‘Task’ Episode 5 Deliver TV’s Best Cliff-Hanger of the Year

Exclusive: Task creator Brad Ingelsby broke down episode 5 for Esquire. You can read it here.

Detectives, I cracked the case. I don’t want to pat myself on the back too much, but my efforts rewinding and rewatching the failed sting in Task episode 4 were fully rewarded this week. I caught the mole in the task force. That’s right folks, the cellphone switcheroo didn’t go unnoticed by this viewer. Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait as long as Philadelphia’s Process Era to reap my rewards.

Twenty minutes into episode 5, the mole reveals himself. Jayson—fresh from killing Cliff (Raúl Castillo) last week, even though he didn’t learn anything from the trash collector about Robbie (Tom Pelphrey)—confirms that someone from the task force slipped him Ray’s phone (with the Flyers wallpaper) right before the sting. That phone needs to head back to evidence as soon as possible. So, Jayson meets with the mole to swap the phone back with whatever phony phone the mole used. Take a wild guess who appears.

Yes, Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel) is the mole. Not only did Frankel switch sides as Sir Criston Cole in House of the Dragon, but the actor is double-crossing his team members again in Task.

“I’m cutting things way too close this time,” he tells Jayson. There’s a kid who is “very much alive” still missing, and now he’s stealing evidence straight out of the locker. If Tom (Mark Ruffalo) and Co. weren’t so focused on finding Sam, I’m sure falsified evidence room visits would have given him away by now. I don’t even know if I can trust his “we can’t have sex in your marriage bed” aversions with Lizzie now either. When she jokingly texts him an ad for a “POST-DIVORCE HOUSE EXORCISM,” it sets in just how crushed she’ll be when she finds out Anthony’s the mole. We might know—but nobody else does. Yet.

Robbie Really F*cked Up

Remember when Robbie punched that random guy at the truck depot? Well, it was just the latest in a string of bad decisions that started with a really awful idea: robbing drug houses. He’s still trying to move the fentanyl and find out what happened to Cliff, but the walls are closing in on him. The man he punched is at the police station describing his appearance to a sketch artist. Meanwhile, Perry investigates his home to look for clues and spots a picture of Robbie and Cliff.

When Eryn (Margarita Levieva) tells Robbie that Jayson came home with blood all over him—and that she’s certain that he killed Cliff—Robbie loses it. He looks up in the sky and spots a hawk flying by, offering a moment of peace. He could turn himself in, work with the FBI to catch the Dark Hearts, and maybe even reduce his sentence. But Robbie’s in too deep. In one of the most confusing scenes in Task so far, he meets with Freddy Frias (Elvis Nolasco) and the Dominicans to discuss a deal. Basically, all you need to know is that both parties are preparing to double-cross each other. Robbie isn’t moving the drugs until he’s certain the Dark Hearts aren’t involved, and Freddy is planning to sell him out to the Dark Hearts anyway.

On the other side, Aleah (Thuso Mbedu) is having a fantastic day as a detective. She may have lost her sense of smell—another dark story courtesy of series creator Brad Ingelsby—but at least she’s out of that abusive relationship. Aleah has forensics look at Sam’s bucket that he left at the trucking depot, which results in DNA evidence pointing to Maeve Pendergrast. Then, she digs into Maeve and uncovered the family’s connection to the Dark Hearts. So, Tom decides to check it out for himself.

Perry… Soprano?

In one of the most heartbreaking Sopranos episodes, Tony sends Silvio to kill Christopher’s fiancée, Adriana, for working with the feds. It draws a sharp comparison to Eryn’s murder in episode 5. Perry heads to the woods immediately after her meeting with Robbie and drowns her in the lake for betraying them. Much like Tony Soprano, it’s tough to imagine how Perry thinks he can keep this from Jayson moving forward. He knows that he’ll have to kill him too, but where does the violence end? How could anyone in the story see a way out other than death?

Mark… Columbo?

Sorry, I got a little dark there. Let’s hop into something a bit funnier—i.e., Mark Ruffalo’s spot-on Columbo impression. When Tom Brandis arrives as Robbie’s house, he kicks into one of the best reenactments of the Peter Falk character I’ve ever seen. I’ve never thought about it before episode 5, but Ruffalo could have made an excellent Columbo reboot.

It’s all about acting clueless. Do whatever you can to make yourself as unassuming as possible while pretending like you can’t already tell that they’re your main suspect. First, Tom asks if he can borrow his pen—a classic Columbo move. He uses his restroom just to pour a drink down the drain while he looks around. Asks him to pull up a chair. Acts tired. You name it.

Then, I remember that no one really threatened Columbo with a gun on his show. This is Task, where guns are more than just the murder weapon in a bag. “You’re a little sneak, aren’t you Tom?” Robbie asks him at gunpoint. “I know you weren’t pissing in that bathroom. Nobody pisses like that.” It’s the most aggression that we’ve seen from Robbie since the opening drug bust—and when he punched that one guy—but it’s just the start of what’s arguably the greatest scene is Task yet. Let’s get into it.

This Is The Juice, Folks

So, here we are. After four and a half episodes, Tom and Robbie have finally met—Tom at the wheel, and Robbie in the backseat aiming a gun at him. Country music playing on the radio. Robbie holding a giant duffle bag full of drugs. It should be tense, and yet it’s oddly peaceful.

Robbie clearly wants to talk. He’s doesn’t give off the vibe of someone who has ever tried therapy, and Tom’s expertise as a former priest who visited hospitals may just come in handy here. So, Tom starts talking about his wife. “Susan was an atheist, so we argued quite a bit about what to say to people who were dying,” he tells Robbie. “She believed that this is our only life.”

Robbie is team Susan. He knows there’s a chance he won’t walk away from this new drug drop-off—especially after what happened to Cliff last episode—and he likely assumes that Maeve took Sam into the station. She told him she would, and she did. “I’ve never once felt God in my life,” he says. “People want to believe that there’s more than this ‘cause if this is really all there is, that’s too fucking depressing. But there’s nothing else after this.”

He’s scared. He asks Tom about what people’s final moments were like as he read them their last rites. Tom switches the conversation to Robbie’s family. He’s trying to convince this man not to go through with whatever he’s about to do. So, Tom works in a little metaphor about birding. He tells him that a summer tanager appeared in his backyard, even though it was out of season for that bird to appear in Pennsylvania. “It’s called a vagrant,” he says. A bird that’s strayed so far from its normal range that it’s forgotten how to find its way home. “Most of them don’t survive,” he warns. Sound like someone we know?

“I’ve kidnapped the world’s most depressing human,” Robbie jokes. He orders Tom to take the next exit so that they can’t track him on the highway. “Tom, I like you, but I don’t like you enough to let you fuck up my plan,” he tells him. He walks Tom into the Bushkill woods at gunpoint and drops the act.

He asks for Tom to help Maeve and makes him promise. Then, Tom tries one last time to convince Robbie to call off his plan. “What’d you call me again, a vagrant?” he asks the detective. “Even if I wanted to go home, I don’t know the way no more.”

So, Task shows Tom walking away to safety as Robbie accepts whatever fate lies ahead for him. Thankfully, the HBO series shows few minutes of Tom walking in the woods to let me catch my breath. I never thought Robbie would kill Tom, but I didn’t expect such a beautiful exchange between the two leads.

I also couldn’t believe that this episode still ends with Tom catching back up with Robbie at Bushkill. With the two pointing their guns at each other and Tom yelling, “It’s over,” it’s one heckuva cliff-hanger to wait out until next week. Scratch that. It might just be the best cliff-hanger of the year.

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