‘The Lowdown’ Finale Recap: ‘Lee Files His Story’

Late in “The Sensitive Kind,” Lee and Marty are laughing at the Sweet Emily’s counter, the assault course of the past few weeks safely behind them. Sally pauses her work as Marty holds court, sharing war stories from his decades as a private eye. Lee insists that Marty write a novel on the subject, but Marty’s been mulling a different medium: “Individual stories — each chapter about a new investigation.”

There was much left for The Lowdown’s season finale to resolve, but it’s no exaggeration to say that an unexplained title card from the series premiere has been slowly eroding my brain, consuming me more than the mystery of Dale Washberg’s killer ever did. If you’ll remember, it read, “Chapter 1: The Sensitive Kind.” At the time, I carelessly assumed each episode would have its own title, maybe lifted from a different J.J. Cale song. When the second episode carried no such title, I fought to make sense of the discrepancy — maybe every two episodes equals one chapter? And when the third episode bore no such title, I grumpily surrendered to my belief in Sterlin Harjo. He’ll let me know what it means when I’m ready to know.

I’m not always down for a last-minute reinterpretation of events. For every Primal Fear, there’s a North. But this one is fun. We thought The Lowdown was an exciting neo-noir fueled by one bedraggled man’s delusions of grandeur. And it is! But perhaps it’s something else, too. Solving Dale’s murder is the apotheosis of Lee’s truthstorian career, but it’s another closed case for a man who’s made a life of exposing secrets. Lee drove the action in Chapter 1, but what if it was Marty’s retelling all along? The finale suggests that he’s the tissue that will connect season one to The Lowdown’s Chapter 2, provided the series is justly renewed. This makes perfect sense to me. My appetite for more Lee is low, but Harjo’s Tulsa — cynical and lively at the same time — simmers with more to say.

It’s fitting that, as the end credits roll, we zoom out to the city block that connects Sweet Emily’s to Lee’s Hoot Owl Books with Dan Kane’s dodgy law practice and the vinyl store in between. This is our Sesame Street. “Anything for the Deadly Natives,” Dan calls to Hoot Owl security guard Waylon, who needs legal advice after a brief lockup. This is where real stories happen, and the big city that looms to the south is only a backdrop. (Incidentally, on the pitch reel for Sesame Street, Kermit explains that show’s funny name: “You know, like ‘Open Sesame’? It kind of gives the idea of a street where neat stuff happens.” He could just as soon be talking about this tiny patch of Tulsa.)

Now, I do understand that other viewers may have been more concerned with Lee’s predicament — we last left him attempting a citizen’s arrest in a church full of Nazis — than the episode-title conundrum. Harjo comes through for you guys, too. Frank laughably claims to the congregation that he was standing his ground when he killed Arthur with a concealed weapon that he brought into the man’s home, which he entered under false pretenses. But these people don’t care one way or the other. When Pastor Mark says “Shoot,” they say “How high?” Fortunately, Marty, posing as a federal agent here to arrest Lee for harassment, bursts through the One Well doors in the nick of time.

The preposterous scheme gives the skinheads just enough pause that Marty and Lee make it back to the van before it starts raining bullets. They head to Hoot Owl, where Waylon could theoretically stand guard, except he’s AWOL. Before long, a brick sails through the window, but it’s not the skinheads. It’s Chutto, enraged at having lost his only family. “You don’t think about anyone but yourself,” Chutto tells Lee. It’s what lots of people have been telling Lee all season long, including Wendell and Ray and Cyrus and Elijah and Marty. At first, Lee really seems to hear it. On the moonlit street, he tells the grieving man that he’s sorry. He repeats the claim in a whisper even after Chutto leaves.

By sunup, though, he reverts to the same old Lee, complaining that he was only trying to help Arthur in the first place. He can’t let go of his own idea of what’s right: getting Indian Head Hills back from the Washbergs for Chutto, a man who Lee cannot believe does not want to own a few hundred acres of undeveloped land that sits adjacent to the compound of a racist, violent religious cult.

Marty works his connections to learn that Frank won’t be charged for Arthur’s murder — the official verdict is that accidents happen when confused old men own guns. If I were the Tulsa DA, I’d be wondering why Frank was at Whispering Pines in the first place. Then again, if I was the Tulsa district attorney, I would be more afraid of gabillionaires like Trip Keating than of bereaved family members like Chutto. Incensed, Lee delivers Dale’s notes to Pearl, hoping to smoke out the only other person who can finger Frank for the murder: Betty Jo.

I’m not entirely sure why this gambit works. Once Pearl knows that Dale was suspicious of Betty Jo, the damage to their relationship is done. Perhaps Betty Jo simply wants to confront the man who took away the last person she had left. They meet on neutral territory — the grand Philbrook Museum of Art — and make asinine accusations. “You turned my daughter against me,” Betty Jo spits at a man who was only the messenger. “If you do something good and it ends badly every time, is that really good?” she asks Lee, who responds nonsensically, “I could ask you the same thing.” Except he couldn’t ask her that because Betty Jo’s never tried to do something good? She’s always been looking out for herself. Eventually, Betty Jo explains to Lee that all she did to help Frank was unlock the kitchen door so his goons could scare Dale in his study that night. Everything that followed was an accident.

Armed with Betty Jo’s partial confession, Lee revisits his murder wall, ready to write the article he promised Elijah weeks ago. He pulls an all-nighter at Sweet Emily’s, drinking bottomless filter coffee, hunting and pecking across his stickered MacBook. Sally stops by Lee’s stool to remind him that Tulsa needs men like him. Personally, I wasn’t convinced by her pep talk, but Rachel Crowl’s voice is so alluringly throaty that I’d listen to her read the Yellow Pages. I guess the point is that for every person like me and Chutto and Betty Jo, who thinks Lee is a dangerous egomaniac, there are people like Marty and Francis and Sally, who believe he’s holding a mirror up to the man. There’s room for everyone to be right.

