‘Task’ episode 1 recap: men on struggle street

IN TYPICAL PRESTIGE crime drama form, a person has died. Or people, rather, as we drop in on Brad Ingelsby’s new HBO limited series Task on the cusp of a new federal operation.

Four years after his hit Mare of Easttown starring Kate Winslet, the American screenwriter has enlisted Mark Ruffalo to lead a charge of fresh-faced FBI agents to investigate a string of drug house invasions. As for the person leading the invasions, Tom Pelphery plays working single father Robbie. What’s revealed over the next seven episodes until the finale on October 19, less cat-and-mouse and more portraits of two sides of the same coin.

Below, we recap the table setting of Task‘s premiere.

A single dad who works two jobs, who loves his kids and never stops

If we were to co-opt the Reba McEntire 2001 hit, ‘I’m A Survivor’, Robbie is a single father who works two jobs, who indeed loves his kids and, to his targets, never stops. By day, he’s a garbage man with his buddy, Cliff (Raúl Castillo), whom Robbie’s kids sweetly call Uncle Trash. But by night, unbeknownst to his family, he and Uncle Trash scope out drug houses around town and invade them when the time is right. There’s a lot to set up in the premiere to make Pelphery’s character a wholesome contrast to Ruffalo’s beleaguered Tom Brandis (more on that later).

Robbie’s tough living situation

His wife, Karen, left him a year ago. The reason why is yet to be discussed on-screen, but a photo of Robbie wearing a jail beige set and kissing his new baby suggests Karen had their children while he was in prison. (Not that his barbed wire tattoo wrapped around his bicep gave it away.) She also kicked him out. As we meet him in the present, he’s staying with Maeve (Emilia Jones), his 21-year-old niece and with whom he argues over property ownership rights since the house belonged to his late older brother, Billy, Maeve’s father. Robbie regales his children with stories of his and Billy’s youth for bedtime.

In his downtime, Robbie likes to jump on CupidsPlan.com (shirtless in bed, we’d like to add) or tries out the online dating scene, as he tells Cliff. The single father feels he’s ready to share his life with someone again, someone to swing on a hammock with on the private Canadian island he’s been fantasising about buying. Pelphery, who hit his stride in a string of successful Netflix-produced crime series, has the soft eyes that can easily sharpen with a wince to play out the character’s moral duplicity. With a glimmer in his eye, Robbie has dreams.

Robbie’s night job

As for his other occupation, the garbage-collection job is his cover for him and Cliff to drive by the same sketchy house and pick up a bag full of guns, ammunition, and new drug houses for assignment. The latest house on their radar is the Murdoch place, which they’ve been staking out for a couple of weeks through the bushes. Judging by the house’s two stories, it requires a three-person job, so they bring pink-haired Peaches (Owen Teague) into the mix. Incentivised now that Peach-boy is engaged to the girl he’s been seeing for a month, this new job will cover the wedding.

In true premiere cliffhanger form, the raid goes awry. The trio don rubber masks – Robbie as the skull, Cliff as the devil, Peaches as the wolf – as they wake up a bearded man and red-haired woman demanding their money. The rumblings of a motorcycle draw into the driveway, sending the trio into a panic. You’re so fucked, the man and woman say. As Tom is brought on to investigate the drug house raids, the pattern suggests ties with the town’s biker gang, the Dark Hearts. (A unimaginative name, by the way.)

Robbie has a new son?

A shootout ensues as Peaches is the first one down. The spraying bullets prove how inexperienced Cliff and Robbie are; they try to leave no bodies at the scene. As the smoke settles, the two left standing find a Nike duffle full of cash. Mission accomplished, it seemed, minus Peaches. Also on their hands is now an orphaned boy who was sleeping in a room downstairs. The bullets were fireworks, said the men. They are “friends” of his parents. If the show were a comedy, this could be a Baby’s Day Out situation as they take the boy back to Robbie’s.

Get-ready-with-me, FBI edition

Not to downplay the show’s themes, but Tom Brandis must watch Ashton Hall. He wakes himself up every morning with a revitalising facial ice bath in his sink, before heading off for work at the FBI. His latest assignment? Not in the field, but setting up for an Open Day type convention to attract recruits. The sedentary assignment is starting to show in (what I discern to be) the padded body suit Ruffalo wears under those tight shirts. At home, Tom unwinds by tending to his tomato garden and birdwatching. (He even has an app on his phone that Shazams birdsongs – I need that.) It’s a connection to nature he shares with Robbie, who loves cliff-diving in the hours between his two jobs.

Tom’s past

Tom lives with his reclusive teenage daughter, Emily, (Sylvia Dionicio) who part-times at an ice-cream parlour. She’s a frequent topic of conversation with Tom’s lawyer, who’s hoping she’ll write a character statement in support of her brother, Ethan, who’s charged with third-degree murder. Ethan’s incarceration is naturally a source of shame for his father, who took time off the field because of it. Tom goes to the prison to drop off a suit for Ethan to wear to the hearing. While he’s there, he refuses the option to visit him. Emily’s mother is also not with us, but it’s unclear as of yet if it was because of Ethan.

Assembling a new team

As he reckons with that, his superior, Kathleen (Martha Plimpton), wants him back in the field. She reasons that, if he’s successful, the operation will be her swansong as the bureau is looking to sunset her. The fresh-faced FBI agents she proposes are:

• State Trooper Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ Stover (Alison Oliver), who is disorganised and has problems at home.
• Sergeant Detective Aleah Clinton (Thuso Mbedu), the competent germaphobe.
• And CD Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel), the eager teacher’s pet.

How the archetypes will work for the show is to be seen. But as of episode one, it plays caricaturish.

Tom and Robbie’s storylines connect

Tom meets up with his new charge at their isolated stakehouse, a skunk-y place in appearance and scent profile, but similar looking enough to be one of the houses Robbie and Cliff target. That night, Tom came home to an old friend, Daniel (Isaach de Bonkolé), knocking on his door, a priest whom he knew from his old life as a man of the cloth. In the years since he left the priesthood and lost his wife, Tom’s grown cynical of his faith, passing around foul jokes that displease Daniel.

That said, Tom shares these jokes with a beer in his hand, a familiar routine Emily and Daniel know well. As Robbie and Cliff’s mission gets the attention of Tom’s new task force, he rushes over (doing a facial ice bath first), the two storylines now meeting. As the poster below illustrates, it’s less cat-and-mouse and more pas de deux.

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