Land Grabs Abound on This Week's ‘The Lowdown’

Nobody beat up Lee this week, but the penultimate episode of The Lowdown does end with Lee staring down the barrels of a few automatic rifles, in a white power church full of ex-cons, so I guess that’s something! Something that’ll be resolved next week, but still — not a bad cliffhanger. How the episode gets there, though, is a marvel of plotting that illuminates the show’s themes, Lee’s character, and features a heartbreaking death.

I sometimes struggle with these recaps, because every episode is so much more than just the slow unpacking of The Lowdown’s central mystery. The reveals sometimes pale in comparison to the character work, but episode 7, “Tulsa Turnaround,” fires on all fronts. It’s bookended by re-enacted land grabs, beginning with Donald presiding over a grade-school celebration of the white settlers who did a Land Run to claim Oklahoma’s wide-open land. When Indigenous protestors arrive to condemn Donald’s participation in an event that whitewashes history (the fact that the land was not free for the taking is highlighted by the handful of students dressed as Native Americans, lounging by a tree), he’s unable to respond, dressed as he is in a ridiculous Will Rogers get-up (Rogers himself was Cherokee). “Some things should not be celebrated,” scolds the lead protestor, and she’s right. If the only way to be proud of your history is to rewrite it, what exactly are you celebrating?

The cycle continues when Frank — who traded a sack full of cash to Betty Jo in exchange for the whereabouts of Dale’s secret will — arrives on Arthur’s doorstep. Frank offers a thousand dollars to Arthur for the will (a steep discount compared to what he paid just for the location of the will), but Arthur either pretends to be or is deep in a delusion. Eventually, Frank gives up trying to reason with the old man and decides to search the apartment for the document, shoving Arthur when he protests. Arthur isn’t so far gone that he doesn’t vividly see the parallels to the last time a white man stole his family’s land, and he grabs a gun. By the time Lee arrives at the scene, Arthur is already dead on the ground, and Frank — after apparently defending himself in the scuffle — is speeding away with the will in his hand.

What took Lee so long? Well, that’s the rub. He bops around town, checking in with every side-player we’ve met (his editor, the lawyer next door) as he decides what his next steps should be to help Arthur and Chutto. He finally settles on Cyrus, helping the man deliver papers while asking if he knows a good lawyer. And he does! Cyrus’s cousin, Daymond, immediately clocks Lee as “One of them caring white boys, I see,” but agrees to help when Lee explains why he cares. If there’s an injustice, who would he be if he sat back and did nothing?

Ray is absolutely of the “do nothing” camp, as he explains to Francis when she asks for his help. She wants Ray to convince Lee to let her help him in his investigation, but Ray argues that the world is corrupt, and though Lee may fight it, the fight is never-ending. Safer just to stay out of it — an argument that echoes what Cyrus tells Lee about white supremacy. Cyrus compares Lee’s investigation into the Washberg family dealings to the Greenwood massacre. “Regular hateful folks don’t drop sh*t from planes. That takes hate and power,” he argues - and that same fire is still alive in Tulsa today. If you get in the way of that, you’ll get burned, so just focus on what’s in front of you and take care of yourself.

It doesn’t take a Black man or a gay man to show that Lee’s flavor of white saviorism is selfishness masquerading as nobility, though. It just takes one conversation with Francis. After all of Lee’s running around town, he winds up late to Francis’s parent-teacher conference, only to find Sam’s fiancé sitting in the room. Lee storms out, but Francis explains that she invited her future stepdad there herself. He’s reliable, and he’s a part of her life. Lee tries to argue that he chooses not to show up for her as the dad who goes to all the dance recitals. That’s just not who he is. Instead, “I’m gonna show you how to follow your dreams,” he says. Of course, he never asks what she wants from him, because ultimately it doesn’t matter to him. He isn’t the dad she wants, but the dad he wants to be, and while she may admire him anyway, she also realizes it means he’ll always be chasing danger until one day he may not show up for her at all.

That day may be very close. Lee hooks up with Marty, who was doing his own digging into Pastor Mark and One Well. While at the church compound, Marty discovers a man Mark had tarred and feathered as punishment and takes him to the hospital. Marty fills Lee in on what One Well is (a crazy white supremacist church), and what they want with the Indian Head Hills land, though he claims Donald had no idea what he was getting into. It was all Frank. Lee then explains that Donald doesn’t own the land anyway, because of Dale’s secret will. So they go to see Arthur, and… well, you know what happened there.

Lee and Marty chase Frank all the way to the One Well church, where Pastor Mark is in the middle of a sermon. Lee pulls his gun on Frank, shouting that he’s a murderer, and then Mark’s flunkies point their oh-so-godly ARs at Lee. Mark gives the command to shoot, and we’ll see how that all shakes out for Lee in next week’s finale.

By all rights, the finale should be a ten-minute affair. Lee gets shot and buried, and corruption triumphs. It won’t, of course, but after this week’s episode it seems like it should. I admire the way The Lowdown has blended a sort of cozy, throwback noir with this examination of the cycles of greed and bigotry in America, but perhaps it has done its job too well. When the smartest characters on the show say the struggle is hopeless, and your hero is a selfish buffoon with pretensions, it’s hard to see what outcome makes sense here when the stakes are so high.