‘Too Old to Die Young’ Episode 4 Recap: The Apprentice

“People aren’t who you think they are. Or maybe they are, but they’re someone else too. Someone you don’t get to see.”

“That guy Greg…for many years now he’s been raping his daughter. He said that if she told anyone, he’d kill her mother. How do you feel about that?”

“As the world fractures, someone, someone has to be there to protect innocence.”

“Give me an F! Give me an A! Give me an S! Give me a C! Give me an -ISM! What’s that spell? What’s that spell?!?”

The first quote above is from Too Old to Die Young episode three. The subsequent quotes are all from “The Tower,” Too Old to Die Young episode four. Put them all together and…well, what’s that spell?

The fourth installment of Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s extended meditation on the evil that men do is one of the most unnerving episodes of television in recent memory. I’d put it up there with any highlight you’d care to name from The Terror, The Act, Channel Zero, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, and even the gut-churning war-crime climax of Game of Thrones.

Indeed, in its eruptions of absurd violence and terror from beneath the surface of quotidian life, it’s most reminiscent of the little asides from Twin Peaks Season Three—a berserk accountant machine-gunning experienced assassins to death over a parking space, say, or a hitman murdering his way through an office space with an icepick, or a crooked cop mocking the psychologically shattered mother of a man who committed suicide over war-induced PTSD. It stares square in the face of fascism, the ideology that lets little people feel big in their collective power to hurt other people, and doesn’t look away.

Plotwise, it’s the least eventful episode of the show to date: After observing the motives and methods of his new hitman mentor Viggo, whose hitlist consists solely of pedophiles, Detective Martin Jones decides killing people over petty cash for his boss Damian is ignoble and wrong. Now, like Viggo, he wants to target only the worst of the worst—and he wants to do so for free. “You want the blood, not the money,” Damian observes, impressed in his deadpan way. “Well, with such high moral standards, how can I say no?”

But morality doesn’t really enter into it, not in the way you and I might think of such things. Recall that Martin told Viggo he felt literally nothing but empty when he murdered the mother of children who were sleeping down the hall. Yes, he’s being nurtured by the more discerning murders carried out by the cult-like clique of Viggo and his handler Diana, but it’s not a conscience he’s developing. It’s an ethos. And you don’t have to be Walter Sobchak to understand what an ethos is worth, morally speaking.

In fact, you can simply be a member of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department homicide squad. (Have you ever seen a show with this deep a contempt for cops?) In what I’d contend is the episode’s most horrifying scene, murders or no murders, Martin’s goofball wise-cracking colleagues on the force all hoot and holler like 1984‘s Two Minutes’ Hate as their lieutenant—played by the incredible Hart Bochner, aka Ellis from Die Hard!!!—first does a lisping gay-stereotype voice, then leads them in a moment of silence in which his deep guttural breaths are somewhat less than silent, then has them cheer and scream for “FASCISM! FASCISM! FASCISM!”, then plays a little ukulele ditty about the Baby Jesus written by his mother. If you can find a better fictional depiction of the way reactionary movements blend cruelty, bias, kitsch, saccharine appeals to religion and the family, and of course the licensed lawlessness of state agents, I’m almost afraid to see it.

The episode is astute across the board when it comes to portraying what plagues us. Martin and Viggo constantly listen to a talk radio host ranting about the coming collapse of society into a second dark age—a broad-strokes depiction of how right-wing television, radio, and social media pipes paranoia into the brains of alienated white men across America on a daily basis.

Viggo is no slouch in the rant department either. As he and Martin look out upon Los Angeles’s rivers of headlights, the hitman describes the past 500 years of history, and then all of human history, as a journey from man’s natural savagery to the savaging of nature by man. We’ve reached the apex, he says, and now all that’s left is the inevitable, civilization-destroying fall as nature collapses in on us. This is the time in which people willing to do whatever it takes to protect the innocent are needed most, he argues. It’s a terrific justification for, say, becoming a serial killer of criminals—or, y’know, putting children in concentration camps along the southern border. Whichever!

Income inequality gets a vivid demonstration as well. One the one hand, an eight thousand dollar debt lands a man on Damian and Martin’s kill list, from which he only extracts himself at the cost of getting one of his fingers chopped off by his feudal-Japanese cosplaying colleagues (it’s a long story, I assume, because it never actually gets told). On the other hand—this one with all five fingers intact—Janey and her father have a jarringly, disarmingly naturalistic father-daughter chat in which he encourages her to reject her acceptance into Harvard and come work for him doing whatever she wants, with his hundreds of millions of dollars to back her up.

Speaking of Janey and her dad, there’s one more thing I want to do before we go—a quick trip through the daisy chain of feverish sexual dysfunction, blithe and sexualized violence, and idolatry of a meaningless notion of “innocence” that fuel fascism like kerosene.

Janey and her father discuss her mother’s suicide sincerely and with empathy, then embrace the way they must have when she was little. Minutes prior, the cop she’s been illegally fucking gives her joking homework help over the phone, while standing in a freezer with the corpse of a woman who’s been partially disrobed and stabbed to death. Earlier in the episode, he plays the sexual submissive, crawling across a motel-room floor to kneel at her feet. Right after that he murders a man who’s watching a movie called Night Tide, in which a character played by a young Dennis Hopper has a vision of the woman he murdered, played by the surrealist artist Marjorie Cameron, a close associate of the infamous magickal practitioner Aleister Crowley, occultist and rocket scientist Jack Parsons, and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. Later, that same cop attends a support group for PTSD victims, in which a man ruefully recounts how his reckless on-duty shooting of a 15-year-old girl has made him feel like he doesn’t belong on the planet anymore. Afterwards, he learns this man has been raping his daughter, and watches as Viggo stabs him to death. Eventually he visits his boss Damian at the ice-skating rink he owns, where Damian’s teenage daughter is practicing her routine. She falls, and he demurs when asked if he wants to help her up.

It’s a cruel world out there, you see.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream Too Old To Die Young Episode 4 ("The Tower") on Amazon Prime Video