‘Task’ Episode 4 Recap: “All Roads”

When you begin this episode of Task, it’s a whole new show. Even as the Dark Hearts biker gang searches for the rat within its ranks feeding information to the Halloween-masked crew who’s been robbing them blind, FBI Agent Tom Brandis, head of the joint task force investigating the robberies, must find a rat of his own. 

Is it Chester police officer Aleah Clinton, the no-nonsense professional recovering from horrific abuse? Is it state trooper Lizzie Stover, a self-doubting fuck-up who’s great in a pinch? Is it county detective Anthony Grasso, the good Catholic boy who’s Brandis’s bravest soldier? No doubt Tom’s investigation will stretch to the end of the season, when in a shocking revelation, we’ll find out that — 

Oh, it’s Tom’s boss, Kath McGinty? The FBI middle manager who set up the task force, apparently with the intention that it do the Dark Hearts’ job for it and locate the suspects for the bikers themselves to take out before the task force does? We find this out like ten, fifteen minutes later max?

That works. That works great, in fact. Before the episode is over, the series you thought had become a whole new show becomes a whole new show again. Now we’re left to wonder if Tom will finger the wrong person before he figures out his own boss is the one selling him and his team — and their quarry — to the enemy. That’s the race-against-time dilemma he faces, not ferreting out which of our adorkable three musketeers is a traitor. 

So now, among other things, Task is a riff on The Departed, with Martha Plimpton as Matt Damon and Tom Pelphrey as Leo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as, I think, Mark Wahlberg? I can live with that, my friends. Gimme all a’ that ya got!

The meat of this episode is the show’s biggest suspense sequence since the home invasion itself. Through a combination of meetings, connections, and deliberate misinformation aimed directly at them, Robbie and Cliff now have a plan in place. They’re going to sell their 12 kilos of fentanyl to some guy some other guy knows in some park somewhere, get the money, and get the hell out of there, especially now that Cliff is a wanted man.

Only that’s not what’s happening. After arresting their erstwhile accomplice Ray, the task force has been using the convict’s cellphone to make arrangements with Cliff and Robbie, who believe it’s still Ray on the other line. Tom and his team have lured the two men into a trap, using Grasso as an undercover decoy and a whole phalanx of federal, state, and local law enforcement to take Cliff and Robbie, whose identity they don’t yet know. Most importantly, they hope to rescue Sam, the kidnapped child they’re not even sure is still alive.

Only that’s not what’s happening either. Via crooked FBI Agent Kath McGinty, the Dark Hearts have intercepted these communications, cutting the police out without their knowledge and feeding their own bullshit to Cliff and Robbie. While Tom et al are going in guns drawn on an innocent couple out looking for their lost dog, Cliff is someplace else entirely, getting abducted by the Dark Hearts. 

It’s the old Silence of the Lambs trick, and it’s one of the better applications I’ve seen in a long time, aided by director Salli Richardson Whitfield’s exceptional use of the eerily dark and empty nighttime roads as arteries for the action. It also leads to the show’s gnarliest scene yet, in which Cliff, beaten unrecognizable, is painfully smothered with plastic wrap by Jayson when he fails to divulge the name of his accomplice or the location of the fentanyl. 

Jayson has his own problems in a big way. According to Vincent (Brian Goodman), the highest-ranking Dark Hearts member we’ve met so far, leadership has decided Jayson will be killed within days as punishment for allowing the robberies to get so out of hand. Now that there’s so much evidence the crew’s origins lie within Jayson’s outfit, his proven incompetence is insurmountable. 

What’s more, Jayson’s boss and mentor Perry learns that his protégé has been lying to him for years. Though he told everyone he killed Billy Prendergast (Jack Kesy), Robbie’s brother and the proximate cause of all this, for skimming from the club, that was a cover story. What really happened was that he found out his girlfriend, Eryn, was planning to take their kids and leave with Billy, so he beat him to death with his bare hands. 

Finding this out at the same time he’s scrambling to keep this guy alive requires Perry to get a little catharsis: He wraps a chain around his fist and socks Jayson square in the mouth. But it also requires him to do some further digging: If Eryn and Billy were still a thing, and if that’s the reason Jayson murdered him, Eryn would have every reason to undermine Jayson to the point where the club would step in and take him out. Vengeance would be hers. 

In the episode’s most chilling moment, so underplayed by actor Jamie McShane that I rewound to make sure I was reading it right, Perry reassures Eryn that (as long as she’s not the rat) if she still wants to leave Jayson, that’s fine — he’ll set them up someplace where Jayson will never find them. That’s not a promise, of course. That’s a threat. By the end of the episode he’s learned that the gun Cliff was carrying before they killed him used to belong to Billy, putting not only Eryn but Billy’s daughter Maeve in his crosshairs.

Over on the side of the angels, a variety of long-simmering tensions memorably come to a boil. Learning that Robbie’s big plan is to relocate the entire family to a remote island in Canada — where of course there would be no schools, no grocery stores, no friends, and no doctors for the kids — Maeve tears his dumb ass to deserved shreds. Fed up with always having to be the model adopted daughter, Emily Brandis cuts loose by getting hammered on vodka-laced wooder ices and vomits up puke the color of a Dario Argento movie before finally having it out with her dad for his abandonment of her brother. 

On a happier note, Grasso and Stover finally fall into bed…sorta. After drinking and dancing to Gwen Stefani’s “The Sweet Escape,” with Stover relentlessly hammering away at the far smoother Grasso’s anti-cringe reflexes, they go back to her place. But when Grasso realizes they’re about to have sex in her “marital bed,” he can’t go through with it. The good Catholic boy strikes again.

The use of found music is realistic and astute throughout the episode, actually. No one’s trying to impress anyone with cratedigging here; the idea is to show you the musical taste of a bunch of regular people. When Robbie and Billy take their families down to the swimming hole, in a flashback that’s positively glowing with the characters’ affection for one another, they listen to “Melissa” by the Allman Brothers. When Robbie wants to play suave and charming for his daughter on the even of a father/daughter dance he knows he’ll never make, he plays “More Than This” by Roxy Music. 

The throughline for all these songs is a sweet, smiling romanticism that the characters themselves have to fight tooth and nail to reach in their real lives. And when they do — boy, with this cast you’re really pulling for them, aren’t you? Robbie, Billy, Eryn, Grasso, Stover — they’re all charming and beautiful, and seeing them happy is infectious, however fleeting that happiness is.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.