‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ Episode 7 Recap: True Faith

It’s a race against time. Not just the quest to find Ron and Dan Lafferty before they kill again, nor the mission to locate Ron’s wife Dianna and their children to make sure they’re safe and sound. I’m talking about the race Jeb Pyre runs to solve the case before his faith collapses entirely. 

That’s the real dramatic engine that powers “Blood Atonement,” Under the Banner of Heaven‘s emotional finale. “How do you do it?” Jeb asks his partner Bill Taba at one point. “Walking through life with no compass?” Bill responds by getting out of their car and taking in the view, saying that in the absence of God, such beauty is even more miraculous, and adding that more often than not, your gut feeling is all the compass you need. 

Ironically, this brings Jeb back to contemplating his LDS faith, and the myths and prophesies that are driving the increasingly fanatical Dan and Ron. Jeb and Bill have tracked them to Reno, where they’re gambling in order to raise the funds necessary to continue their murder spree. (They’re also banging a cocktail waitress; that whole polygamy thing has its benefits if you get horny between brutal slayings, I guess.) In a dream in which Dan kills him, Jeb recalls the dream-Dan saying he is the One. 

That’s the key to catching them, Jeb realizes: A power struggle will soon erupt between Ron and Dan, since there can only be one “One Mighty and Strong.”

Sure enough, Jeb winds up finding and arresting the brothers in a casino men’s room while Ron is in the middle of trying to choke his brother Dan to death, having received a revelation from Heavenly Father that Dan had to die for their work to continue. Once he recovers, Dan doesn’t seem the least bit flustered by the event. He proclaims for all to hear that he was following God’s laws, then proclaims himself the prophet Elijah as he’s being put into a squad car. There’s no shaking his faith, or the insanity that has taken faith’s shape in his mind.

In a way, Under the Banner of Heaven winds up being as much about fragile masculinity as it is about religion, though religion no doubt shaped the masculinity of the people involved. When Ron’s estranged wife Dianna returns to town in hopes of rescuing the other brothers’ wives before it’s too late, she confronts their brother Sam. “You’re not special,” she tells him, arguing that he and the other brothers turned to fundamentalism because they were unable to confront their own failures.

And that’s what it all comes down to, isn’t it? A failing chiropractic practice, a failing construction company, a refusal to pay fines and taxes—this is the quotidian bad luck and bad decisions that led the Lafferty brothers to collectively go mad. Every setback is refashioned into a challenge to be overcome with ever more fervent and violent faith. Anything but admitting that such mighty men as they could possibly have steered the plane into the mountain on their own.

Ditto the polygamy concept. These small little men, losing control in other aspects of their lives, no doubt treasured the power and thrill of having multiple wives (or “wives,” in the sense that simply having sex with a woman constitutes marriage to them). It’s an extension of the control they wish to have over their own original wives, and a reflection of the misogynistic rage that drove them to kill Brenda Lafferty and her daughter over her perceived meddling in their affairs. 

And all the while, Jeb increasingly questions his own faith—his disgust with church leaders who are attempting to spin the story; his struggle with the lies the church tells about its early days, including a brutal massacre; the concept of his dominion over his wife, which he petulantly asserts even as he’s pursuing a case driven by that kind of thinking, and even as his wife threatens to leave him over his shaky belief. 

But Jeb does capture his suspects, and is able to return home. The show ends with Jeb and his dementia-plagued mother looking out at the view, with a satisfied Jeb proclaiming it miracle enough.

Maybe that’s the message of Under the Banner of Heaven. The Lafferty brothers were never satisfied with what they had; having been brought up to believe they were special, the emotionally collapsed in the face of evidence that they weren’t, and had to rebuild themselves into ever more fanatical versions of themselves in order to sustain the fantasy that God had great things in store for them. They fought so hard to be great men that people had to die to sustain their delusion. Jeb’s life is far from perfect, but in that final moment he appreciates it for what it is. Rejecting the little men who use God as a cudgel so they feel better than the women they’re beating with it—isn’t that what we all desperately need to do?

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.