Well, Cary, you were kind of a blank, and then you made us hate you because you made Lucky a mark. Sure, she’s done a lot of bad shit in her life — Lucky Episode 5 alludes to it, entitled “Are We Bad People?” — but she didn’t deserve that. Not inside the life of crime where you both have lived. But Cary, we still didn’t want to see you buy it. There was a euphoric lovers-on-the-run energy crackling in the final moments of your life, as you and Lucky put the pedal to the metal in your latest stolen vehicle. We even had an inkling your car-crash/gut-shot death could be part of the con. But nobody runs forever. And now Lucky’s alone again.
Except for Bloody Teddy, her only companion. The bloodstained stuffed animal pops from the top of the laptop backpack as she flees Cary’s body and the scene of the crash, back to the first collision, where Lucky climbs in next to an elderly motorist victim. It’s a cocktail of shock, emotions, and adrenaline she’s feeling, cut with the propulsive energy of always being on the grift, and the responding medics allow Lucky to ride with her “grandmother” to the ER. This is where her world fades. She passes out in a hospital hallway, just as an injured Special Agent Billie Rand is wheeled into a nearby trauma bay.
How does a gangster mourn a criminal son? If the gangster is played by Annette Bening, continually fantastic in Lucky, it’s with a mixture of a mother’s grief, steely dismissal, and the personal regret of a boss. “Did I kill him?” She asks Harris Dutch. “Did I put him in that car?” Priscilla says she could have sent Cary to boarding school. Insulated him from the life. But Dutch is more philosophical. We always like it when the crime genre allows space for the thoughts of its more A-to-B, one-dimensional characters, and Clifton Collins Jr. does a lot with Dutch’s little speech.
“It’s normal in bad moments to look back and do a warped accounting of sorts. We might want to find someone to blame, even ourselves. But that’s not how life works in real-time. Life’s just a million random choices you make day after day, year after year. You can manipulate them to add up to anything you want, but that doesn’t make it true.” We wonder if all this goes through the cowboy gunman’s brain whenever he puts somebody down. Priscilla, grateful for Dutch’s presence, since the rest of her life is populated with ciphers and people she uses, chides him a little. “I don’t know if you’re being wise, or just full of shit.”
And what did she mean? “Wayne should be told.” This episode of Lucky reveals the leverage we’ve felt Priscilla had since the beginning, the deeper connection between gangster money launderer and hilltop criminal world power broker. Wayne was Cary’s father. Priscilla brings their son with her, cremated in an urn, to Wayne’s open-air poured-cement mansion. He didn’t even send flowers to the memorial service. She’s forcing him to acknowledge the child he never would in life. Priscilla slaps Wayne with a percussive grunt. “I’m not afraid of you anymore!”
It’s a rough scene. She’s just thrown Cary’s remains at his biological father, who deflects the urn and produces a pistol from somewhere in his rich guy sweatsuit. He pushes Priscilla onto a settee, jams the gun in her face. “If you were anyone else in the world, I’d have killed you a long time ago. Clean up this mess” — that’s their son he’s continuing to dismiss, even as ash — “and then go get my money.” Ouch. Wayne Whittaker is the worst guy, and it takes Priscilla a second to process just how terrible he is.
“Are we bad people?” It’s a question Young Lucky asks her father back in the day, as the parameters of their grifter’s life become apparent to the adolescent. John’s application of the laws of nature over anything man-made, like good and evil, for instance, feels more like a version of how he’s always justified the life to himself. But in the present, as Lucky mourns Cary — she breathes deeply of his coat, remembering his essence — she thinks she’s getting tired of being this way. Tired of the grift. Tired of being always wired for it. Because look what it finally took.
And then her world changes again. Mangling Bloody Teddy in her anguish and frustration sets off a recording inside the toy. “Apple. Hamster. Karma. Snow.” It’s Cary’s voice. “Identity. Purpose. Fossil. Mushroom.” These are the customized seed words to unlock the digital wallet, and when Lucky frantically types them into the laptop, she’s suddenly $9,913,432 richer.
Billie Rand and her team were left with no leads after Cary and Lucky’s mad dash. The guy with the money was dead, and Lucky was in the wind. Until Rand thought of John Armstrong. We don’t know how easy it actually is for an FBI agent to just call in one favor and boost a prisoner from federal lockup. But as we have with the other leaps of convenience Lucky has made, we will allow it. Because John being out unites the father-daughter duo in the present for the first time.
Where do they go now? Lucky surmised it was Rand who sprung her dad, and she tells John he won’t like her resulting plan. They walk together into the open, kneel, raise their hands. “Are you sure about this?” John asks his daughter. “You’re asking me this now?” And Agent Rand arrives to arrest them both. Suddenly it’s bring your daughter to jail day.
Scratch-Offs for Lucky Episode 5 (“Are We Bad People?”):
- “Never lay your cards on the table…” The way Episode 5 fires up the buzzy electro-punk of “Mq9” by Automatic, as our grifter fam’s getting arrested, makes us think this is all part of Lucky’s play.
- But before they were arrested, before John was suddenly released, Lucky seemed to be using some of the nine million bucks to buy a seat on a private jet. Where was she going? Maybe it’s still their actual destination. One thing’s for sure: the grift will continue.
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.