These Kids Nearly Got Munsoned

Jake Friedken lying to everybody is nothing new. But watching the lies form behind his stunned features, amid the screaming, terror, blood, and bodies in the immediate aftermath of the robbery and shootings at the Black Rabbit, is pretty fucked up. Like, where does it end? As EMS arrives to take Wes and Tony to Bellevue, a police officer questions Jake about the dead robber – Junior – at his feet, and the lies start tumbling out, fully-formed. He doesn’t know the guy. He doesn’t know the other robber – Vince, his brother – who got away. He had nothing to do with – a lot to do with – this half-assed million-dollar heist of his hotshot restaurant. Maybe in that moment, alongside his lying, he’s also channeling some hard truths about the Friedken boys. Like how they’ve been around lies and deaths – and Mancuso – for 40 years. 

Episode 7 of Black Rabbit again flashes back to the Friedken house, this time to 1985 and their mother Sheila (Olivia Hebert) being attacked by their father, “Big Dick” Friedken. He’s hitting her and kicking her, and when Young Vince cries for him to stop, Dick says “Go back to bed or you’re next!” Vince instead grabs his father’s New York Jets-colored bowling ball and drops it from the second floor, killing his father to save his mother. Later, Sheila pours a 10-year-old Vince a Canadian Club. There’s a knock on the door; “Don’t worry, it’s not the cops.” Mancuso arrives, hugs Sheila, says he’ll take care of everything. And that Vince will have to carry this for the rest of his life.

It’s still a mess at the Rabbit when Jake’s phone rings. “What did you do, you fucker?” Jake is hysterical. “You fucked us.” But even though he just killed a guy, and even though he’s running across Manhattan with a million dollars’ worth of stolen jewelry, Vince has time to older bro Jake. “Howabout a little bit of gratitude for saving your life?” Maybe the insinuation is that he did it before, too, from the heavy hand of their abusive father. And within seconds, Jake is agreeing to help his chaos agent sibling yet again. 

The thing is, Jake fled the scene, and Roxie saw him take Vince’s call. While the staff gathers at the hospital, and Estelle heads there too, Jake is frantically trying to push Val and Hunter out of town, in case Mancuso goes after them. When Val stops at Gen’s to try and pick her up, too, she doesn’t know the whole story, but knows her deadbeat dad’s involved. Run? That’s his thing. She’s got her own life, and she’s staying in New York. 

Jake also meets Mr. Fixit in the back of a nondescript Chinese restaurant. There are two ways it will go, Campbell tells him. Either Vince is caught by the cops and talks about everything, including Jake’s involvement, Jules Zablonski, and the coverup of Anna’s assault. Or Mancuso finds Vince, there’s decidedly less talking, and “it ceases to be a problem for either of us.” Campbell lays it down. “It’s a zero-sum game.” (Morgan Spector is so good in these Black Rabbit scenes; a fixit guy spinoff when?) “It’s either you, or your brother.” 

“Yeah, it’s Ben Baller. ‘Ben made the chain,’ whatever his fuckin’ catchphrase is. Get your spyglass, take a look.” Vince is still trying to use Hyman (Tony Macht), Junior’s Diamond District fence, to convert the stolen goods into hard escape cash. But that’s a Vince play Babbitt, after pleading for his life, fed to his apoplectic boss. Mancuso and his right hand man arrive at the fence and chase Vince from the building, firing wildly the whole way. Bulletproof glass stops the rounds, or Vince might’ve got Munsoned right there. Again.

So many lies. As Val packed, Jake said “Vince is wrapped up in something.” (Not him, of course.) And when he finally joins his staff and Estelle at the hospital, the dishonesty keeps flowing, easier than a whiskey neat. “Who the fuck did this?” Estelle asks. (Lies.) “You deleted the security tapes!” Roxie shouts. “Tony told me! Why would you do that?” (Lies.) And finally, Detective Seung arrives. “If there’s something you’d like to tell me, now’s the time. Because if I find out you’re withholding information about who pulled that trigger, or what happened to Anna, there’s no leniency then.” Jake has already lied to numerous people about both of these things, including the detective. This right here is just the ex-rocker coming back for an encore. 

Babbitt has abducted Gen. And while it’s never a good time to receive a call like that, Jake is responding to his threats to chop up Vince’s daughter while Estelle is standing right in front of him, trying to get him to engage. To tell her how the robbery happened. How Wes and Tony got shot. Why Wes had to die for all of this. To finally share with her all that she can see him calculating and re-calculating in his mind. But when Jake finally turns to her – this woman who left Wes to be with him, and who he hasn’t been honest with from the start – she walks away, drained and silent. Estelle would be angry if it wasn’t so terribly pathetic and sad. 

Ultimately, Jake meets Babbitt and Mancuso in a parking garage where they’re holding Gen as a hostage. They’ll leave her alone if he calls his brother. After all the lies it’s here, the zero-sum choice Campbell spoke about, and the consequences are clear. But whether Jake will sell out Vince isn’t clear at all, and that’s the truth. Where does it end?  

DJ Booth for Black Rabbit Episode 7 (“These Kids Nearly Got Munsoned”):

• In the moments before Dick arrives, Sheila Friedken is listening to a classic Motown platter from 1973, Willie Hutch with “I Choose You.”

• At one point in Episode 7 of Black Rabbit, Gen is in a club, living her New York life. Blaring in the background, to the point she can’t hear Jake’s frantic call, is Underworld’s “Born Slippy,” a perennial banger from the Trainspotting soundtrack.

• And speaking of the mid-1990s, when Jake arrives at Val’s townhouse, she’s wearing her sleep gear, a T featuring the Garbage logo from the quartet’s still-great first album.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.