'Briarpatch' Episode 6 'The Most Sinful MF-er Alive' Review: Brattle's monstrosity frames violent episode
Spoilers for 'Briarpatch' Episode 6 'The Most Sinful MF-er Alive'
Jake Spivey (Jay R Ferguson) screams "I'm the most sinful MF-er alive" — his version of the Bruce Willis' "Yippee-ki-yay, MF-er!", right after he has gone commando on Brattle's henchmen. But by the end of the episode, we all know who takes the "Sinful MF-er" crown — none other than the twinkly-eyed Clyde Brattle (Alan Cumming).
It is a bit of a theme in this episode that Jake Spivey is the cat with nine lives and always having the good fortune of someone else take the fall for him because he has friends and well-wishers like Allegra Dill (Rosario Dawson) and Lalo (David Zaldivar). It is what made Allegra take the fall for both of them when their blackmailing scheme had gone awry.
In Lalo's case, his "humane" smuggling of people across the border, is bankrolled by Spivey. So he decides to take the fall when the brewery warehouse where the illegal immigrants are staying catches fire.
Only Brattle, who watches the fire, Nero-like, with a martini in his hand, decides that Lalo is going to be the stain that Spivey won't be able to wipe off. He walks off as his henchman shoots Lalo dead just before the town's power comes back on.
Right at the start of the episode, in a delicious open, Brattle walks into the town's diner. After he is pranked by the town's greaser teens from the wrong side of the tracks, he puts the fear of God into them, before leaving them with a gun — a gun!!
If that wasn't enough to convince you he was a very bad man, he tells them, he is the "accelerant". The rest of the episode shows us exactly what he means by this.
In a simultaneous three-pronged attack, he gets his men to shut down the town's power. The power outage provides the cover for a full-on assault on Spivey's mansion — the police back up doesn't arrive, Spivey's greenhorn Mexican guards duck for cover or are killed. Spivey takes care of all the "hostiles", Rambo-style. But he gets shot while trying to protect Allegra from the last of Brattle's men.
In the meantime, Brattle has engineered the fire in the warehouse where the immigrants are staying. Thankfully, Lalo and some other men break open the chains on the warehouse's locked gates and escape with all the immigrants and no casualties.
Lalo tells Allegra that he will take the fall for the warehouse incident. Right after, he is shot dead by Brattle's henchman before he can do so.
Brattle, as the "accelerant", seems to have quite a few people in the town under his influence, but without them knowing what each is doing.
Eve Raytek (Kim Dickens) seems to be in on his plan to start with. She was the one who had the story planted about Felicity Dill, Strucker, and Floyd Furness being involved in corruption as we learned in last week's episode. Felicity and Strucker might have been on to her and had to be removed, with Floyd being the convenient scapegoat.
In this week's episode too, she conveniently turns up late or isn't there to stop any of Brattle's men during the night of mayhem. The next day, she uses Lalo's death and the anger among the town's poor residents about the violence and heat to turn votes away from the "elitist" Mayor Tony Salazar and to announce her own candidature for the post of mayor. She is a little too poised about her bid not to know what was going to go down in her town.
But the surprise of this week's episode is Gene Colder, the late Felicity's fiance, who till now has been portrayed as a put-upon, righteous little dunderhead. But after Colder "secures the premises" at Spivey's house (accidentally setting up one of Brattle's men to blow himself up), he looks in on the injured Spivey and he is about to shoot him when he sees Raytek.
Later, Colder meets Brattle (who is doing a spot of ironing outside his caravan) and says, "I can fix this" — meaning his mission to kill Spivey came from Brattle. The fact that Raytek is unaware that Colder is working for Brattle could be her downfall.
'Briarpatch' airs on Mondays at 11/10c on USA Network.
