“Terriers” lightening round: Recaps of Episodes 6 – 9

Britt - played by Michael Raymond-James.

Episode #12 is on tonight, Wednesday, November 24th, on FX (ch 43 on Cox Cable) at 10:00 pm.

Greetings once again folks, and welcome to the lightning round! I left off a week or so ago with a Terriers episode 5 recap, right before episode 11 went on air. Since this leaves us lagging considerably behind, professional TV watchers were rightly introduced to cover the series’ tenth and eleventh installments. I’m trying to quickly fill in the gaps now, so let’s jump right into …

Episode 6 – “Ring-a-Ding-Ding”

(Again, if you’re lost with the cast of characters, click HERE to get filled in…)

The short story: Hank and Britt are hooked up by Maggie with a job tracking down a sapphire ring stolen from Beth and Dale Komack. Except that the ring wasn’t stolen – while his wife was dying of cancer, Dale gave her heirloom ring to his girlfriend Paola. Except the ring isn’t mounted with a sapphire, it’s a $300,000 blue diamond, and Dale has actually been banging his wife’s hairdresser (Paola) long enough to have given her a grade-school age daughter. Beth just hired the boys to track down the mistress she’d suspected Dale of keeping, so she could file for divorce and write him out of her will, thus protecting the fortune she’s leaving to her teenage son.

The long story continued: The episode opens with Jason and Gretchen’s engagement party, which Jason later admits that he only invited Hank to in order to rub in our hero’s face how happy his ex-wife is to be with another man…oh yeah, he also has figured out it’s Hank that’s been dickering around with his credit cards. Britt confesses that he’s ready to ask Katie to marry him. Meanwhile, Katie goes to a karaoke night with her classmates and teacher, and proceeds to get crunk (I hear that’s what the kids call inebriation these days) with a guy who’s trying to bed her despite full knowledge of her relationship with Britt. Instead, her teacher chases the kid off and proceeds to take advantage of the situation himself. The show closes with a distraught Katie confessing her sins to Hank at the Old Townhouse. He advises her to walk the straight and narrow from this point forward, but never mention her indiscretion to Britt.

Other stuff: Cool shots from what I believe is the Hard Rock downtown overlooking the convention center as the setting of the engagement party. One of the many blunt and awkward gems of dialogue delivered by Steph to Jason regarding Gretchen: “Societal norms baffle me. I mean, you feel this need to announce your engagement, yet I assume you’ve already put your penis in her.” The fake Irish bar where Katie gets hammered and decides to screw her professor is portrayed as Gallagher’s from the outside, but once we go in we’re at O’Connell’s in Bay Park.

Skip to episode 7 – “Missing Person”

The short story: Hank and Britt go to the Old Townhouse for breakfast and find a kid with a case of amnesia that’s locked himself in the bathroom. Britt wants to ditch the kid, Hank sees the early form of Steph’s illness in him and wants to help him out. Our boys find a mysterious black pill on him, identified by Doc Johnson, former doctor turned Mission Beach ice cream vendor after getting caught writing himself bogus scripts, as an anti-malaria drug. He feels he’s done something wrong, but doesn’t know what – apparently his memory returns when the boys take him to the police station, where he punches out a booking officer and runs. It turns out amnesia boy is Adam Fisher, who’s kidnapped fantasy girlfriend Jessica Sampson, who apparently wasn’t thrilled with his idea to take her to Singapore. When the boys rescue Jessica, Adam takes her roommate hostage with a squirt gun in an attempt to commit suicide by cop. This enrages Hank, who feels he’s been playing his temporary insanity as a reason to be a dick, while Hank deals with the seriousness of Steph’s real-life illness.

The long story: Katie is oddly distant from Britt. Well, it’s not that odd to us, because we know what she did last week. Steph spends the episode oddly interacting with the neighbors, including a girl from across the street who it turns out doesn’t even exist. In a moment of clarity, she decides to check back into the psych ward, where Hank bids her a sad farewell. Britt is beginning to feel more like Hank’s sidekick than a true partner, and his frustration with this status is beginning to surface.

Next stop on the quickie recap express, episode 8 – “Agua Caliente.”

