Last week on Graceland: nothing much happened. This week on Graceland: a bunch of semi-improbable things happen at once. Mike discovers that his supervisor, Juan, has been bugging him, and decides that his whole assignment investigating Briggs is based on nothing more than a paranoid revenge fantasy of Juans' for a tragedy that happened years ago. Charlie keeps investigating the Odin/Briggs connection but instead turns up a Mexican federale, with whom she enters into a tentative alliance. Paige and Michael have a lot of long conversations for no real reason– have they ever been close before? The only non-surprising development is that the Caza Cartel continues to pursue Bello, eventually trapping him in his supposedly safe house to torture Odin's location out of him.
Most of these developments are surprises, things you couldn't reasonably have guessed at from the clues we've been handed so far. The reveal of Jangles– the notorious, terrifying Caza boss– as being one and the same with Mike's supervisor, Juan– works as a legitimate twist only because for the space of the episode we've been learning not to trust him. It would have been far more effective if we'd been suspicious of him– or even seen him as anything other than a low-level pawn taking Mike's reports– previously. It's also tough to pull of an FBI officer as drug dealer surprise! when you've done just that several episodes ago with Paul as Odin.
The episode ends with Michael confessing to Paige why he's been in Graceland all along. It's one secret too many, the thing she's not yet ready to hear. She leaves him alone in the hospital room, and Michael has officially lost everything: his girfriend, his friends, his family, perhaps soon his job. Next week he goes undercover to try to flip Bello on Odin: three episodes left, and he's hit rock bottom, which means it's time for him to begin to rise again.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.