Did Hulu’s ‘Chance’ Just Kill Off Its Most Captivating Character?

The battle between good and evil, well, the battle between morally ambiguous and evil, just got a bit more intense.

Last night’s episode of Hulu’s psychological-thriller Chance ended with a bit of a cliffhanger as Hugh Laurie’s Dr. Eldon Chance found his friend and partner in vigilante justice, Ethan Suplee’s character D, lying face down, unconscious after an apparent attack. Earlier in the episode, Chance and D struck back against the source of their wrath, the villainous crooked cop Raymond Blackstone (Paul Adelstein), leaving Blackstone injured and one of his men dead. The fact that Chance had just thwarted an obvious attempt on his own life prior to finding his unconscious friend leads us to believe that Blackstone may have already seized his revenge by killing D.

Which would be a monumental mistake because D is by far the most captivating character on Chance.

Now don’t get me wrong, Dr. Chance’s slow decent into mental and physical calamity has been riveting, but Ethan Suplee’s serene yet distressing portrayal of D has been the best work of his career — and, yes, I’m counting his scene-stealing performance as “Man who can’t see a Magic Eyes sailboat” in Mallrats.

Suplee is the poet laureate of the seedy San Francisco underground. Armed with a philosophical mind that belies his steely darkness, D speaks in vague, ominous remarks and confounding riddles. Whereas those of us who don’t spend their day-to-day on the fringe of society use weather or the news of the day for small talk, D adds some much-needed levity to the series by conversing like he’s reciting dialogue from a dog-eared copy of a hardboiled detective noir with phrases like “Let’s see what other nuggets we can chisel out of this day” and communicating in metaphors about grilled cheese sandwiches.

“I’m a medical professional. I’m not some Raymond Chandler character,” Laurie’s Chance said in a recent episode, not comprehending the fact that his recent tailspin of poor decision making has irrevocably altered his once tranquil existence.

Suplee’s absorbing performance and obvious chemistry with Laurie leads me to believe that D isn’t going anywhere, at least not yet.

One of the themes of the series is how good intentions can quickly transform into fatal consequences. During episode four, D explained the Frozen Lake metaphor to Chance — where sometimes there’s something you want so badly that, despite logic, you’ll go out to the center of the lake where the ice is thinnest to obtain it. D believes that Jaclyn (Gretchen Mol) is Chance’s Frozen Lake and that his lack of rational thinking as far as she’s concerned could eventually lead to his downfall.

D’s inherent need for vigilante justice could very well be his Frozen Lake, but let’s just hope that the ice holds until the next episode of Chance.

[Watch Chance on Hulu]