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By the time we get to Black Rabbit’s final flashback intro — the show’s go-to narrative framing device — the lore of how the original Black Rabbit crew came together is well established. The scene of the team assembling plays out pretty much as that lore would suggest. Jake is sweating bullets, having just quit his job and signed a $30,000-a-month lease on the new restaurant. Vince is telling him, “It’s not a prison sentence.” Wes and Estelle are conveniently having their meet-cute by the jukebox, while Roxie and Tony are back in the kitchen, about to be swept up in the “Isle of Joy” Vince is desperately trying to build.
Most of these flashback intros have reiterated the same thing: You’re about to watch a found family fall apart. And we’ve been through this episodic structure enough by default that one wonders how many were actually necessary. But now that the ball has dropped, Black Rabbit zigs and zags at top speed through its finale — more than effectively framed as a story of the generational wounds of one family corrupting the foundations of a chosen family.
After Jake secures a deal with Joe Mancuso to leave him and the rest of their family alone, he calls Vince and offers him up as payment for Junior’s death. As soon as Mancuso and Babbitt take off for the Plank, Jake jumps in his car and frantically calls Vince while screaming at traffic, but Mancuso and Babbitt get to him first. This is where Mancuso staged and discarded Dick Friedken’s body. “Just another drunk taking a tumble,” he says, implying Vince’s body is about to follow the same trajectory. Poetic ending though it might have been, Vince is now older than his dad ever was and, as a result, has a few more years of escaping a pinch under his belt. Vince is quick on his toes and asks for a farewell drink and a bump to the world, which gives him the opening to slam a bag of coke in Babbitt’s face and bolt out the door while the hearing-impaired Mancuso has his back turned at the bar.
The car chase that follows is proficient enough, and it’s a prime example of the strong visual style of this roster of directors who are dampened by the aesthetic limitations of a modern TV production. But it gets us to a vivid pit stop where the Friedken brothers are foregrounded by the iconic Coney Island boardwalk, where Jake cashes in on the leverage he has against Campbell. He calls the all-knowing fixer and says he’d better get a plane ready to get Vince out of the country or he’s gonna release his backup copy of the security-camera footage to the news. Campbell accepts the offer to make the exchange at the Teterboro Airport.
The brothers set out for Teterboro, but Vince’s heart isn’t in it — he sees the writing on the wall. When they get into Jake’s car, they hear an APB for Vince on the radio. “I’m a one-man pandemic,” a defeated Vince says as they try to reach the finish line. As if by cosmic force, the streets keep Vince and Jake from their destination, cutting them off with a delivery truck in Chinatown, then forcing them to run, duck, and hide from a cop who spotted them from the corner. They end up at the Black Rabbit, where we see it’s too late for Vince to see a future outside of running from the past. Finally undone by Jake’s persevering kind heart, Vince confesses that he killed their dad all those years ago … but Jake already knew: He saw Vince drop the bowling ball that night and kept it inside, just as his older brother did. “You are not a bad person,” Jake tells Vince over and over. Up until now, Jake has been obsessed with maintaining a good self-image, to the point of sacrificing the needs and well-being of those he most cares about. But with this confession, we learn that no matter how far down the path of selfishness and deceit he gets with his brother, he can’t bear to leave him alone in the mire of their father’s legacy. It’s an emotional reveal that goes far enough in fleshing out the psychological dynamic at the heart of Jake’s choices that it could really have stood to appear a couple of episodes sooner. As it stands, it still makes for a tender final moment between Jason Bateman and Jude Law, who end the series having earned their dramatic believability as the two-man pandemic of Black Rabbit’s Brooklyn.
Seeing no future for his brother with him in it, Vince removes himself from the equation and lets himself fall backward off the roof and onto the pavement below. One of the defining images of the series will surely be the shock, terror, and reluctant awe on Jake’s face as his brother’s body disappears from the frame. Jake returns to his apartment with the box of stuff from his mom’s house, all he has left of the past, when Mancuso appears behind him with a gun to his neck, holding it as if he were a papal authority of the underworld (the kind of faux-Baroque imagery with which Kurzel elevates even the most compromised projects he’s had a hand in — Assassin’s Creed, looking at you). But Vince’s death and the grief pouring from Jake prove sufficient penance: Mancuso absolves him with a touch of the forehead and disappears from Jake’s life.
An el train moves through the frame at the edge of the cemetery where Vince is now buried. Only a few attend the funeral, including Estelle, who ends up with the short end of the narrative stick. The series essentially waves away her reaction to finding out that Jake, this coked-out loser she left her now-dead boyfriend for, was also withholding a shitload of criminal activity. That’s one thing but then to have her pop back up to tell Jake he’s gonna be okay is a conspicuous cop-out. Estelle’s character development as a whole (or lack thereof) really put a bad taste in my mouth.
Other than Estelle’s nonconclusion, the survivors of the original Black Rabbit crew all end up in calmer waters. Roxie and Tony don’t get the Pool Room, but they do open a restaurant called Anna’s, which attracts lines going out the door; it’s an ending that feels too sweet for an otherwise bleak show that exacts bleak consequences from nearly everyone else. Gen and Val are shown enjoying a brewski in Coney Island, signifying a road to a stable family life for them. On a formal level, this is a compilation of modern limited-series ending clichés that blunt their own narrative effect, compared with something like the roof scene. I suppose it’s reassuring to know that you can form new bonds with people who love you unconditionally, that Vince’s dream of finding his people is still possible even if he couldn’t make it happen for himself. It’s also a little neat for an otherwise bleak show that set itself up to exact bleak consequences.
For Jake, going for broke puts him right back where he started: behind the bar. Again, the visual clichés blunt the impact of both of these cruel fates, but the sum total of time spent with the Friedken brothers brings the core home. An infamous quote from The King of Comedy comes to mind: “Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime.” A false dichotomy that, whether you live or die by it, is a lesson learned too late.
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Andy Andersen
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