Banshee Ep 4.8 - 'Requiem' reviewed...

The end is nigh – but did all of Banshee’s main players make it out of the its last episode? John Mosby reviews the series finale and offers a ‘Requiem’…

“I don’t know what it is about this town, Bunker… what geographic phenomena makes us a magnet for every scumbag and criminal east of the Mississippi… but what I do know that to do this job sometimes you have to take off these badges and get bloody…”

The Satanic Cult have been cut down to size and it seems that the murder of Rebecca Bowman has been avenged. But Veronica is puzzled that the murder doesn’t quite fit the precise lunar pattern of the killers. Did someone disguise the murder to mislead the police investigation? Needing to know the truth, Hood finds a telling piece of evidence in a place he didn’t expect and heads off for a final confrontation with the person he now believes is actually responsible.

After having several of their number killed by Clay Burton, Proctor faces down the entire White Supremacist group – though finds he has some help with that before things get… out of hand. However his day is about to take a turn for the worse: the meeting with the Cartel on which he has bet his fortune, reputation… and maybe his life… is explosively gatecrashed by Carrie and Job, wanting nothing more to prove how bad an idea it would be for the Cartel to trust Proctor and to definitely NOT consider Banshee as a base of their criminal intentions. But will the Cartel let them walk away from their meeting? Will they have a choice?

Calvin Bunker now humiliated and powerless heads to a final confrontation with his brother Kurt – determined to kill his estranged brother and then the wife who has abandoned him for his sibling’s bed.

In a complex web of endgames, the fate of many people rests in the end of blood oaths and agendas and past mistakes they can’t take back… and, as usual, no-one is going down quietly.

The problem with a series like Banshee was always going to be how you’d choose to end it.

For a quartet of seasons, the show raised the bar each year. There would be more explicit violence. More explicit sex. More back-stabbing and bloodshed. There came a point where the suspension of disbelief about the damage to body and psyche of its ensemble characters probably required a noose as much as anything else, but if you were a loyal follower you simply smiled, grimaced, opened another bottle of whiskey and kicked back, letting the story take you where it wished. Like a Scotch on the rocks, it was a show that burned the throat, sang you the blues and then told you to man up. And it’s hard to think of any show that did it as well and unapologetically.

This final season was a mixed bag, not always playing to the series strengths.The show dialed back on the explicit sex, going for mere flashes of nudity that seemed almost coy by comparison to previous runs. Instead it cranked up the violence and though there’s few shows on television with such balletic ballistic confrontations, there were times the bloodshed felt forced and a substitute for the nuance Banshee had already proven it could manage with a single look or camera-angle.The addition of Eliza Dushku’s FBI agent Veronica Dawson played out well enough but felt like the stunt casting it was – a role built for her. Without taking anything away from the ‘bad girl’ image that Dushku has perfected since her days as ‘Faith’, the addition of Veronica was somewhat unnecessary to the plot and it’s easy to think her involvement was as carefully choreographed as the sex scenes that were among the tamest the show has seen (though grading on a curve that the show was infamous for, that may not be saying much). The season meandered, the Satantic Cult arc – as we’ve previously said – never fitting the show’s remit as comfortably as all the other grotesques that found their way to the town’s borders and beyond. In the end, that aspect became smoke and mirrors (which was both welcome and frustrating) and the emphasis returned to what the show does best: bubbling-over animosity and grand gestures smothered in blood and broken bones… and bringing to (kind of) conclusion the relationships that framed the entire run.

It was, perhaps, a surprise that most of Banshee‘s ‘heroes’ managed to make it out intact. One could easily predict or even hope that they’d go down in a blaze of glory, but Lucas, Carrie, Job and Fancy all got their walk-into-the-sunset moments, full of nice one-liners and snark. Antony Starr has proven his screen presence, able to handle violence and quieter moments. If Banshee put his name on the map and gave the New Zealander his international break, then one hopes his career continues to climb. He’s one of the few actors who could legitimately find himself in the running for Wolverine if Hugh Jackman departs the role as planned.

Proctor, played by the deft Ulrich Thomsen, is a villain to savour. Like the best bad guys, he’s risen above a character we simply hate… to one we love to hate. Audiences want him to get his just desserts but equally revel in the way he always manages to get out of bad situations and make others suffer. Though written in broader strokes in this farewell season, Proctor remained enigmatic, bruised but not quite completely broken until the end and his last scene was everything we’d expect.

Ivana Milicevic’s Carrie has made her presence known all season, but in singular moments rather than every week: sometimes unusually sidelined – her new vigilante vendetta feeling like the production needing to give her something to do amid the chaos caused by others. That being said, Milicevic’s scenes of one-on-one combat still ranked up there with the likes of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow in the Avengers and Sarah Shahi’s Shaw in Person of Interest). Hoon Lee’s Job is also a character for the ages, an asexual but bitchy snark-machine that owns almost every scene he’s in – like Breaking Bad‘s Saul, there’s probably a series of his own the character could carry could carry without blinking if he so wished. From scarecrow-haired POW to stylish diva and hacker, it’s likely we may miss him most of all.

Matthew Rauch’s Clay Burton goes out, as needed, in much deserved style – revealed as the guy who finally went too far in protecting his beloved boss – a sadistic Smithers to Proctor’s Mr Burns – and pays the price. Frankie Faison’s Sugar Bates has also been underused this year, but he’s made the most of his scenes and gets some of the last laughs – and indeed, the final moment of the show – one he possibly deserves, as Hood notes, given that he probably kept Hood alive in one way or another, throughout. Even Matt Servitto’s Brock, God bless his sardonic wit and expertise with a bazooka (“That’s right. Someone just blew up your f*cking drugs” is the best punch-the-air line of the night), finally gets to be the hero and Sheriff he always dreamed of being.

Hood rides off into the sunset on the motorbike he arrived upon, vanishing down the road to a new chapter, finally able to put the past behind him. Of course, we never did find out Hood’s real name – something the show has carefully avoided throughout. Technically, we do – though the file that gives us all his details remains JUST out of focus enough to prevent even the best squint and PhotoShop enhancement from revealing too much. ‘John Smith’, maybe? Typical.

Al in all, then… not the best season of Banshee, one that suffered from somewhat inconsistent pacing and a wavering of unnecessary story threads, narratives and direction… If the ending came both too quickly and yet felt drawn out, it still managed to pull off a neat-ish chapter-ending finale… a largely satisfying and stylish enough guilty pleasure to which we will always find a reason to raise our dirty, chipped but always half-full glass…

Sláinte

9/10