Photo: Brian Douglas/Paramount+
There’s a lengthy scene in the middle of this week’s Tulsa King that’s best described by paraphrasing Jon Stewart’s character from Half Baked: Have you ever seen Sylvester Stallone play a mob boss … on weed??? Dwight Manfredi spends a lengthy car ride from Tulsa to a remote wind turbine farm on tribal land absolutely gone off that lollipop loud. He gets very confused about the name of the band Phish, he launches into a lengthy rant about how he blames the band Canned Heat for ruining his hearing, he says that everyone blames everyone else for their own failures because “it’s all a pie of lies”…he just generally entertains the hell out of his boys Mitch and Tyson while irritating Bodhi, a stoner veteran who’s beyond this kind of display by now.
It’s an endearing scene for two reasons. One, it suggests rather emphatically the best state of mind in which to watch Tulsa King. (I mean, I’m guessing.) Second, it comes in the middle of an episode that’s otherwise all about the criminal factions lining Dwight up in their crosshairs, from Tulsa to Kansas City to New York. Honestly, “Stallone plays a genial guy caught up in a web of tense intrigue” is a best-case scenario for Tulsa King.
Taking a tour of the various players, we’ll start with KC boss Bill Bevilacqua, whose right-hand man — a made guy — was betrayed and killed by Dwight’s soldiers last week. Unable to give the guy a proper burial without inviting a murder investigation, he’s seething with rage, not just at Dwight but at New York boss Chickie Invernizzi, whom he blames for the bad intel that led to the botched hit on Dwight.
Chickie, who has a knack for reacting to things in the wrong way, compensates for being li’l-bro’d by Bevilacqua by more or less bragging that he killed his father, the family’s previous boss. This, it’s safe to say, is a big no-no, though his men have the decency not to ask him about it point blank. Still, it leads his underboss Vince to make overtures to Bill directly, figuring the bossman can no longer be trusted.
In Tulsa, the potential double agents in Dwight’s crew are dealing with the ramifications of their decision. Last week, underboss Goodie chose to stick with Dwight, stabbing Bevilacqua’s hitman in the back. (Technically the front, but you get it.) Now he’s the picture of paranoia, wondering whether a vengeful Bill or a furious Chickie (who recommended Goodie for the assassination attempt and got chewed out by Bill as a result) will hit him first. He winds up shoving his gun in the mouth of an Uber Eats driver who passes by him one too many times.
Armand, meanwhile, realizes he’s into weed baron Cal Thresher for more than he bargained for. After accepting another hunk of cash from the guy, he mentions that Dwight is out of town in wind-turbine country. When Cal lets slip that it’s always good to know what “the competition” is up to, Armand realizes he’s been played. Sure enough, Thresher places a competing bid the same afternoon Dwight has his meeting with the owner scheduled, though this wouldn’t be Tulsa King if he couldn’t talk his way into getting what he wanted in the end anyway.
Thresher has bigger fish to fry than getting outbid by Dwight, however. When he discovers that Jackie (Rich Ting), his weed farm’s Chinese stakeholder, has been secretly cultivating heroin within the vast cannabis grow, he demands the plug pulled. After a few demands too many, Jackie decides to take negotiations to the next stage: He murders two of the trafficked Chinese immigrants doing forced labor on the farm, slated for some kind of punishment for stealing, right in front of Dwight, and announces the poppies will be staying. Cal’s tough talk about knowing various judges and attorneys general sounds less impressive when drowned out by gunshots.
The other kind of family plays a role in the lives of Dwight and his crew as well. Dwight’s sister realizes almost instantly that Dwight’s up against it, and correctly points out to him that by (a) launching a revolt and (b) killing one of his enemies’ own, he has guaranteed retribution, most likely against people close to him. I can’t help but wonder if that’s why we get an extremely folksy scene between Tyson and his hard-working plumber dad, who’s so full of gruff wisdom and tough love that it’s impossible for me to imagine he’s surviving this season.
If there’s one major drawback with this episode, it comes in the early stages, when Tyson and Bodhi are still recovering from the disposal of the would-be hitman’s body hours earlier. Tyson seems dazed and distracted, preoccupied with the sight of blood on his sleeve; Bodhi threatens to dissolve his partnership with Dwight and quit the business entirely. I get it, and I think showing what living a life of crime — murder crime, not weed crime — will do to a person is a great idea. But unless I’m badly misremembering things, these guys were all involved in a shootout that left an entire outlaw biker gang dead. You’d think they’d have had their long, dark night of the soul about this stuff already.
Both Tyson and Bodhi come back around, with Bodhi crunching the numbers to make their wind-powered hydroponic farm a success and Tyson giving the pep talk to the crew that Dwight himself is tired of giving. And like, of course they come back around. The central fantasy of Tulsa King is, “What if you were a 75-year-old guy who a bunch of young people thought was really cool?” If they stop thinking he’s cool, there goes the fantasy!
Dwight is never going to have a meaningful, lasting falling-out with his millennial minions, any more than he’s going to get killed off and the show will suddenly be about Garrett Hedlund instead of Sylvester Stallone. Dwight is surrounded by surrogate kids and grandkids who enjoy his anecdotes about the Fillmore East and find his jokes about their music being noise charming. For some people, that’s the kind of wish fulfillment that puts superheroes to shame.
