Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Tori Preston | TV | October 8, 2025
Wouldn’t you know, as soon as I decide to do a fun game about who’s beating up Lee in The Lowdown each week, along comes an episode where he doesn’t get his face smashed in at all. I mean, he gets smashed all right (tequila). He smashes (sex). But “Who’s Banging Lee This Week” wasn’t the name of the game, dammit! “Who Beats and/or Bangs Lee” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. I’ll keep workshopping this.
To be fair, I didn’t think we’d see Lee at all this week. Episode four, titled “Short on Cowboys,” kicks off with Dale reciting the text of his hidden notes while strolling through the golden fields of his ranch, and I could have watched a full hour of Tim Blake Nelson detailing the various ways Dale never quite fit in with the Washberg clan. Soon enough, though, the episode transitions to Lee reading the notes aloud to Francis, critiquing Dale’s writerly impulses as they sit in the neighborhood diner. The pair pulls an all-nighter over coffee and those secret confessions, searching for any insight into what happened to Dale. By the time Francis’s mom arrives to take her daughter to school (and drop the bomb on Lee that her boyfriend proposed and she accepted), Lee has a couple of leads.
He knows that Dale was spooked by two intruders in his yard, who ran after he grabbed his pistol and shot at them. Dale’s wife, Betty Jo, somehow slept through the ruckus, but seemed suspiciously unmoved by her husband’s encounter - almost as if she wasn’t surprised. Both Dale and Lee believe this was an attempt on Dale’s life, and Lee surmises that the intruders were the same skinheads who kidnapped him (hence the hat he found on Dale’s lawn). This attack on Dale was the job they had messed up, which was the reason Allen killed them.
Lee also learns that, a week prior to that incident, Dale and his brother Donald had a big fight about some “Indian Head Hills” issue. Donald became enraged and said a “most vile provocation” to Dale, at which point Dale punched him. “Betty Jo put that terrible idea into his head,” Dale wrote, once again throwing Lee’s suspicions toward the widow. What’s the deal with Indian Head Hills, and what was that most vile provocation?
When Lee’s editor informs him that Donald Washberg is now suing The Heartland Press and seeking a restraining order against Lee because of his exposé, Lee realizes time is running out. So he heads straight to the one person he thinks will have the answers while he still can: Betty Jo herself. Or rather, he follows her in his creepy van until she pulls over and invites him to lunch. After submitting to a good tongue lashing for the things he wrote about her and how he behaved at Dale’s funeral, Lee begins to work his charms on Mrs. Washberg, offering to buy her drinks to continue their conversation.
The noir vibes are high as Lee and Betty Jo continue their flirtation over more and more shots of tequila and eventually head back to her empty house. Is Lee actually interested in her, or is he manipulating a widow with a drinking problem? Is Betty Jo a femme fatale with shadowy motivations, or a lonely woman finding comfort in the one man who seems genuinely interested in her? The answer is all of the above, and it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s all mutually beneficial fun, and the chemistry between Ethan Hawke and Jeanne Tripplehorn is endearingly wacky. And after all is said and done, Lee does walk away with some answers - even if he may never be able to tell them to anyone.
According to Betty Jo, Dale was increasingly paranoid in the last months of his life, which is why she didn’t react to his claims about the murder attempt. She didn’t believe him. And as for what it was that Donald said to Dale to piss him off, he told his brother the truth: that Dale isn’t the father of Betty Jo’s daughter, Pearl. Donald is. Turns out that Betty Jo and Donald had a fling back in her rodeo days, but his family wouldn’t let them be together due to their political aspirations for their son. On the other hand, the Washbergs were eager to see Dale, who was indeed gay, married off to a woman, so Betty Jo took that compromise in order to stay close to Donald. When she became pregnant, she tricked Dale into thinking he was the father by getting him blackout drunk and claiming they slept together, and Dale never questioned it until Donald revealed the truth that day. Pearl has no idea, and Betty Jo wants to keep it that way, so she’s trusting Lee not to use that bit of information - meaning whatever her motivations are, she’s not using Lee to get back at Donald in the press.
The most important bit of information, though, is something Betty Jo reveals almost in passing: that the Washberg clan is cash-poor. We know Dale was blocking various business deals that required unanimous consent from the family trustees, and that Indian Head Hills is old Washberg family land. Surely next week Lee will find a way to tie Akron to whatever development plans Donald had going on for Indian Head Hills - or we’ll learn that it’s all another red herring.
A big theme this week, or really every week on The Lowdown, is that people are never quite what they appear to be. The truth is always more complicated. Dale is an unreliable narrator. Betty Jo isn’t a villain. Those poachers were poets! And even Allen, who very clearly is a murderer, wasn’t necessarily all bad. The episode detours from Lee’s wild night to reveal that Allen is in a 12-step program and struggling with his sobriety due to stress from letting his boss down. Is it because he killed two skinheads and left them floating down the river while a journalist was sniffing around, or was there some other mistake? Doesn’t matter - Allen gets shot in the neck before he can correct his error anyway. I wasn’t expecting to lose the biggest threat to Lee (and Francis) halfway through the season, but hey, at least we know there’s an even bigger bad guy involved now!
Next week, we should learn more about what Donald is really made of, too. After all, he witnessed Lee exiting Betty Jo’s house the morning after their escapade. He must assume Betty Jo gave Lee dirt on Donald as revenge for him trying to kick her out of her house, even if we know that’s not quite what happened. So is Donald the bereaved brother and hapless politician he’s appeared to be so far, or is there something more calculating and sinister going on beneath that shiny Kyle MacLachlan surface? Like a man possessed by an evil spirit from the Black Lodge…
Nah, that might be one Twin Peaks reference too far, even for The Lowdown.
