‘Bloodline’ Recap, Season 2 Episode 1: If You See The Vulture Coming

“We’re not bad people,” went the tagline of the first season of Bloodline, Netflix’s Florida Keys bourgeois noir, “but we did a bad thing.” There’s a lot contained in that line, especially coming from straight-arrow John Rayburn (Kyle Chandler). First, it’s a story he’s telling himself. He’s accepting some responsibility for the death of his brother Danny and the fractures running through his family, but not all of it. John never gives voice to the idea that doing bad things is what makes bad people. You can see Kyle Chandler wrestle with it, though: staring out the car window, or unable to meet his wife’s gaze as she talks about Danny.

But there’s also a hidden observation there about playing to one’s strengths. The convoluted scheme to hide Danny’s body back in the 13th episode of the show’s first season, making it look like he fled to Miami with Wayne Lowry’s drugs, barely worked. The tension of keeping up a lie about Danny—to their spouses, to their mother—is breaking the Rayburns down. So perhaps they’re not bad people after all. If they were, they wouldn’t sweat a murder.

In the Season 2 premiere, Lowry acts as the obvious contrast. In a conversation with his partner in a frosty fishery, and in absentia as the DEA task force discusses him, we see that Lowry is cleaning house. Everyone connected to him and his operation is missing or presumed dead. But does Lowry wander the docks shirtless, or phase out while staring at evocative objects? Hell no! He’s hosting the neighborhood kids while they play video games! He’s grousing about answering the doorbell for the (presumed) pizza guy. He’d be the gruff dad playing straight man in any primetime sitcom, if he weren’t involved in, y’know, all those deaths.

See also Nolan Rayburn, Danny’s apparent son (Owen Teague). It’s unclear why he showed up at John’s house, aside from the obvious narrative reason of making life hard on the Rayburns. John puts some of his detective skills to work, alternately prodding and cajoling Nolan for answers. But it’s Nolan who grills John, asking him if he’d been to Danny’s place in Miami, or if he’s afraid of him. “Am I afraid of you?”, John echoes, which, as a detective, he must know is an obvious evasion.

For the time being, I’m ambivalent on Nolan as a character. His introduction to the story is just a little too pat. It’s not clear how old he’s supposed to be: he talks to John like an equal, rather than like a sullen adolescent, but a call from John to Miami indicates Nolan’s in the system for runaways. And he apes Danny’s mannerisms a little too well: the way he ducks his head, fishing in his breast pocket for cigarettes. But for all that, it’s fascinating to watch this teenage boy wrongfoot John in one conversation after another.

Compare these cool customers to the Rayburns. Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz), always the hot-tempered one, is losing it. He’s jittery enough that even Lil Jake feels the need to check him. When Marco brings him along to get his expert opinion on the boat Danny was found in, he blurts out a helpful idea about insurance fraud, then gets angrily defensive. He comes achingly close to blurting the whole scheme to Belle, then covers it up with his concerns about money troubles at the marina. Someone should tell Kevin that he needs downers to calm his nerves, not a snootful of coke in the morning. Of course, someone should also tell him that a man with half a dozen kilos of pure Colombian hidden beneath his dock doesn’t have to have money problems, but I understand the market in the Keys is a little tight right now.

Meg (Linda Cardellini) is not adjusting well to life in New York, though it’s hard to tell how much of that is from obstruction of justice and how much is from the travails of Big Law. She falls asleep in her office over caskets of Chinese food and snaps at her assistant. When Susannah invites her out to schmooze some clients, she gets unprofessionally hammered. I understand the desire for Meg to break free of her old life, but the regular conference calls with her siblings indicate that she’s not out of the woods yet. New York isn’t a haven for her—it’s a cage. And yet when Susannah suggests she go visit her family for the weekend, she tries to wriggle out of it. Home is the anchor around Meg’s waist, limiting her range and threatening to pull her under.

And John? The moral center of the Rayburn universe?

With Kevin flaking and Meg a thousand miles away, John is tasked with holding the conspiracy together. Not only does he have to stage three-way calls to keep his siblings’ stories straight, he has to host conference calls with the whole family—Diana and Sally included—where he keeps up the lie. He has to keep the sheriff and the DEA on Lowry as Danny’s killer, even as Marco pursues other leads and even as John quietly hides the truth. He has to play innocent when Diana asks about Nolan, and restrain his temper when he finds Nolan chatting up his daughter Jane.

But on top of all this, John thinks he has to lie to his mother. Sally (Sissy Spacek) knows about Miami—though obviously not the full extent of it—thanks to Potts’ diligent detective work (the look on John’s face when he learns Potts is staying on at the Rayburn’s inn is priceless). She gives John a chance to come clean: “what else are you keeping from me?” But, like Kevin when confronted by Belle, John does the smart thing: makes a phony confession, a promise to keep Sally in the loop with whatever other leads he uncovers (if he doesn’t bury them first). Sally stalks off.

This perhaps is the great tragedy of the Rayburn family: making the best decisions they can, given what they know, only to realize how little they know. John didn’t know Sally already knew he was lying. He didn’t know that Nolan was in cahoots with Eric O’Bannon; otherwise, he might not have left the boy unattended in his home while dining with his family. And he couldn’t have known that Danny, as one last kiss-off to his loving family, left a tape with Lowry documenting John’s entanglement with Lowry’s drugs. But in the end, we understand why Lowry has been so cool with the prospect of a DEA investigation. He holds leverage over one of the lead investigators, and he has zero problem using it. Wayne Lowry is a bad person—and, ultimately, John Rayburn is not.

Miscellanea

• If Nolan is playing John, why give up his mother’s name? Presuming of course that Evangelina is actually Nolan’s mother; the $5000 that Robert was regularly paying her suggests otherwise. But why offer the name at all? To prove his bona fides? To start John on an investigation that will lead to a more damning truth?
• The scene where John alternately yells at, laughs with, and weeps with Kevin was my favorite of the episode. The subtext is transparent—John needs to convince Kevin he has everything under control, even though he obviously doesn’t—yet remains unspoken, portrayed perfectly by Chandler and Butz breaking down.
• A crime thriller would have shown Jose Munoz getting capped after Lowry and his partner discuss his fate. But this is a tense family drama with crime ladled in. So instead, someone wearily closes a sliding door and that’s all we need to see.
• Potts is carrying a torch for Sally, right? In that stoic Baby Boomer, men-who-served way? Is his wife going to come looking for him?

[Watch Bloodline on Netflix]

John Perich (@perich) lives and writes in the Boston area. When he’s not scrutinizing pop culture at Overthinking It, he blogs at his own site, Periscope Depth. His latest crime thriller, Too Late to Run, is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other retailers.