‘The Lowdown’ Episode 4 Recap: “Short On Cowboys”

Oh man, this episode. Oh man, this episode!

Liking The Lowdown has been easy from the jump. Every line is a little gem of Dude-speak, every Tulsa location is lovingly photographed, every performance is charming, and every character is, well, a character. It is simply a personal preference (or defect, if you’re disinclined to charity) that I’m not, as a rule, all that interested in sun-baked shaggy neo-noir or the romance of the American West. Look, I dress in all black all the time, it’s tough to get me into stories about people who wear a lot of earth tones.

Add pathos and dimension to the villains, add a massive injection of scorching sexual chemistry, add a touch of genuine mystery — not mysteriousness, mystery, in the religious sense — at the end, though? I am all in now.

I’m gonna start towards the end, because that’s where the star attraction of this episode is located: the unbelievable sequence in which Ethan Hawke’s down-and-dirty reporter Lee Raybon and Jeanne Tripplehorn’s white-trash rodeo queen turned married-into-money mistress of the next governor Betty Jo Washberg get drunk and make out. 

The funny thing in retrospect is that there was zero evidence of that kind of combustibility between these two characters — even these two actors’ performances, I’d say — until, all of a sudden, there was. Betty Jo has heretofore been presented as kind of a joke, a two-timing would-be heiress who finds herself out on her ass after her gay husband dies and his straight brother stops sleeping with her. The idea that this is a woman with sexual and romantic needs that must be met — y’know, the way it is with lots and lots of people — never really enters the equation.

It’s not until she spots Lee very clumsily tailing her in his white van and invites him for a bite to eat so they can has things out that, BOOM, the chemistry ignites. They eat and she chews him out for dragging her family name through the mud. They go out for drinks and pound a medically inadvisable number of tequila shots while she takes at least two cracks at karaoke. (What do you think she was singing? I’m going with the Reba McIntyre’s “Fancy” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.”)

Then they make out. She has him follow her home — just to make sure she hasn’t been tailed, you understand. He snoops around Dale’s office and they bond. They watch her old rodeo-queen videos and they bond some more. She pulls a loaded gun on him as a joke and it freaks him out. 

They finally have it out over everything — her relationship with Donald, getting together with Dale as Option B, her daughter’s real father being Donald not Dale, Donald confronting Dale with this prior to his death, the very real assassination attempt that took place two days before Dale’s death (Betty Jo, who drank herself to sleep, heard nothing and didn’t believe him), Lee’s own ex-wife remarrying, you name it.

By the end of the night they’re both just sitting out on the porch steps, smoking and drinking beer, stunned by the emotional wringer they’ve been through that night. (Ever had one of those? I sure have.) “Thank you for the company,” she says, getting up and staggering back inside. “It was the most fun I’ve had in years.”

She does go back inside…but she leaves the door wide open behind her.

Reader, I cheered and clapped. Writer Duffy Boudreau and director Macon Blair (he also plays Lee’s tax-lawyer neighbor, remember?) really had me convinced that these two beautiful, eligible people were not, in fact, gonna get laid after all of that. But get laid they do! Yes, the show annoyingly yadda-yaddas the sex — for chrissakes, that’s Ethan Hawke and Jeanne Tripplehorne you’ve got there, give us something we can feel to paraphrase the immortal words of Aretha Franklin and En Vogue — but the heat of it radiates off the screen, even if the fact that Lee is half the equation injects a little humor into it no matter how handsome he is.

Anyway, Donald happens to see Lee leaving Betty Jo’s house while on his morning jog the next morning, so that’s not good. I’m sure his friend and employee Marty would say it serves him right: He warns Donald that alienating your mistress who is also your dead brother’s wife as you ramp up an election campaign is pure insanity.

But man alive, what a sexy sequence that was! And a valuable one too, from a character perspective. It reveals a side of Betty Jo we’ve never seen and perhaps never anticipated either — a real person, not The Other Woman. (Unless of course she’s a sociopathic noir femme fatale and is lying through her teeth. Anything’s possible!)

The sinister Allen, of all people, also reveals a surprisingly human side. In an AA meeting, he is genuinely distraught about his recent failures at “work,” saying he’s let down the man who saved him when he was at rock bottom as an ex-con. And he means it, too! Whether he’s working for Donald, as it’s long seemed, for for someone else entirely, it’s clear Allen truly does care about him and want to do right by him. They just happen to both be very bad people, so that care takes a twisted and murderous form. It’s a fascinating development for this antagonist, and a fine use of actor Scott Shepherd, who reveals the soft underbelly of the terrifying beast he’s been portraying.

And before you know it, Allen is dead, bloodily assassinated in a Coen-esque mess of a hit, by a killer sent by the very man Allen was so desperate to please. No one ever believes the leopards will eat their faces.

But the moment that made the episode for me came at the very end. As he’s done throughout the season, Dale Washberg appears onscreen, talking directly to the camera as he narrates the events of his life through the letters that Francis and Lee retrieved last episode. (His prose is purple when he’s not quoting Jim Thompson, and he’s prone to exaggeration, but the letters give Lee the intel he needs to do all the investigating he does through the rest of the episode.

Dale is also one of this episode’s many direct Big Lebowski references. In addition to the extremely obvious tail, there’s a reference to a “beaver film” as a euphemism for pornography, and Dale is seen literally wearing the Dude’s trademark Pendleton sweater.

And there he is at the end of the episode, smoking a black cigarette on his family land. He tosses the cigarette away and walks off without a farewell, leaving us to look at the rock behind him. The image cuts to black and the credits roll, but the sound of the wind over the hills remains the only sound we can hear until the end. The last character to appear on screen is a dead man, the last word is given to the land itself. There’s an eerie magic to that that hits me harder than quirkiness or crime-buff stuff. It’s an argument that despite all Lee’s clowning, something sacred is at stake here.

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.