Staying true to its pulpy roots, Banshee finished a brutal first season with a blood and bullet filled season finale, teaming up the law enforcers of Banshee with the Lucas’s lawless friends for a rowdy little adventure out in the woods. But everything that’s toted as a big event is really just precursor – as a season finale, it isn’t really satisfying or conclusive as most would be. Knowing that there’s a second season, I suppose it’s not a big problem, but the various tentmarks and unfinished story lines in the final third wore on the logical side of my brain a bit.
For the most part, ‘A Mixture of Madness’ sticks to the show’s strengths: making Lucas’s life as depressing as possible, and not really taking anything else too seriously. The sheer amount of contrivances in the first half of the episode to bring all the pieces to the center of the table is commendable: from Kai showing up at the police office to kill Rabbit’s men, to Brock somehow jumping into whatever plan Sugar, Job, and Ana were going through with, right down to Job’s hidden tracker that leads them straight to Rabbit’s hole.
Although we all knew where it was heading, the plot sure does take its time getting there, allowing Rabbit the typical bad-guy-who-tortures-for-too long to get pinned down as the A-Team + Banshee P.D. took down every Ukranian in the joint trying to save Lucas, who’d traded his life for Max’s earlier in the episode, a scene after Rabbit tried to blow him to pieces (saying “I know I’m already dead”, and remembering when, eight years ago, Rabbit sent a psychologist to fuck with his head). There’s a long shootout, Ana shoots Rabbit in the chest a few times, and they pick up a broken, stabbed Lucas and head home.
It’s pretty much what we expected – and it plays out in entertaining fashion, thanks to the always-terrific work with the cinematography and choreographing of every fight/shooting scene. But once it’s over, it turns out it’s not really over at all: Rabbit gets away in the end, gone with the wind to fight another day. I’m not sure what the advantages are to this – keeping a Big Baddie around like Rabbit can only lead to diminishing returns: he’s not going to be interesting when he returns to get revenge for the revenge that went wrong when his daughter finally took revenge on the revenge he was inflicting on Lucas. For one season, Rabbit’s somewhat thin dimensions as a character worked. Stretched out into a second season, there doesn’t seem to be much more compelling material left with him. He’ll come back next season, angrier than ever and with Ana and Kai added to his kill list – which isn’t really an exciting proposition.
The rest of the episode’s final third is largely spent setting up plot lines for next season. After Burton murders someone trying to kill Kai (in a signature scene of muscle-slashing, stabbing, and finger amputating by wire), Kai decides to punish Alex and his sister Nola by blowing up the half-built casino to teach him a lesson. But wait – the underdeveloped mayor character is sitting in it, reflecting on his young looks and inability to take down Proctor! In other words, get ready for an election in season two, because there’s a new spot at the head of the town’s political table (and one more widow).
It’s a bit odd, though – it feels like all the first season was for Kai and Alex’s showdown was set-up. They brought Nola into town for a few episodes (she decides to “hang around”, spoiling the already-leaked news that she was promoted to regular next season), Kai and Alex flexed a few muscles, and Kai blew up a building with a mayor in it. Kai’s not going to kill Alex “for now”, because like Rabbit, everything that happened this season was apparently a big tease.
The most important new plot thread of course, is the body of Lucas Hood that the Moody boys (who else?) stumble upon while hunting in the woods. This brings a inquisitive Xavier Duke to the scene, who calls in a “special investigator” (new character next season!) and has lots of long looks into the distance, possibly theorizing how many times he wants to smack his mother for giving him that name (… or how ‘Lucas’ connects to it all, probably a better option). Again, all of this is just a big stinking tease: the last shot of the season (in the post-credits screen) is Lucas’s son watching a YouTube video of “Lucas” beating the shit out of the MMA fighter from earlier in the season – and it ends there, the last line of Banshee in 2013 being “Fuck me.”
Banshee‘s first season certainly was an enjoyable one – despite its indulgence in boobs and blood, it managed to carve out a little niche of pulpy drama powered by great performances across the main cast. And ‘A Mixture of Madness’ is a perfectly enjoyable episode, but one that feels highly anti-climatic for the amount of building it did to the events of this episode. I’m willing to forgive the plot contrivances to reach the conclusion, but there isn’t much of a conclusion – and it leaves most of Banshee‘s first season feeling like pre-cursor to the actual story, an extended prologue that presents all of its story lines, but stops them halfway into the ending, in order to prolong things for the future.
On some level, this is acceptable – there was too much to wrap up in one episode, even one with a 57-minute running time. But there’s no reason that Rabbit should live through the season, nor was the rivalry between Kai and Alex ever compelling or complex enough (beyond a dramatic pissing match) to make me yearn for another season of material surrounding it. There are certainly a lot of suggestions that the status quo is changing: Ana’s family moves out, Siobahn takes a liking to Lucas, and the countdown to Lucas being revealed as a phony has begun. But even with that, it doesn’t feel like it’s changing much at all: Rabbit’s still going to hunt them, the Hood kid is still looking for his dad, and Alex and Kai are going to take bloody swings at each all next season. As a regular episode of Banshee, ‘A Mixture of Madness’ is a fine episode, tautly shot and plotted with purpose – but as a season finale, it’s a bit empty in its conclusion, leaving the same story avenues open without many compelling reasons to do so.
Grade: B
Season Grade: B
Other thoughts/observations:
– Lucas shrinks the shrink in the first scene, and then punches her face in later on. A gentleman and a good patient, this one is not.
– Siobahn: “What would Hood do?” Brock stops to think, as if the answer isn’t “something stupid and wreckless.”
– the guy getting shot in the head as he’s about to shoot a rocket launcher, causing him to shoot the guy next to him, is the kind of over-the-top batshit crazy action that Banshee‘s made its trademark: it’s totally unnecessary, but enjoyable as hell.
– Lucas’s attitude while getting tortured is great, telling Rabbit (I’m paraphrasing) “why don’t you shut the fuck up, and stop whining about love and shit.”
– speaking of Lucas being tortured, does anyone still feeling anything when Lucas gets his face bashed in? At this rate, season five is going to be about his premature Parkinson’s and on-setting Alzheimer’s. Holy shit does that guy’s head take a beating.
– the incest story line awaiting us next season between Kai and Rebecca is NOT something I’m looking forward to.
– with the casino blown up, looks like Hood and Sugar will have to wait awhile to rip it off. Either that, or they’re just dropping that story line.
– Nola points out the obvious when Alex gets pissed that Kai’s men leave his goon’s head on his front lawn: trying to kill a man in his own wine cellar throws privacy right out the window.
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