With his story drafted, Lee finally confronts Donald, laying out everything that we already know. Yes, Donald was right that Dale was obsessed with a Native street artist. That’s why his mistress threw in with Frank to intimidate Dale into a land deal that would have ruined any chance of Chutto’s family ever getting their land back. Frank tasked the intimidation out to Allen, who tasked it out to Blackie and Berta, who screwed it all up. The first time they came to scare Dale, Dale ended up shooting at them. The second time, with Betty Jo’s help, they made it into Dale’s office, where they killed him. Scared, Betty Jo staged the suicide. And just in case Donald doesn’t believe she would do such a thing, Lee plays him a recording. (Oklahoma is a one-party consent state.) Lee was right not to buy Dale’s suicide, but Marty was right, too: Donald had no idea what was going on. To his credit, Donald holds himself to a higher standard: “I didn’t want to know,” he comes clean to Lee.

Interestingly, when given half a chance, Lee refrains from telling Donald about the time Dale came into Hoot Owl, which we learn about in a flashback at the top of the episode. It was about a year prior, back when Lee had time for tasks as quotidian as manning the till. Dale tells Lee that he’s read his “brave” articles, and the two get to talking. When Lee calls himself a “truthstorian,” Dale doesn’t roll his eyes dismissively. He asks Lee what the word means to him. “You know how they say there’s more to every story?” Lee says. “Well, that’s what I try to find.”

The men are very different, but they’re also kindred. Dale responds with a Jim Thompson quote that may as well be the first bread crumb in this whole investigation. “There’s only one plot: Things are not as they seem.” What eventually gets printed in the Heartland Press is less of a Washberg hit piece than a tribute. Lee writes that Dale believed in freedom, personal expression, and that the choices we make in life matter. It is, in large measure, Lee’s tribute to what Lee likes about Lee. The word “sensitive” was hurled at Dale as an insult, but Lee redefines it in a way that flatters them both — “quick to perceive things.” The article runs with Chutto’s sketch of Dale as a standalone image dominating the front page and a familiar headline: “The Sensitive Kind.”

In exchange for Lee burying the Indian Head Hills land-deal story — which, on paper, looked like a candidate taking a bribe from Trip and the Nazis — Donald agrees to give up the land. At a press conference alongside tribal leaders, he announces that the family of Arthur Williams has deeded the plot back to the Osage Nation. In their middle-of-the-night, middle-of-the street confrontation, Lee told Chutto that his grandfather wanted to claim the land. No, Chutto insisted, a little cryptically: “He knew who it belonged to.” Donald loses the money, but he still wins the governor’s race.

When poor Bonnie learns what really happened to Blackie, she shoots Frank in broad daylight. Pastor Mark gets arrested, thereby avoiding an eventual Waco. There’s no punishment for Betty Jo, but also no hope. The next time we see Pearl, she’s standing by her uncle-father’s side. The next time we see Pearl’s mother, she’s singing tearful karaoke. It’s not tidy, but the end of The Lowdown resembles something like justice.

Lee’s personal life is less successfully resolved than his murder investigation, which is unsatisfying even if it is also, to some extent, the point. When Francis performs at an open-mic poetry event, Lee swings by just in time for his daughter’s go. Her poem is about her broken home, literal and figurative. Her dad planted a redbud tree, in bad soil, outside her bedroom window. “After he left, it grew.” The poem is littered with gut punches that would destroy me as a parent; Lee sees the poem’s beauty and appears to feel appropriate shame. But when a better father would stick around to order a round of hot drinks for everyone, Lee bolts for the door. After hearing that poem, how does he not worry what takes root every time he leaves?

One of Lee’s principal virtues as a dad is that, even if he doesn’t stay too long, he eventually shows up. In episode two, he doesn’t bail on his weekend. Last week, Lee made it to Francis’s parent-teacher conference, however briefly. And at the end of the finale episode, he even shows up at Dr. and Mrs. Johnny’s wedding, which means we’re back at the Philbrook. (Cherokee Nation singer Kalyn Fay plays the reception.) Along with a controversial present — the Joe Brainard sketch he stole in episode one — Lee brings self-serving disdain for the event’s expensive bouquets and caviar, emblems of the life he couldn’t give Samantha even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t.

As he makes an understandably early exit, Lee and his daughter share something of a full-circle moment. Early in the season, Francis suggests it might be easier for Lee if she lives full time with her mom and Johnny. Here, Lee suggests it would be easier for Francis to do the very thing she offered episodes ago. It’s Francis’s turn to affirm her dad that he’s still her dad, even if her mom has married someone new. “It’s offensive to pretend I’m not smart enough to see that you’re good,” she pleads — a generous sentiment from a girl who shouldn’t have to think this much about her dad’s feelings. Just let your daughter enjoy this emotional, complicated day as best she can.

When Lee’s pedo van craps out for good in the parking lot of the stately museum, I couldn’t help feeling it was karma catching up to him. But it’s honestly not much of a problem for Lee. He’s not in a rush. No one’s really counting on him, which makes it that much more stunning when he makes good. He ambles back to his Sesame Street, which probably doesn’t take that long because Tulsa’s not that big a place. Lee’s a big personality on a short block.

It’s so short, in fact, that Lee’s liable to turn up again in various ways across the other chapters of Marty’s story, which I hope we get to see.