This piece discusses, in detail, the finale of The Lowdown.
At the center of Sterlin Harjo’s excellent neo-noir The Lowdown, whose finale aired Tuesday on FX, were two big questions. One—how did Dale Washberg die?—was always going to have a straightforward answer. The other was more complicated. Sure, it sounded like a simple either/or: Is Lee Raybon a righteous crusader for truth and justice or a dangerously delusional white savior? (See also: no small number of this year’s most memorable movie protagonists.) But because Harjo, the creator of Reservation Dogs, understands how reductive the labels of hero and villain can be, Ethan Hawke’s wild-eyed “Tulsa truthstorian” turned out to be an equal mix of both archetypes. An even bigger surprise, for Lee and, I think, for most viewers, was that the man he identified as his nemesis ended up being no more malicious than Lee himself.
Titled “The Sensitive Kind”—which isn’t just a song written by J.J. Cale and featured in this episode via an Eric Clapton cover, or the headline on Lee’s cover story about Dale, but was also the working title for the show —the finale opens with a flashback that also feels a bit like a fantasy. Lee is in his bookstore, reading Walter Tevis’ novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, as Dale (Tim Blake Nelson) browses the shelves. (The book, which the filmmaker Nicolas Roeg adapted into a classic sci-fi movie starring David Bowie, follows a space alien who is tragically distracted by earthly frivolities from a mission to save his imperiled home planet. It also includes a human character who shares a name with Jeanne Tripplehorn’s Lowdown femme fatale, Betty Jo. In many ways, it’s her love that dooms the extraterrestrial protagonist.) Dale tells Lee that his journalism is “brave.” Lee explains to him what he means when he calls himself a truthstorian. “You know how they say there’s more to every story?” he says. “Well, that’s what I try to find.” Dale…
