‘Big Sky’ Season 2 Episode 13: Travis Stone, Man of Many Secrets

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again about Big Sky: Just when you think someone is dead, they come roaring back to life (or come back as their only-slightly-less-evil twin). So each week, as I watch the show just like you all do one episode at a time, I call it like I see it, and last week, what I saw was Scarlet being stabbed to death with a scalpel, and Wolf Legarski getting shot, but not fatally.

This week, Scarlet is alive (or at least, her body is still floating around somewhere) and Wolf is the one who’s definitively dead. After last week’s big climax which saw Ronald (and Scarlet, we thought) getting killed, Cassie getting stabbed, and Wolf and Lindor both getting shot (not to mention T-Lock also getting killed by Bob, who’s also now on the run), it seemed as though the ballad of Wolf and Ronald was concluding, but we were wrong.

Everyone wants to know where Scarlet is, even the EMT who’s riding in Wolf’s ambulance. But he’s not just any EMT, he and Wolf appear to have a relationship because he’s in the sex trafficking syndicate that Ronald and Rick Legarski were a part of, and he knows about Wolf’s plan to try and rehabilitate Ronald. Now that that plan has failed, well, Wolf has to pay, and this EMT suffocates him with a plastic bag. This is a very dense and dramatic pre-credits scene for Big Sky!

Max, Harper, Madison, and Bridger, the teens at the center of this season’s entire mess, meet up now that their whole ordeal is resolved. Madison tells the gang that their parents are sending her and Bridger away to boarding school, so Max extends her arms for a group hug. Aww. It’s the end of a traumatic era that will haunt them all forever and led to countless murders! Luv you guyz!

Over at Illegal Narcotics, Inc, Tanya is explaining the finely-oiled machine she’s set up to crank out thousands of synthetic pills every day to Ren and Jag who are trés impressed. The siblings then discuss the mysterious Alicia, their dad’s girlfriend who they’re investigating because something is definitely suspicious about her, but so far they’ve turned up nothing. They’re interrupted when Travis shows up with the big bag of cash he stole from the crime scene last week, and he presents it to Ren. They had their little flirtation, and between that and Travis secretly stealing that money, we’re still not sure which angle he’s playing right now. (If his intentions were pure and he was still on the right side of the law, couldn’t he have told Jenny about it and tagged the money or something? All I know about any of this is from a class I took called “Watching The Wire 101.”)

Later, Ren takes Alicia out for huckleberry pie at the diner, because rather than privately investigate her, she thinks it’s just easier to be forthcoming with Alicia. Alicia gives Ren some backstory: she’s an accountant who worked for Verr and they started a relationship, but she also hints that maybe Verr is keen to move the family business to Montana because there’s trouble brewing in Canada. Then, she cryptically tells Ren, “You do know that we don’t have to do this, right? I like to think us girls could find a better way.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Ren says. Uh, same.

“I think you do,” Alicia responds before leaving the diner. What is she talking about?!

While Jenny reports back to Sheriff Tubb about the events of last episode, they get a call letting them know that her partner, Popernack, has found Bob’s hideout where he has been stashing Max and her mother Rachel. When Jenny shows up, she and Popernack enter the home and find nothing but some old tools and a mannequin. The officers inside do what any good officers do, and start tampering with the dummy. That’s what all crime scene evidence is for, right, to have fun with it? Jenny realizes the mannequin is rigged and screams “BOMB!” just before it detonates. Popernack is injured and the other two officers are killed instantly by shrapnel. (Unless they’re not, because as I said, this show revives anyone it wants to.)