This time, the long story first: This is the beginning of a series of episodes where we really get back to character development and the drama that makes the lives of these people we’re watching intriguing. The whole episode is about strengthening the bond between Hank and Britt. We hearken back to when Gustafson assured Britt that Hank would let him down huge someday. Hank’s effort in tracking Britt down, chasing his kidnappers across the border, and ultimately taking a bullet intended for Katie goes a long way to ease Britt’s skepticism about his commitment to the partnership. In the closing moments, Hank seems to chase off Katie’s creepy student-bedding professor for good from his ambulance gurney and Gustafson alludes that even though Hank appears great now, he still hides considerable darkness under the surface.

The short story: Hank and Britt are at a golf course doing more side work for Maggie serving a subpoena. Hank chases the guy they’re after down, while Britt stays behind to get abducted by the Mexican mafia. Across the border, he’s reunited with Ray (remember the guy he framed for armed robbery a few weeks back?), and presented with an ultimatum: break into the evidence lockup of a Mexican police station and steal back a few keys of coke that Ray’s sloppy ass lost in a traffic stop, or Katie will be gunned down after Ray tipped off the mob on how to find her. Hank convinces Gustafson to travel to TJ with him to help Britt, but not before his partner pulls off the heist and gets himself tagged as an international fugitive. By the time Britt has the goods, his kidnapper has been knocked off by higher-ups who’ve learned about his inadvertent loss of produce.

Meanwhile, back at home, Katie’s professor follows her home and is taken hostage by the thug hired to keep Katie company until Britt’s job is done. After Mark and Hank smuggle Britt back into the States, a gunfight ensues at Britt and Katie’s house, with Hank taking a bullet to the shoulder trying to ambush the guy (is there a generic name for a Mexican mafia thug, like Italian mafia thugs are stereotypically Guido?) who’s holding Katie and her professor. Settling into a good routine more worthy of a sitcom than a soap opera, everything (minus Hank’s shoulder) is more or less back to normal by the close of the episode.

Random quirk you probably didn’t catch: Gustafson’s unmarked police cruiser has Oklahoma ‘exempt’ license plates.

And, to round things out/bring you up to the point of the reviews already posted on the Rag, we come to:

Episode 9 – “Pimp Daddy”

This week’s story/stories: Hank has a personal trainer provided by his insurance company to help him rehab his (literally) shot-out shoulder. But insurance doesn’t cover the number of treatments he needs. In exchange for some pro bono sessions, Britt takes on a case – recover $400 stolen by a tranny whore (Michaela) from the trainer’s nephew Cody, a busboy at Hodad’s. The hooker, upon admitting (s)he stole the money as an alternative to exposing the unsuspecting kid to a surprise helping of wang, hires Britt to track down the parents of a post-op transvestite friend murdered in a particularly brutal role play with a client.

The big picture: We open to Hank in one of his delusions, thinking back to the days when Gretchen was still with him. We quickly learn that Jason Adler is really Jason Volloway, using a pseudonym because he was implicated in a high-profile sex abuse case back in the ‘80s. When Hank tells Gretchen, she freaks out, tells Hank that Jason has already confessed and she’s okay with it, and disinvites him from the wedding, imploring him to stay out of her life henceforth.

Meanwhile, Britt has found a pregnancy test Katie was trying to hide from him. Hank discreetly clues Katie in to Britt’s discovery, and she admits that the test is positive and she doesn’t know whose seed she’s carrying. The episode closes with Britt, oblivious to Katie’s infidelity, presenting her with an engagement ring via a romantic (at least by OB standards) display on the roof of their apartment building. Katie accepts, overcome with tears – we just can’t be sure if they stem from joy or conflicted agony. Hank, meanwhile, sits alone staring at Gretch’s wedding invitation as the scene fades to black.

Interesting tidbits: In order to intercept the hooker who’s stolen Cody’s money, Britt must travel to “that block on Voltaire where they all hang out.” This place looks pretty sleazy, and I’ve never seen a spot on Voltaire that looks quite like it, although it appears the Mariscos German van has relocated there. Michaela has no clue how to fasten a D-ring motorcycle helmet. When Hank meets a reporter at the Wall to discuss the old Volloway case, the reporter takes some very thinly veiled cuts at the staffing purge at the Union-Tribune and the subsequent migration of professional journalists in San Diego to the precarious and woefully underpaid realm of the online blogosphere.

Tagged as: Terriers