Tulsa King Recap: For Whom the Car Tolls

Photo: Brian Douglas/Paramount+

Dwight Manfredi’s driver and right-hand man, Tyson, is a good son. When he sees his plumber father, Mark, struggling with his work van for the umpteenth time, Tyson takes advantage of his boss’s trip to advantage and shuttles his father from job to job all day. He chats with the clients, he bonds with his dad, and he positively delights in how much fun his old man is having in Dwight’s expensive Lincoln Navigator. What better way to commemorate the day, support his family, and do something nice for his father than buy the car off Dwight — no freebies here, it has to be earned — and give it to his dad?

Yeah, about that. The whole time Tyson drives his dad around, a white car with tinted windows keeps popping up behind them. Dwight has already warned Tyson to keep his head on a swivel, so we know trouble’s in town. Tyson ought to know better than anyone.

In short, giving someone you ostensibly care about a car you are pretty sure is being followed by hitmen is like something Larry David would have done in the Fatwa! season of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The bombing itself is straight out of The Godfather, with Tyson realizing — too late! — what’s happening when he sees the perp speed away, calling out to his father in vain. The scenes are so similar I half expected him to yell “Apollonia!” instead of “Dad!”

But there’s a lot about this episode of Tulsa King that feels familiar, for better or worse. In addition to the Godfather homage, the script, by head writer Terence Winter, at one point all but quotes Breaking Bad verbatim. Cal Thresher’s Chinese partner, Jackie, irritated with being dragged into what amounts to a fight over the guy’s love life, warns the weed baron about taking “half-measures” against Dwight. Mike Ehrmantraut, call your lawyer.

Intentionally or not, this makes Cal’s conversation with Armand, his unwilling informant inside Dwight’s organization, harder to take seriously. When Armand tries to back out of their arrangement — he now sees his intel is being used for violent purposes against Dwight and his associates like poor broken-nosed Bodhi — Cal’s response is cutting. “What are you, a child?” His subsequent threat to have Armand skinned alive before ripping out his tongue and mailing it to his kids, however, rings hollow when you already know the Triads he’s using for muscle are sick of his shit. I honestly can’t tell if that’s the point of the scene or what.

I mentioned that not everything familiar in this episode was familiar in a bad way. As Dwight’s sister Joanne, Annabella Sciorra doesn’t have a ton to do beyond vague “when you’re here, you’re family” Italian-American platitudes. But in The Sopranos, a show Winter worked on too, she had one of the most creatively successful guest-starring roles in the history of the medium as Gloria Trillo, a glamorous luxury car saleswoman who becomes embroiled in a torrid and extremely fucked-up love affair with Tony.

We’re nowhere near that kind of fruitful psychosexual territory yet (alas), but you catch glimpses of what this character could be with this actor playing her. She’s squeezing her way into the legit side of Dwight’s business by helping Bodhi create an online store for CBD products that can legally be shipped around the country, and she’s providing Italian baked goods as munchies too. But it’s the moment when she lights up a joint and smokes it that you remember why Tony fell in love with Gloria in the first place.

This is as good a place as any to get to the heart of the episode: the big sitdown in Atlanta between Tulsa boss Dwight, Kansas City boss Bill, and New York boss Chickie. But in a move that feels like one of the believably idiotic things a member of The Sopranos crew would do, Chickie forgets he’s wearing a gun on his ankle when he walks through the metal detector at the airport. He’s got a permit; it’s not a federal case, but when he’s detained at the airport, his underboss Vince attends in his place.

He probably wishes he hadn’t. After a little sparring, Dwight and Bill come to an agreement over weed and a share of Tulsa’s profits. Kansas City agrees to buy bootleg Ozempic from New York. And Dwight offers New York … nothing. Vince has to bring this news back to Chickie, pretty much proving the bald boss right that the meeting shouldn’t have gone forward without him if this was the best Vince could do. One of those two ain’t making it to the end of the season, that’s for sure.

At any rate, the deal is off just as soon as it begins. Bill decides he got a bad bargain, which is pretty rich considering we watched every second of the negotiation and at no point did Dwight do anything excessively intimidating or underhanded to get Bill to come to terms. When his lieutenant asks him why he didn’t stick up for himself, all the script can give him for an explanation is a half-hearted “I don’t know.” Yeah, I don’t either.

So it seems safe to assume that the car bomb was Bill’s handiwork; he had the white car in Tulsa in case things went south in Atlanta, and when he retroactively decides they did, boom goes the dynamite. And despite the fact that his crew consists of a total of two made guys (himself included) and a bunch of stoners and working stiffs, blood is likely to flow.

When Tulsa King has its moments, it’s usually in the easy conversation it gins up for its supporting characters in off moments. Think of Grace helpfully serving as Armand’s budtender (stay away from sativas, Armand, that’s why you’re feeling “buzzy”), or Mitch and Goodie discussing the latter’s fear of flying, or Fred the security guard asking Joanna what her focaccia is infused with and her melting him into a puddle with the response “Love.”

Also, the crew of heavies who staff this show are all past masters at playing tough guys; the utterly humorless eyes of Frank Grillo as Dwight asks to hear the restaurant’s specials in the middle of a sitdown — “Yeah,” he echoes, staring daggers into Dwight, “what are they” — are a case in point. You may doubt Cal Thresher’s credibility as a threat; you don’t doubt Bill Bevilacqua’s.

How big will the battle for Tulsa be? Dwight, Cal, Bill, Chickie, Jackie, and Vince all have competing interests they seem willing to achieve through violence. Winter’s skill in building Boardwalk Empire’s sprawling seasons toward stunning, violent season finales was legendary, the kind of thing even the show’s detractors gave him credit for. (It’s one of the best shows ever made, just to be clear.) Here’s hoping moving the action from New Jersey to Oklahoma won’t damage the bloody goods.