'Ray Donovan': The Deal Went Down

This Sunday’s Ray Donovan was a pivotal episode for the season, bringing a number of storylines to a head: We learned more about the strained father-daughter relationship between Andrew Finney (Ian McShane) and Paige Finney (Katie Holmes); Ray attempted to reconcile with Abby; Terry’s learned he could not put his recent prison past behind him; and Bunchy made a move on his wrestling crush. Warning: Spoilers follow for this week’s episode of Ray Donovan.

The strong third season has been notably adept at keeping us involved with very disparate storylines, subplots that rarely find any of the main cast interacting with each other. Another show could have done a whole hour on Bunchy’s attempt to woo Teresa, the wrestler who’s helped him channel his stunted sexual growth via a frisky submissive-dominant relationship. His proposal to her was sweet, but the hour had other things on its mind.

Terry feared retribution from the Aryan brotherhood that threatened him in prison, when he finds the same kind of barbell weight he used as a weapon in the slammer placed significantly on his desk at the Fite Club. But his fear seems to have been misplaced — that Bunchy, using club equipment as a paperweight!

But the heart of the episode resided in the deal Paige wanted to make to buy that NFL team — the deal that, if it went through, would snag Ray three percent of the team ownership. Ray rarely pins his hopes on anything — he’s a cynic who doesn’t believe much in hope — but this time, he was hoping to re-make his own business model and save his marriage in the bargain. You kinda knew it wasn’t going to happen, but thanks to the script from Michael Tolkin, you probably didn’t see how it would fail.

When the governor Finney has bribed fails to win reelection, the football deal falls through, but not before Paige hands over something valuable to leverage her father into accepting the football-deal terms: “a love letter… from my father to my husband… a break-up letter,” Paige tells Ray. “That was the deal: the letter for the team.”

Now, everything’s a mess — and it’s hard to see where the Finney plot goes from here. Andrew Finney no longer trusts Ray, and thus his contract with Donovan would seem to be permanently frayed; Paige no longer has any sway with her father or power to accrue; Ray can’t stay with the Finneys and he’ll have a hard time getting the old gang together again. (Although you really want to see him working with Lena again, after the episode’s fun scene of her picking up a victim and telling him her name is Debbie Harry — the tough-guy dialogue about the lead singer of Blondie was quietly hilarious.)

I don’t know where the show goes from here, which is a measure of how surprising and swift Ray Donovan has gotten.

Ray Donovan airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on Showtime.