‘Task’ Episode 5 Recap: “Vagrants”

I was wrong. After watching last week’s Task, I assumed the identity of the Dark Hearts mole in the FBI was a settled matter. It was Kath McGinty, lead agent Tom Brandis’s supervisor, not Grasso or Stover or Clinton, his charming young charges. That settled that, I thought.

Again, I was wrong. Yes, Kath is working for or with the Dark Hearts — but so is Grasso! I figured something was going on when Kath’s young underling said he’d found something in the personnel records for one of the three musketeers, but I figured it would have an innocent explanation but get used by Kath to jam up someone else to throw suspicion off of her. Nope! Grasso’s a grass for the bikers, working hand in glove with top lieutenant Jayson Wilkes to get this whole home invasion/armed robbery/missing fentanyl/missing kid mystery solved to the gang’s liking. 

I bring this up first simply to offer a mea culpa, not to suggest that this is the biggest “uh-oh” moment of the episode. The entire hour is pretty much “Oops! All Disasters!”

Take the side plot involving gang leader Perry’s investigation into the case. First, having traced the gun used in several homicides to his slain soldier Billy Prendergrast, he shows up unannounced at the Prendergrast home. He’s on his best behavior, he doesn’t do anything overtly menacing let alone actively violent, but 

Maeve, the only one home, is damn well aware of the threat this visit represents. It’s all she can do to hide Sam, the missing boy from the last house her uncle Robbie hit, before Perry happens to notice he’s there. She doesn’t even realize, though, that once he sees a photo on the fridge of Robbie with his friend Cliff Broward, who Perry abducted and murdered the night before, he’s learned all he needs to know.

He’s not done, either. Suspecting his protégé Jayson’s partner Eryn of treachery, he puts a tracking device on her car and finds her at the rendezvous spot where she’d met with Robbie so recently that Perry actually saw him driving away. A chase through the frigid water nearby ensues, and Perry is so preoccupied with the possibility that some nearby teenagers smoking weed in the woods will spot the commotion that he accidentally holds Eryn under the water for too long, killing her. 

So Perry has gotten rid of the informant within the Dark Hearts, but he’s made his adoptive son a widower and cost his kids their mother. Indeed, the prospect of Eryn running away and costing Jayson his kids was the whole reason Billy was murdered in the first place! In an attempt to solve a nagging problem, Perry has recreated it, and worsened it a thousand fold.

Throughout the episode, things get progressively worse for everyone you might be tempted to give a shit about. Eryn is killed. Maeve turns Sam and herself over to the FBI, where wouldn’t you guess who’s questioning her but Kath McGinty. Working on a tip from Shelley, the battered girlfriend of his erstwhile confederate Ray, Robbie does the exact wrong thing and tries to make a deal with Freddy Frias, the Dominican druglord who exists in an uneasy detente with the Dark Hearts. Freddy immediately rats out Robby to the bikers.

As Robby heads home to grab the stuff and make the final deal at a prearranged location out in the woods, who should show up at his house but Agent Tom Brandis, who tracked down the Prendergrasts with fingerprint evidence. Pretending to be a doddering old-timer on the age of retirement — it’s the same trick Gandalf pulled in The Two Towers when he begged the guards of Rohan not to part him from his magic wizard staff, which he passes off as his “walking stick” — he wheedles his way into Robbie’s house in search of answers. Finally Robbie has enough of the charade, holds him at gunpoint, and goes for a ride in his own car with Tom driving.

I’ve said before that if you know actor Tom Pelphrey, it’s likely because of a single scene from Ozark, in which he sits in the back seat of a car and delivers one of the most searing performances of a broken person you’re likely to see on TV. Smartly, writer-creator Brad Ingelsby recreates this dynamic. With Tom Brandis behind the wheel and Robbie in the back seat, gun at the ready, the two men listen to some country music on the radio and talk about all kinds of things — Brandis’s wife, his stint in the priesthood, what happens after we die, all kinds of dorm-room shit. And he’s magnificent during it, like a guy who got warped in from a world where all of this is actually happening.

Tom and his wife, it turns out, met at a hospital where he worked as a chaplain or grief counselor or something, and she worked as a patients’ rights advocate. Their clashes about whether dying patients should be told heaven awaits them or not led to the romance which led to the family which led to her eventual death. (Even while all this bad shit with Robby and Tom is going down, his daughters have a rapprochement, which is lovely to see.) 

“I’ve kidnapped the world’s most depressing human,” Robby says at one point, but with humor rather than frustration or malice. The fact is he likes Tom, digs his whole deal — just not enough to allow him to fuck up his master plan. 

Robbie likes Tom plenty enough not to kill him, however. After they park in an isolated location in the woods, Tom is sure the executioner’s bullet is soon to follow. But Robbie just wanted to a) take a pee break, and b)  drop Tom off close to a nearby beach where he could find help. By recalling that Tom had Sirius satellite radio, he’s able to have his team — which includes both Kath and Grasso, who tried and failed to stop Tom from getting to Robbie in the first place — meet up with him at Robbie’s rendezvous point for the fentanyl deal.

Unfortunately, so do the Dark Hearts, who’ve been tipped off to the meet by Freddy, who had no intention of being there at any time. So even as five FBI agents converge on Robbie, so does a whole hit squad of bikers, led by Perry and Jayson.

And that’s where we leave things. The other agents have split into two teams with one honest cop (Clinton and Stover) and one crooked one (Grasso and McGinty) on each. As they approach, Tom draws on Robbie, who draws back. It seems like he’s eyeing some other threat, maybe to him, maybe to Tom, maybe to both. For all we know the next episode begins with one or both of the main characters getting dropped by some combination of honest FBI agents, FBI agents who work for the Dark Hearts, and the actual Dark Hearts themselves. Hell of a cliffhanger!

I just want to state for the record that the least interesting thing you could possibly talk about regarding Task is the accents. Are they good, bad, indifferent? I honestly can’t imagine caring! Think of how many shows set in England or some fantasy equivalent thereof you watch, with actors from America and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and Ireland or just other regions of England on them. You think all of them are constantly nailing it? I doubt it! But if you made me list the 300 most interesting things in Game of Thrones, “Peter Dinklage’s accent was so-so” wouldn’t make the cut. Believe it or not, they’re not actually stabbing each other with swords either. Go with the flow a bit!

What is more interesting to talk about than that? Oh, I don’t know. Robbie insisting they listen to the radio during an abduction. Perry slamming the door in his girlfriend’s face to hide the wounds he incurred during the struggle with Eryn hard enough to give her a lump on the head. Director Jeremiah Zagar spotlighting some of the local flora and fauna like this is a season of The White Lotus set in Delaware County.

The grin on Freddy Frias’s lying face. The way Tom poorly fakes peeing by pouring the remnants of a half-drunk can of Pepsi into the toilet, one plop at a time. Robbie pulling over to piss in an echo of the earlier scene. The closeup on Eryn’s eyes as she sees Jayson come home covered in blood. Everyone, including the bad guys, seemingly genuinely interested in making sure Sam doesn’t get killed. Kath pigging out during the hunt for Tom, getting called on it, and claiming to be “an emotional eater.”

My favorite? Tom literally finding his way out of the woods and back to civilization. No, not civilization — community. What he finds at that beach are families and couples laughing, playing, enjoying nature and each other. When you abandon your calling for love, then that love is ended by your own adopted son, then you find solace in a bottle, then you’re called out of semi-retirement to find a missing kid, then you’re held at gunpoint fully expecting to die — when all that happens, imagine how hard the sight of a child laughing in her mother’s arms in the sunlight would hit. Because Task is the show it is, you don’t really have to imagine.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.