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White Lines

This is the episode of White Lines where it gets nasty.

Set on the day of Zoe’s trial for that high-speed chase and Anna’s wedding to her awful boyfriend George, the whole hour feels like one extended Festivus airing of grievances. Grudges big and small, old and new, get a fresh airing. There are a lot of arguments. One of them ends with a dead body.

But we’ll start with those that don’t. First and foremost, there’s Zoe. The night before her trial she’s living la vida loca with her friend Marcus and his new girlfriend Kika, but she makes the mistake of calling up her daughter back in Manchester while high. The call, predictably, is a disaster; her husband Mike jumps on and announces his plans for a divorce, and to seek full custody of their kid.

Zoe never says so outright, but it’s clear she blames Boxer for this turn of fortune. Even when he’s lying his ass off about her mental instability in order to help her out in her trial, she’s furious with him. It’s easier for her to blame him than herself, after all.

Meanwhile, at the Calafats, Marcus is fitting right in, cooking a huge family dinner as his kids pay a visit. Then Anna shows up to whisk them away to get their hair styled for the wedding, at which point her daughter Tanit lays into her, Mike-style. She doesn’t want to come to the wedding because she doesn’t like Anna’s fiancé George, and believes, correctly I’d say, that he doesn’t like her and her sister either. Certainly the joyless sex Anna and George have when she arrives back home—interrupted by her thoughts of Marcus and followed up by him blithely saying he doesn’t love her because “I’m not a teenager”—is an indicator that maybe Anna’s not that nuts about the guy either.

But Anna has other things on her mind as well, namely her own infidelity on the very night she and Marcus got married, with Axel presiding. After the ceremony, she deliberately seduced Axel, leading to yet another round of hot but basically mirthless sex. Axel picks a fight with Marcus later that night, calling him a leech and a passenger, coasting off Axel’s superior fame and talent. It’s as if he needs to justify to himself why he violated his friend’s trust; what better way than to denigrate the very idea that he’s truly his friend at all. The ensuing fistfight is ugly and one-sided, with Axel cackling as Marcus pounds away at his face and clocks him with bottles of liquor and platefuls of coke.

Back in the present, Oriol has turned once again to guru David for help with his psychological problems. This time, the pair trip on mescaline, the idea being that Oriol can confront and eliminate the toxic parts of his personality. Instead he winds up getting hunted down and kidnapped by Clint in full SWAT gear; Oriol sees him as a huge gorilla, and gets horribly tangled in barbed wire as he runs for his life.

And then poor Oriol—who almost certainly did not kill Axel Collins—winds up becoming a killer anyway. Regaining consciousness in the bathroom in Clint’s camper, he escapes his bonds and a struggle ensues, causing the car to plow straight into a load of timber. We cut away at the moment of the crash, but when we return, there’s a log smashed right through the window and into Clint’s head. (Insert “logging off” pun here.)

White Lines

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Amid all the fireworks and bloodshed there are quiet character moments I thought played very well. I like the well-meaning but condescending way Conchita gives Kika’s relationship with the “stoner in flip-flops,” Marcus, her blessing. I also love the bond between Andreu and Marcus, an easy rapport that leads to the older man telling Marcus about his vendetta with Martínez. To be continued, I’m sure.

With one episode in the season remaining, it’s worth taking stock of how far we’ve come. The jumpy timeframe and the rapidity with which these characters form and break bonds makes it easy to forget that Boxer brutally murdered two guys a few days ago, and that Zoe and Marcus are both involved in the cover up. Instead, the show focuses on their personal growth journeys, their sex lives, the question of whether they’re in love and if so who with. I can’t quite square that with the same people who hauled dead bodies out of the water and buried them in a shallow grave, you know? It seems like that would take precedence in their psychological landscape.

For that matter, it seems like Axel Collins’s murder would remain their number one concern, but everyone has treated the surfacing of his corpse like an opportunity to party. But maybe that’s the show’s message. Maybe tragedy drives us to find ways to relieve our minds of that burden. Or maybe it’s just that without the sex scenes and dance scenes and fistfights you wouldn’t have much of a show. Either way, White Lines has one hour left in this season to square everything away. Buckle up—it’s gonna be a rough ride.