'Banshee': Coming To An End Unexpectedly
You know how much I love Banshee, and I would never, ever say anything to discourage you from watching it if you’re not hooked on it already. But as of Friday night’s episode, we were now in the second week of Eliza Dushku’s guest-star turn as FBI Agent Dawson, and more than halfway through the series’ short, eight-episode final season, and the different, more tamped-down tone is becoming genuinely curious.
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Sure, it was fun to see Dushku and Antony Starr’s Hood punch out a small denizen of S&M-club attackers, and even better when Dawson held up a bottle and two glasses and said, “I can’t drink all this Scotch by myself” only to have Hood say to her, “Yeah, I think we both know that’s not true.” And I know I, and you, felt a little thrill when Job shaved off his Torture Whiskers to return to his shaved beauty.
But the series is going off in all sorts of directions that seem to be dictating abrupt twists and turns, some of which aren’t paying off entirely satisfactorily. Right from the start of this episode: Don’t you think Dawson would have seen the flames and/or smelled the smoke from Hood’s burning shack when she dropped him off? I know Banshee wanted to get Hood alone with Proctor so the latter could mutter his threat one-on-one, but it seemed a little too contrived.
And the abrupt killing of Randall Watts by Calvin — ice-pick into neck — would have been Banshee-fantastic… if it had occurred about four or five episodes into a 10-episode season. As it was, I felt a little cheated: The show was setting up Randall to be a terrific Big Bad, but felt it necessary to dispose of him quickly because — well, why? So that Calvin can run the Aryan Brotherhood in a more principled way? I can only hope that Frederick Weller’s horned serial killer gets murdered just as quickly, preferably next week.
Well, enough grousing. There was good stuff here, for sure. The awful torso-pull that killed Pony Joe was as crazy-gruesome as you’d want from Banshee. The dialogue remains rock-solid hard-boiled, to mix clichés in a way no Banshee writer does. And kudos to whoever suggested the concluding music tag: You can’t go wrong with Richard Thompson’s doom-laden “Wall of Death.”
Banshee airs Friday nights at 10 p.m. on Cinemax.
