'The Good Lord Bird' Episode 2 Review: Onion lands in brothel, hard-hitting plot moves from religious saviorism
Spoilers for ‘The Good Lord Bird’ Episode 2 ‘A Wicked Plot’
Showtime’s limited series ‘The Good Lord Bird’ infuses the tale of slavery in Antebellum America with a hearty dose of ridiculously comic moments, giving the show a very Coen Brothers feel to it. What makes this comparison more potent is that the comic moments are not really slapstick in the normal sense of things. They’re just funny because the situation is that effed up.
In Episode 2 of the story narrated by Henry Shackleford or Onion (Joshua Caleb Johnson), we see him and Bob (Hubert Point-Du Jour) in the aftermath of John Brown’s (Ethan Hawke) departure. Brown’s son Frederick (Duke Davis Roberts) was killed by a former ally. When his sons refuse to participate in his crusade any further, he takes off, understanding their position but unwilling to stray from his path. Brown’s son Owen (Beau Knapp), now the leader of the small anti-slavery religious militia, asks Bob and Onion to wait for them. But fearing their safety, the two march on.
Of course, they are stopped by two Redshirts (soldiers of a white supremacist paramilitary terrorist group in the South at that time). Now here’s where things get messy (and hilarious). If you remember, Onion appears to be a girl to everyone because he wears a dress because when Brown “saved” her, he mistook her for a girl (because he heard Henrietta instead of Henry). And Onion, because he’s not as educated, tells one of the Redshirts Chase (Steve Zahn) that he has expertise in “trim”. While he meant that he could shave and cut hair, the Redshirt understood it to be that Onion was a prostitute. So, he took them to a nearby town of Pikesville, Missouri, where they were sold to the Madame.
When the prostitute called Pie (Natasha Marc) figures out Onion was a boy, she agrees to keep his secret only if Onion taught her to read and write. Onion, also, falls in love with Pie, though that is not a love story (even a one-sided one) meant to last. But Onion gets into trouble again when he comes across another slave called Sibonia (Crystal Lee Brown) who threatens him to forge a bill of sale so that she could escape. Things go from comic to tragic when Pie rats out Sibonia’s plan and she is caught and “tried” for execution. Sibonia, in her “trial”, tells why she planned to escape and murder White folk and, in an emotional speech, manages to convert the White preacher to the side of anti-abolitionists. Onion feels guilty because he was the one who told Pie and he was also the one who never kept his word to Sibonia.
In what can only be called a deus ex machina, Owen arrives in town and tells Onion that they would soon raid and attack the place. After the execution of Sibonia and the others caught in the “conspiracy”, Owen and his militia return. But they’re not alone. Brown is there along with them. The battle ends in the death of most White people in the town (along with Pie and Chase), and Onion and Bob are once again reunited with the group, as they travel ahead in their quest to free all slaves.
The second episode comes strong after the first which sets up the plot for the show. In many ways, it was a better episode because it focused much more on just Onion and his struggles and not on Brown and his religious saviorism. It also showed just how much justice was a farce in Antebellum America, which is not hard to imagine anyway.
'The Good Lord Bird' airs on Sundays on Showtime, at 9 pm ET/PT.