‘ZeroZeroZero’ Episode 2 Recap: The Living and the Dead

As a critic, I consider myself to be in the liking-things business. I go into every show I watch with as few expectations as possible, save one: I expect that what I’m watching will be good, until proven otherwise. That’s it! I’m never like “Oh brother, this looks awful, but here we go”; even in cases where I suspect a show might not be for me, I hold out the hope of being pleasantly surprised. Some of the shows I’ve had the most fun writing about—The Leftovers, Halt and Catch Fire, Billions—took the better part of a whole season to get to that point, but when they got there, whoa baby, I sure became a fan. I’m always open to starting to like something, from the moment the premiere begins until the credits roll on the last episode I’ve been assigned to review.

I say all that to say this: The second episode of ZeroZeroZero kicks twelve kinds of ass. Hallelujah!

After a pilot episode that largely left me cold, I found myself wowed over and over in the show’s second hour (“Tampico Skies”)—by the plot, the performances, the imagery, the overall tone. It’s as if it transformed into another, better show—a streamlined, iron-hard show—from one episode to the next. I’ve never seen anything quite like it…and man, I sure am eager to see more.

If I have a single quibble with the episode, in fact, it’s that it hogged too much of the good stuff, keeping it out of the premiere where it may have done the show some good. I’m thinking here of the episode’s single biggest twist, the audacity of which made my jaw drop the moment I realized what the show was doing: the death of Gabriel Byrne’s character, Edward Lynwood.

It took some time to happen, mind you; he didn’t die there on the ground outside the restaurant, bathed in bullet casings and glowing light. His daughter Emma physically hauled him into a getaway car, helped him alternately sit up or lie down as the pursuing army soldiers fired at the vehicle, loaded him onto a plane, and got him into the family home before his heart, wounded when he took a shot to the chest of his bulletproof vest, finally gave out.

If the show had tacked all this onto the end of Episode 1, my review would have read very differently indeed; as it stands, this successful Ned Starking of a main character played by a marquee name winds up becoming just one part of a hugely successful second hour. For example, I love how the Lynwood siblings deal with his death, lounging languidly on the bed next to their father’s corpse, literally smoking a joint and holding hands over his dead body. It tells you so much about how close the three of them were, how at ease with one another, that not even death can keep them from their father’s side.

The staging takes advantage of the washed-out, soft features of both Andrea Riseborough and Dane DeHaan, the latter of whom gives the performance of the episode when his character Chris delivers a fiery, teary eulogy for the man who held the family together during the decline and death of the kids’ mom from Huntington’s disease.

But Riseborough more than holds her own as Emma, the new leader of the family. When the beastly Don Stefano flies over from Italy and breaks into the family home in an attempt to strongarm them into connecting him with their Mexican suppliers directly, you can watch her adjust to his sexist insistence on addressing Chris rather than her in real time. When Stefano lays his hands on her, she plays possum enough to get him off her back—but the next thing you know she’s cutting him out of the trafficking business, communicating directly with his grandfather via their secret newspaper-obituary code and showing up at a meeting without Stefano’s knowledge or permission. Yet she’s also capable enough of adjusting to the Italians’ way of doing things by sending Chris to mind the shipment as it travels across the Atlantic, recognizing his importance as Edward’s male heir. It’s strong writing and strong acting, working together to demonstrate who these people are and what makes them tick.

Speaking of which, we learn a whole lot more about Vampire, the Leyra cartel’s man inside the anti-drug military task force. He’s not tormented by his dual loyalties in that saggy, clichéd way I was afraid of, oh no, not at all. As played by Harold Torres, he is a stone-cold killer, capable of executing one of his own men along with two sacrificial lambs from the cartel in order to throw his captain off his own scent.

Even the scapegoat soldier transcends the usual good honest family man cliches: Although he may be all of those things, we discover this by seeing him going down on his very pregnant wife. That beats opening up his wallet to show the sergeant a picture of his kids, doesn’t it?

Much of the Mexico sequence takes place without any hint of the show’s ominous score by the post-rock band Mogwai, too, lending itself to long stretches of minimal to no dialogue, where the sounds of the city, the music of nightclubs, and the evangelical sermons Vampire listens to on his headphones are all we hear. Couple that with Torres’s laconic performance as Vampire and director Stefano Sollima’s restrained camerawork and it’s almost like we’re watching season two of Too Old to Die Young, that’s how strong and vivid a picture is being painted here.

And I haven’t even mentioned Don Minu’s narrow escape from Italian cops, involving an escape hatch in his bathroom, a plunge down a ladder that breaks his hand in horrifying ways, and his insistence on being operated on without an anesthetic. Clearly this was his grandson’s big move against him, and it didn’t go to plan, but it did make for a hell of an opening sequence for the episode.

It’s echoed, in a way, by the closing sequence, in which Vampire leads a raid on Chris’s ship, the identity of which his captain has tortured out of a captured Leyra gangster. Vampire descends out of the sky and knocks Chris out, true to his name. But he winds up killing his captain and another “good” soldier in order to ensure that the shipment stays on course after all, going so far as to coach Chris and the ship’s captain as to how they can avoid detection. He even leaves them with a religious benediction, which sounds as weird coming out of the mouth of a guy who just assaulted one of the men to whom he’s giving God’s blessing as you’d expect.

I could go on and on, really—about the shots of insects crawling in the Lynwood’s garden, about the costuming that emphasizes Riseborough’s lanky frame and DeHaan’s pasty stoner’s mien, or that incredible final image of the attack helicopter trailing bodies beneath it over the ocean. It’s just a terrific episode from top to bottom. I’m so glad to be back in the liking-things business.

READ NEXT: ‘ZeroZeroZero’ Episode 3 Recap: Smoke on the Water

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch ZeroZeroZero Episode 2 ("Tampico Skies") on Amazon Prime