What’s the worst part of season 3?
Easily Kevin. The character is both despairing and monumentally stupid. You know when you’re watching a horror movie and screaming at the soon-to-be-killed camp counselor to not go into the basement? Or when you’re watching “Prometheus” and think all the scientists are completely idiotic in their choices and behavior? Kevin’s like a “Prometheus” scientist who falls into the basement over and over again. It’s just colossally aggravating. Danny was the fuck up of the family and after he dies, Kevin takes on that mantle and holy shit, it is just brutally frustrating.
Youch.
There’s also another thread running through season two and three, and it’s convoluted. John Leguizamo plays the greaseball scumbag, equally-shady friend of Danny’s named Ozzy Delvecchio, and he’s come to suspect and pretty much know that John killed Danny. He’s trying to extort the family and out them. Throughout season three he comes to threaten the matriarch Sissy Spacek, the mother of all mothers, who is in sociopathic denial about the family and deviously willing to throw anyone in the middle of traffic who could potentially harm her kin. So, Ozzy threatens and scare this older woman several times and she NEVER ONCE TELLS JOHN — A COP.
This is full stop ridiculous. John and Ozzy already butted heads in season two with the detective threatening him to stay away from the family or… you know what could happen. And yet mama Rayburn, disturbed and scared every time Ozzy shows up in the dead of night AT HER HOUSE, never once mentions this to anyone. Not even her son WHO IS PART OF THE POLICE! This is just mindless and idiotic writing that insults everyone that’s paying even a second of attention. That storyline could end pretty much at any moment should John know. There’s zero motivation for her to keep this a secret.
Ozzy takes on Danny’s role in season two and three; the Max Cherry character from “Cape Fear,” a dangerous criminal who constantly taunts the family and does so with an evil smirk on his face. It happens so often, that the character is deeply annoying. In fact, one can say that much of the nefariously character dynamics and provoking elements of the show vis-à-vis Danny and Ozzy are taken wholesale from “Cape Fear” (both versions), even the balmy, sometimes pouring rain Florida weather.
There’s more. The cinematography is often irritating, in that every frame is composed like someone is watching John (ok, we get it, he feels guilty and watched). And there’s two more threads involving Roy Gilbert (Beau Bridges) the drug trafficker and the guy trying to be a (totally bullshit) avuncular/guardian angel character to Kevin. And the other subplot follows Danny’s emo-core son. It’s strange because the character is almost not that important in season three, but he means everything to its final moment.
Damn, OK. What’s the best part of season 3?
The best element and thread of the show was the key voice-over line that John delivered in season one: “We’re not bad people, we just did a bad thing.” It’s a massive understatement, and establishes a thematic long game of denial. This family was prestigious, and well-respected by their community, but the dark secret is they are extremely bad people and they don’t even know it.
Well, that sounds interesting.
It is. The best part of “Bloodline” is how it makes you test the limits of how much you’re willing to empathize with these people. The show, other than being about the struggles between patriarchs and sons, and family as a cancer, was the idea of a brood blind to the truth of themselves and sticking their heads in the sand. You were always rooting for the family because it seemed Danny was a bastard that deserved the worst of everything he received (minus his death), but as the show unfolds it becomes apparent how toxic the family dynamic always was, how their lineage trickled down from a bad person (the father they revered). They were all too young to realize, but the venerated, untouchable father was actually a very immoral, self-serving person and the apples didn’t fall far from the tree.
As the drama unfolds, the self-awareness and history of the family, especially from the childhood they had blocked out or forgotten, grows to a disturbing realization that this tribe was always covering and making excuses for themselves to preserve the family reputation. The Rayburns and the Rayburn name always came first, everything and everyone came second, morality be damned. All of these are extremely poignant themes that anyone with a dysfunctional family can relate to.
The end verdict?
It’s a pretty bad season. It feels like the worse of network TV, with subplots for every character, plot blocking for all their storylines and somewhat ridiculous or manipulative increasing difficulties for each one too. It runs with an old formula that seems to be disappearing in the era of free-form Peak TV, however, when it wraps up at the end and the shit hits the fan hard, the collateral damage is really compelling. The denial of the Rayburns is corrosive throughout and as it eats away at all of them psychologically, and it feels emotionally very true and human.
So, as the siblings start to self-destruct one by one and the family itself implodes to the point that it looks like every man for himself, the self-reflection and self-realization is painfully real. Thus John, looking down the barrel of a gun metaphorically, finally looks at himself in the mirror. As he lets go in a kind of slo motion freefall and lets the dishonesties wash away, it’s powerful satisfying stuff. Especially the final scene and shot. But it obviously doesn’t excuse or salvage the rest of the season.
For better or worse, I stuck with the show all the way through because I’m a masochist like that sometime. The ghosts of family past finally catch up with the Rayburns in the end and if that line sounds cliché, bear in mind I didn’t write the show.
“Bloodline” has some intrigue and poignant moments over its bloated and over-extended three season arc that went on far too long. But in the end, for all the strong performances and sometimes engaging suspense, “Bloodline” clogged up its own arteries with overstuffed fat. [C]
