Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Tori Preston | TV | October 1, 2025
After last week’s frenzied two-part premiere, The Lowdown is finally settling into its natural storytelling pace. Episode three, titled “Dinosaur Memories,” focuses almost exclusively on Lee’s hunt for Dale Washberg’s missing paperback mysteries. When Lee was blackballed from the Washberg estate sale, due to his recent exposé on the family, he tasked his friend Ray, an antiques dealer, to acquire the book collection on his behalf. Only Ray failed - a detail Lee learns from that flirty real estate agent who had managed the sale and is currently trying to rent Lee a “quadriplex” so Francis will have a real bedroom when she stays with him (unlike whatever living situation he has going on above his bookshop). After agreeing to take the apartment, Lee brings Francis along to track down Ray, who admits that the books were scooped up at the last minute by a rival dealer named Catalina.
“I don’t need the books, I need what is inside the books,” Lee explains as he drags Ray and Francis off to find Catalina. Remember: The books are where Dale Washberg stashed notes about the events leading to his death - events somehow involving his wife, Betty Jo, and brother Donald. Their mission takes them to Keystone Lake, where Ray claims Catalina lives on a houseboat with her husband, who is a poacher.
Which reminds me! I’m starting a new game for this show. I’m calling it “Who’s Beating Up Lee This Week?” After going two rounds with skinheads, Lee is moving on to - yep, you guessed it! - poachers! Lee’s brilliant idea to get the books back involves stealing a Fish and Wildlife warden’s jacket and pretending to be “Special Agent Cooper” to spook Catalina and her husband (because casting Kyle freaking MacLachlan wasn’t enough of a Twin Peaks reference for The Lowdown, apparently). Lee discovers several cardboard boxes marked “Books” onboard the houseboat, but inside, there are tins of Beluga Brothers-brand caviar instead of paperbacks. Still looking for someone to intimidate with his snazzy jacket, Lee is instead knocked out cold with a shovel, gagged, and taken to the secret poacher hideout where they don’t take kindly to law-enforcement types poking around their business.
Or at least, they wouldn’t if they believed Lee’s cover story, which they don’t. Marlon, the head poacher, quickly clocks that Lee’s no game warden on account of his pants being too shiny, but his pants aren’t the only problem. “Due to the structure of your mouth, I’ll never believe a word you say,” is how Marlon puts it, because Lee has a punchable and untrustworthy face apparently! Marlon then reveals the secrets of his whole operation: They’re the “Beluga Brothers” and they’re harvesting paddlefish eggs to pass off as high-end beluga caviar. It’s their personal volley in the class war between the haves and the have-nots, not exactly legal but not as dangerous as drug running, which makes them exactly the sort of fringe personalities Lee can work his magic on.
They’re not too keen to hear Lee is really a writer, so to convince them that he’s not as bougie as he sounds, Lee offers up the story of how he ended up in jail - a story Francis was trying to wheedle out of him earlier in the episode. A story that, apparently, involves methamphetamines, a three-legged dog, and public nudity. It’s just wild and specific enough to earn Marlon’s trust, but Marlon can’t help Lee with the books because even though he’s Catalina’s husband, she recently left him and stole his houseboat. Instead, Lee helps Marlon craft a love poem to Catalina, in exchange for his safe release.
While Lee was busy getting abducted, Francis was sitting in a dockside bar while an increasingly tipsy Ray regaled her with the story of how he came out to his deeply religious mother. Ray, you see, firmly believes that Dale Washberg was a closeted homosexual, and that his death is no mystery at all. It was suicide after a life spent denying who he really was, and thus, Lee’s entire mission is pointless. Francis, however, has more faith in her father - at least as far as his investigative instincts are concerned - though she also knows that he has a tendency to land himself in hot water. Following her own instincts, she decides to head down to the boat and see what’s keeping Lee. Her father is nowhere to be found, of course, but inside the boat she finds the very box of paperbacks he was looking for - just as Catalina comes home. The pair hit it off despite Francis’s poor lying skills, because Catalina senses a kindred spirit in this clever girl with a good-for-nothing father. The moment Catalina turns her back, though, Francis snatches up the box and runs back to Ray.
By the time Lee comes running up the dock to hug Francis, his precious books are gone. Catalina burned them in a barrel after catching up to Francis and seeing that Ray, her nemesis, was involved. Luckily, Francis was paying attention to what her dad had said, that what he wanted wasn’t the books themselves but what was inside them, and somehow she managed to snag all of Dale’s hidden notes from the novels before they went in the fire. At long last, Lee has the clues he’s been searching for, and he sits with Francis as they begin to read them together - or rather, as Tim Blake Nelson appears beside them to narrate the notes as poor, dead Dale. I absolutely love that he’s going to be a continuing presence in this show, not to mention the latest in the recent trend of great actors getting killed off in the first five minutes of a show only to linger for the rest of the season (like James Marsden in Paradise and Andrew Koji in Black Doves).
Meanwhile, Marty has his own little mission to deal with: Donald asks him for a favor, in exchange for a cushy security gig. The favor? Deliver ten thousand dollars to Betty Jo and inform her that the Washberg family trust is taking control of Dale’s ranch and kicking her out of her home, per the pre-nup she signed. If Marty didn’t already know that Donald has been having an affair with his brother’s widow, he finds out when Betty Jo reveals that Donald cries when he cums, just before she throws his payoff to the wind.
Later, when Marty tries to enjoy a coffee while perusing his dating app, creepy Allen turns up. He heard about Lee’s confrontation with Donald at Dale’s funeral - specifically the part about how Lee claimed he’d been kidnapped by two skinheads. He also knows Marty had been tailing Lee, which means both Lee and Marty could be potential witnesses to Allen killing those skinheads. Marty doesn’t tell him anything, immediately sensing that the guy ain’t right, but the encounter just may be enough to push Marty back to Lee’s side as an ally in the coming episodes.
Other than those brief developments with Marty, though, this episode was all about Lee and Francis, and their dynamic is proving to be the best twist The Lowdown has up its sleeve. The danger Lee’s muckraking poses to Francis will likely come to fruition - Allen already met her, after all - but that’s not her only purpose in the show. Rather than being an eventual victim, Francis is shaping up to be a true sidekick in a way that makes sense for both characters, but without absolving Lee of his irresponsibility for putting her in that position in the first place. Their uniquely functional dysfunction is a beautiful, nuanced approach to what could very easily be a bog-standard father-daughter affair. Still, I could say the same about every character on a show where even the one-off villains are given unexpectedly poetic souls! If the “mystery” turns out to be a total dud, it won’t matter. I’ll just be happy spending another five episodes with this collection of weirdos.
