‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ Episode 6 Recap: Up Where We Belong

Ron Lafferty is on a spiritual journey. Not one that takes him safely to the preservation of his marriage, mind you; oh no, not at all. His wife Dianna, desperate to save herself and her children from her husband and his increasingly erratic family, moves away to an undisclosed location with Ron’s own bishop’s help. In this she is aided by Brenda Lafferty, wife of Ron’s kid brother Allen. Brenda and Dianna tried, in vain, to get church leadership to intervene on their behalf; the leadership simply tasked Brenda with the responsibility of getting the entire Lafferty family back into the fold. So much for that.

But Ron is not in the way of seeing how his own conduct and that of his brothers is what led to the end of his marriage. No, in Under The Banner Of Heaven Episode 6 he’s off chasing spiritual enlightenment from a series of snake-oil salesmen. First, he heads out to the Oregon woods, where one Brother Bryant and his sister-wives greet Ron with glasses of wine and co-ed naked hot tub encounters. (Bryant is the acolyte of a polygamist Mormon banished from the fundamentalist fold for being too liberal. It’s complicated!) Half drunk, half dizzied by the willing women surrounding him, Ron proclaims that this is how he always believed faith was supposed to feel. He and Bryant exchange a lengthy kiss, after Bryant proclaims Ron to be the “One mighty and strong” prophesied of old.

In the end, if it wasn’t clear already, Ron is a broken man. In short order, he lost his father (for whom he denied potentially life-saving medical treatment), his church (which has excommunicated him and his awful brother Dan), his business (which failed because he couldn’t get a loan, in part because of his wife Dianna), and his wife and children. So when his coterie of would-be fundamentalists makes contact with another polygamist radical, the Prophet Onias, Ron is all too willing to believe the man’s visions of a “dream mine” beneath which they will find refuge. And their entire group agrees that Ron is not just a one mighty and strong, but the one mighty and strong—a leader who will restore the Church of Latter-day Saints to its roots. Their first order of business: Restoring Dianna to the fold, or cleansing her sins with murderous blood atonement.

Dragged along in all this is Allen, Ron and Dan’s younger brother. He is the least radical of his siblings, but he’s still been convinced that the modern-day LDS is some kind of sham, picking and choosing the tenets of belief to which they cling instead of following the original texts laid down by the likes of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. You’re left to wonder if, had Allen been more attentive to his wife Brenda’s reservations instead of angrily storming out of their meeting with church leadership, this whole disaster could have been avoided.

But disaster struck regardless, and it falls on Mormon cop Jeb Pyre to pick up the pieces. And sure enough, he’s having an increasingly difficult time doing so. 

“I tried to defeat the Church in my own mind,” Allen tells him, “see what kind of person was left behind. I read our history, all of it. All that ‘personal revelation’—it seems to me that it’s just men listening to their own selfish desires and calling it God so they can justify…anything.” In this it seems that Allen is following the guidance of his father-in-law, a liberal bishop, who goes so far as to sing pop songs at him and offer him the forbidden treat of chocolate in one of the episode’s most affecting scenes.

Allen tells Jeb that he has a book laying out the LDS church’s past in black and white, which Jeb dredges up from the evidence locker and reads himself, through his own tears. What Allen has unearthed is enough to shake the faith of even a happy family man like Jeb, whose own wife tells him he’s on his own in this struggle. Pyre spends much of this episode in or near tears; he’s grieving his own faith as much as he’s grieving the dead.

And where are we left, in the end? With Dan Lafferty’s browbeaten wife Mathilda, staring at the ground as if remembering her lines as she warns Brenda about blood atonement. With Jacob Lafferty, brain damaged by his father’s beating, sticking up a convenience store. With Detective Bill Taba arriving at Onias’s dream mine, invited in by the bearded racist himself. With Pyre, sobbing in his car in his home’s garage. In all cases, faith does not heal, it destroys. With only one episode to go, the only question is how deep the damage will go.

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.