eric when he has the chance?

This is the episode where the investigation into John – and, consequently, Meg and Kevin – kicks into its highest gear. With Eric’s testimony, Marco has grounds to investigate Cardozo Citrus’s surveillance cameras. John already knows that those cameras will yield annoyingly crisp images of Danny driving to Indian Key (but not returning) and John, Meg, and Kevin driving to and from. When he sees Ozzy threaten Eric, the perfect plan unfolds: steal Ozzy’s gun from his car, kidnap Eric, and kill him. One scumbag offs another – case closed!

But, when John has Eric at gunpoint, he can’t quite pull the trigger.

What’s stopping him? John has positioned himself for years as the one who takes care of the family – the one with the will, unlike Meg, and the brains, unlike Kevin. He’s already descended further into antiheroism this season, leaking Marco’s role in the Aguirre coverup to stymie him with Internal Affairs. Going from the hotblooded murder of Danny to the coldblooded murder of Danny’s friend is a big step, yes, but it’s a plausible one.

And yet John lowers the gun and walks away. “You tell your fucking story.” The only plausible justification is that John no longer has a family worth fighting for. Diana couldn’t handle knowing John’s duplicity as well as she thought she could; she throws him out of the house early in the episode. Meg and Kevin turn on him, insisting that he’s solely responsible for Danny’s death. “This is on you, John.” So even if John did shoot Eric and the investigation collapsed, what would he go home to – a distant wife, resentful siblings, and a mother who (as we see in the final moments) knows what monsters she’s raised?

And the last, big mystery of the episode: Kevin.

Oh, Kevin.

Kev, Kev, Kev, Kev, Kev.

This entire turn of events, tragic and dramatic as it is, hinges on a lot of inexplicable behavior.

Such as: why is Meg so scared of Marco that she can’t face him? When Kevin insists on talking to Marco, why doesn’t Meg warn him that all Kevin can do is implicate himself further in “obstruction of evidence,” as he hilariously calls it? Since Meg’s the one who dropped Kevin at Marco’s house, how will Kevin get away from the scene of the crime (if he does)?

It doesn’t take much imagination to guess how things will play out in the next few hours. Kevin overheard Marco set a rendezvous with Eric, so it won’t be hard for him to show up there, nab Eric, and add another corpse to the pile. Ozzy’s still out there as a loose thread, but Ruis has snagged him at Roy Gilbert’s behest. We don’t see much of Roy this episode, aside from him listening to Danny’s last tape, formerly in Wayne Lowry’s possession. And the episode ends with Meg apparently confessing everything to her mother.

With all those threads up in the air, this feels less like a season finale than a season midpoint. There’s a time-honored practice of ending a season on a cliffhanger, and I get that, but Part 23 resolves absolutely nothing. The investigation won’t end with Marco Diaz’s death; it’s about to get kicked into overdrive. Ozzy Delveccio, who talked a much bigger game than he merited, hasn’t gone away. Nolan’s learned why his father abandoned him, but hasn’t done anything with the knowledge but mope. Kevin’s either about to become Monroe County’s shortest-lived fugitive or its shakiest criminal mastermind. And John still has a sheriff’s campaign to resign from.

The episode, and the season, ends with John in his truck, leaving the Keys. Danny’s ghost rides shotgun. “Yeah, fuck it,” Danny says, “just drive.” It’s hard not to read that as a mission statement for this season. It doesn’t matter what corners the characters get backed into, or what storylines remain unresolved, or who does what for what reason. Just point the car in a new direction and keep going.

Miscellanea

• This entire season, they’ve gone back and forth on whether it’s the “Red Reef Inn” or the “Red Reef Motel.” The former sounds too much like a certain national chain we won’t admit to staying at, but I thought that was the gag: that it was a kitschy local knockoff, coasting off of faux name recognition. Figure it out, Islamorada!
• RIP Jacinda Barrett’s Southern accent.
• What sort of dip you think John will take in the polls after his brother is arrested for murdering a cop? I say twenty points but he rebounds.
• This being Florida, I’ll bet you see a lot of dolphin-statue related slayings. First time we got a wide enough shot to include that statue, any number of Biscayne cops probably sucked in their teeth and nodded.
• Kevin’s probably not showing up for work tomorrow, which means it’ll just be Lil Jake and Ruis puttering around the boatyard. There’s Season 10 of The Office for you.
• Did Roy nab Ozzy to silence a potential threat to his candidate? To find out what Ozzy knew for future leverage over John? To protect Ozzy from John doing something that might tank his campaign? We don’t know.
• Somewhere the proprietor of Cardozo Citrus and that greedy pawn shop owner are sitting down over a Corona, violently agreeing on how little you can trust the government. And given what we’ve seen of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department, can you say they’re wrong?
• Odds of Marco’s ghost haunting Kevin next season: 8 to 1.

[Watch Bloodline on Netflix]

John Perich (@perich) lives and writes in the Boston area. When he’s not scrutinizing pop culture at Overthinking It, he blogs at his own site, Periscope Depth. His latest crime thriller, Too Late to Run, is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers.