“How come everything this girl touches goes up in flames?” This is an observation from Gates (Mo McRae), one of Agent Rand’s guys, as they survey what’s left of the Arizona gas station after Lucky’s run-in with Harris Dutch in Lucky Episode 3 on Apple TV. And we’ll allow that it’s basically the same observation Dutch made in Episode 2 — “How can someone so small cause so much trouble?” — because what neither the FBI nor Priscilla’s hired gun seem to grasp is that Lucky herself did not cause or touch any of this. Alright, yes, we’ve seen the flashbacks. She has led a life of crime from a young age. But since we met her, Lucky has only been reacting to shit other people did.
Let’s get inside another one of those flashbacks. This is before the skim-from-biofuels scheme went south, and John Armstrong is at a refinery bribing a state regulator. Priscilla and Dutch are there, too, and the money launderer says she needs to put a pin in it. (“We’re generating more cash than I can safely move.”) But the most substantive part, besides Agent Rand surveilling the entire meeting, is an angry Lucky. “You know I don’t want anything to do with this,” she tells John Armstrong. “This.” (The scheme.) “Her.” (Priscilla.) “All of it.” But John, who we know eventually goes to prison for this, her, all of it, just tells Lucky to trust him. “We got a good thing going here.”
And maybe they did — right up until Cary Masterson skated with the skimmed 10 million. Since then, Lucky has been forced to kill a henchman who attacked her. She has witnessed the harming of federal agents. And in Episode 3 of Lucky (“Read the Room”), she rides in Dutch’s pickup bed all the way to Priscilla’s Spanish Mission-style horse ranch in Malibu, where she promptly witnesses another murder. Sorry you had no insight into Cary or the money, random guy Priscilla abducted. “Bummer,” she says with offhand cruelty, and orders Dutch to silence him.
We’re willing to move with Lucky as it spills blood like this, without fully justifying these people’s motives, because what we’re really into is Anya Taylor-Joy just reacting as her character. Lucky is somehow not seen as she departs Priscilla’s property. She discovers a kids’ birthday party at the neighboring mansion, enters smoothly under false pretenses, and helps herself to shoes and an elegant wrap dress in silken cream. “Take a Birkin while you’re at it, she won’t notice,” a drunken party guest says of the homeowner, and Lucky supports this notion with another instance of her running grifter’s flashback.
In her memory, at a different kids’ party, John guides Young Lucky (Quinn Aune) into thieving. “Invisibility is a matter of environment.” And he instructs his daughter in how to turn invisible as she surreptitiously lifts gift envelopes stuffed with cash and wallets from unattended purses. Lucky also turns invisible in the present, and soon she’s blasting down the Pacific Coast Highway in a matte black Audi, stolen from the party’s valet stand. We could watch a grifter improvise her grift all day, and Taylor-Joy is a delight in these scenes.
Lucky also succeeded where Priscilla’s heavy hand couldn’t. That guy whose abduction and murder she ordered really didn’t know anything. Cary actually contacted his neighbor (Nicole Chanel Williams), a woman who makes fake IDs out of her apartment. And from that encounter, Lucky deduces her deadbeat husband’s newly-constructed fake life. What does Cary mean to her, now that he double-crossed her? Lucky’s meeting with the ID maker is cut with more flashbacks, this time to intimacy with her technically-still-husband.
“Do not get it in your head to have some kind of reckoning with him over this.” That’s John Armstrong, who now has a burner phone in his prison cell. His daughter listens to his advice from her stolen Audi, parked by the beach in La Jolla, where Cary has a home under his fake information. But Jailbird John does not know the lengths Lucky has already gone to reckon with her husband. She tracked down the real estate bro who leased Cary the property, endured his ridiculous come-ons, let him think he got her drunk. And then, shakedown. She turned the tables on him and threatened to text his wife. Just another someone who could not see the real Lucky through her cloak of invisibility.
At the house, while an oblivious Cary swims in the Pacific, Lucky takes a box cutter to a few couch cushions. She doesn’t find the hard cash he took. But she does recover a loaded pistol, shatters a few pricey bottles of liquor — because fuck this guy — and finds Cary’s laptop, conveniently open to his digital wallet. “Enter your twelve-word seed phrase” goes the prompt, and we can see the account is flush with over nine million bucks. This is right when her husband walks in, and from the looks they give each other in the kitchen, both Cary and Lucky expected this exact moment. She is no longer invisible. Neither is he.
Scratch-Offs for Lucky Episode 3 (“Read the Room”):
- Lucky is building nicely on its Fiona Apple-sung theme song with a yen for featuring women in music. Episode 3 of the series reaches back to 2007 for “Into a Swan,” the first single from Mantaray, Siouxsie Sioux’s lone solo album, pairs that with the excellent “She Will” from Savages, and reaches into the Sub Pop archives for “Mine” from Finom.
- Decider put it on the record – “[Timothy] Olyphant has one of the all-time great heads of hair among showbiz men” – which is why we’re fascinated with the various things Olyphant’s weave is doing in Lucky. As a present-day convict and in the frequent flashbacks, John Armstrong rocks a version of a pompadour that looks like it lost its way.
- “This isn’t just about the money. It’s about a zero-tolerance policy. No one steals from me.” Wayne Whittaker’s latest conversation with Priscilla is full of more threats. But we don’t yet know enough about this guy. How serious is he? Remember, Wayne almost choked her to death last episode, then inexplicably stopped. We suspect Priscilla has some sort of leverage over Whittaker, as yet unrevealed.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.