Our two big drug dealers in town, Dietrich and Verr, meet up (but not before Travis warns Dietrich that the meeting might be a trap). Dietrich had been one of Verr’s distributors, before the bags of drugs and money disappeared. Dietrich tells him that he’s still loyal to Verr, that it had been a rogue employee responsible for stealing the loot. Verr is unmoved, and tells his son Jag to “get his hands dirty” and handle Dietrich. He watches as Jag beats the crap out of Dietrich, and then weirdly, Verr hands Dietrich the bag of money that Travis just gave Ren, saying it’s severance pay. We’ve spent this whole season in search of this bag, with everyone claiming its theirs, and now he just hands it over?! Does not compute. When Ren sees Jag, he is visibly shaken at what he’s done to Dietrich. I mean, he didn’t kill him, why is he so upset? This is a guy whose bodyguard shot and killed an innocent karate sensei and showed no remorse, why does punching Dietrich a few times rattle him? This also does not compute.

Tanya gets two truck drivers ready to make their first drug delivery for her, but one of them, Jameson, doesn’t like being told what to do by Tanya (and Travis, who’s also there). Travis tells Tanya that tough guys like Jameson who speak out of turn are a danger to the operation, so Tanya says she’ll follow his truck as it makes its delivery to make sure nothing happens. She doesn’t realize Bob is spying on the drivers, watching their every move. On the road, Jameson stops the truck because Bob has set up a roadblock in the form of a carousel horse that’s set on fire (if there’s symbolism here, it’s lost on me), and when Jameson gets out of the truck to look, with Tanya watching him, Bob shoots him dead, takes his keys, and steals the truck. Tanya scurries away terrified, and back at the drug ranch, when she tells Ren about losing the shipment, Ren goes ballistic.

Jenny is sent to investigate Jameson’s death and she finds Travis who tells her Jameson was driving one of Ren’s trucks. Jenny assumes Dietrich was involved so she and Travis go to the Boot Heel find him and ask. Dietrich confirms that it’s all Bob’s doing, and he’s acting alone. But as soon as Jenny and Travis leave, guess who pops out from behind the bar? BOB! Dietrich, full of revenge for the Bhullers, tells Bob, “Let’s go sell some drugs!” Except that Dietrich doesn’t sell drugs with Bob, he sets him up. He calls the Bhullers, and they show up and kidnap Bob, and the Bhuller’s henchman, Dhruv, tells Dietrich, “Mr. Bhuller thanks you. We’ll be in touch.”

At the Bhuller’s, Donno prepares to give Bob a deadly acid bath and go full Breaking Bad, dissolving his body into goo, and as a last ditch effort to save his life, Bob reveals to Ren that Travis is a cop, a mole in her operation.

Jenny’s starting to get suspicious of Travis lately. When she visits a recovering Popernack in the hospital, he suggests she watch her back around Travis, and later, she and Travis tell Sheriff Tubb that they have eyes on Dietrich, and Travis’s shiftiness when Tubb questions why Travis hasn’t arrested the Bullers raises an eyebrow. No one can figure out where Travis’s loyalty lies. And after what Bob’s told Ren, she is especially keen to figure it out. She summons him to her house at the very same moment that Travis’s handler with the state police, Lila Dodge, show up to Jenny’s office to have an important conversation about Travis.

“What did Travis tell you about the Bhullers?” Dodge asks Jenny. “He told me that they killed his partner. That the case was personal. Is that not true?”

“The personal part is,” Dodge says, showing Jenny a picture of a woman who, it turns out, was Verr Bhuller’s mistress-turned-informant and Travis fell in love with her. When Verr found out she flipped, she disappeared without a trace and is assumed dead.

Over at Ren’s, Travis shows up not realizing he’s walking into a setup. Bob is there eating a nice juicy steak, cutting into it with a nice, sharp steak knife. Ren asks Travis if he’s a cop and he does a “who you gonna believe, me or Bob?” thing, and Ren continues to ask, is he a cop of not?

“Would a cop do this?” Travis asks, grabbing Bob’s steak knife and stabbing him in the neck, blood spurting all over the table. I mean, yeah, I’ve seen the news and I’m pretty sure a cop would, but for the sake of this scene, point taken.

And that leaves us still with the burning question, what is Travis getting at?!

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.