Bloodline - S1E2 - Part Two

Previously on Bloodline, ‘Part 2’

Welcome back to the rainy Florida Keys. This episode opens on a pretty cool zoom shot of Kevin sitting in the office of the marina during what I assume to be the same rain storm we saw last episode during the flash forwards of John blowing up the boat. John’s voiceover tells us Kevin has always been considered the hothead of the family which is evident by the holes punched and kicked through the door and walls in the office. The scene ends with someone knocking on the door.

Danny Extends His Stay

After this dramatic (and wet) open, we pick up where Part One left off. After John drives away from dropping Danny at the bus station, we see Danny has not boarded the bus and walks away. Eric later picks him up off the side of the road and implies Danny has accepted the sketchy job Eric offered him last episode.

John returns to his house to find Diana waiting up on the couch. After using what has to be the lamest lines ever, they get down with some couch lovin’ since the kids are out. I hope these kids aren’t of driving age, because if I came strolling in to find that on the couch when I was a teenager, I would have run away screaming and then gouged my eyes out of my head.

Back to the Danny and Eric show, they are loading canisters full of stolen fuel into the back of a van. I assume it’s stolen because of the way Eric is acting and the fact that they are pumping gas out of a tank after dark and hurriedly loading it into a van. Danny asks what they need to do tomorrow. Eric is vague and says Danny needs to meet him at 10:00 AM sharp because he has a window of time that he can borrow a boat and they have to deliver the canisters during that time. Eric then takes Danny to stay the night at his sister’s house.

Kevin gets dropped off at the marina in the greenest of green jeeps. His wife is dropping him off because evidently this is where he has been staying. He says he knows he needs to tell his family, but he hasn’t figured out how. She tells him there is only one way to tell them, and that this happens all of the time. He responds, “Not in my family.”

Back at the Rayburn place, Robert and Sally are enjoying a candlelit evening on the porch bench. Robert tells Sally Danny left earlier this evening. She gets upset and says she can’t take Danny anymore. She is done with him and maybe it’ll be better this way. Robert responds “Maybe it will.”

The Autopsy

The next morning we see John getting a report on the autopsy of the girl they found floating in the water in Part One. The girl was Hispanic and in her mid-teens. She is missing her right leg from the knee down and has third degree burns over half of what remains of her body. The medical examiner says she has multiple contusions on her chest, sides and back, and fiberglass scrapings under her fingernails. He also determined that her cause of death was, in fact, drowning. John comments this means she was alive for the burns. Ouch.

Robert Takes a Tumble

We find Danny asleep in a lawn chair at Chelsea O’Bannon’s house. She wakes him up and they have some flirty catching up before she goes inside to fix him some coffee, leaving him staring at the front page of the newspaper with a picture of his parents and a headline celebrating the dedication of the pier to the family.

Robert is on his morning kayak run when he spots Danny waiting for him on the beach near his normal route. He gets out of the water to approach Danny, who tells him he wanted to say goodbye before leaving. Danny says he had hoped they could work things out before Robert died, but he won’t be coming back again. This scene fades out before we hear if Robert responds to Danny.

In the next scene we arrive at the hospital, which becomes one of main backdrops for the remainder of the episode. Kevin is at the nurse’s station looking for his Dad. He’s told Robert is in the ER because he is suffering from a head trauma. He finds Sally and asks what’s going on and how did Dad end up at the hospital. She tells him that his brother brought him and Danny appears behind her with his arm in a sling.

Kevin is Kind of a Dick

The entire family gathers in the waiting room. Kevin is staring at Danny with contempt and angrily asks him what happened. Sally calms them down and asks Danny to tell them what happened. Danny tells them that Robert was in his kayak and he just sort of collapsed. Sally asks how he hit his head and Danny responds that he must have hit it when he toppled over.

Kevin storms off in a huff and Meg and John follow him. In the hallway Kevin starts yelling at them asking what Danny did to their father. John tells him to calm down and he turns and storms off outside. Meg tells John she’s going to go cancel the ceremony and take care of some things at the inn.

Back in the waiting room, Danny gets some water for Sally and she asks him why he didn’t tell her he was leaving. He says he didn’t want to upset her, but she sees through his bullshit and tells him he didn’t want to face her. She gives him the what-for and he tells her it wasn’t his choice to leave, but he asked Robert to come back and he told Danny no.

John then asks Danny to come outside and talk to him. Outside, Kevin confronts Danny and asks him to tell them what happened. Danny explains to them that he went to tell Robert goodbye and to let him know that Danny didn’t harbor any bad feelings. He said Robert didn’t respond and got in his kayak and paddled away and then collapsed. Kevin doesn’t believe him and starts yelling again, which just seems to be his natural speaking voice at this point. A nurse comes out looking for Danny because his x-rays are back and they need him inside. Evidently this hospital hasn’t yet gone digital.

Once Kevin storms away again, John calls and asks one of his cops to track down Eric O’Bannon, who is on probation. Meanwhile, Eric is frantically calling Danny because Danny never showed and he’s pissed. Everyone seems to be pissed at Danny today.

Danny’s Broken Wing

Danny is going over his x-rays with the doctor who says nothing is broken, but that his previous injury never healed properly. Danny tells her he was hit by a truck when he was a kid in a hit and run. He then gets really pissy with her about filling his pain meds and she says she’ll call it in to the pharmacy for him. This finally frees Danny up to return Eric’s calls and get his ass chewed. He says he’ll grab his family’s boat and meet him shortly.

John’s wife, Diana, shows up at the hospital and we find out that they have determined Robert had a stroke which caused him to collapse. This information is kind of shoehorned in with a return call regarding Eric telling John he failed to show at work today. I felt like it was pretty important information that was very nearly missed the first go round because it was stated and then moved on from so quickly.

Fuck HIPPA Sideways

As John hangs up his phone, Danny’s doctor decides to say fuck HIPPA and tell John all about Danny’s business. She thinks Danny has a problem with painkillers. Then to take it even farther out of the realm of legality, she tells him Danny should have surgery on his childhood injury. At John’s confused look, she elaborates that Danny told her he was in a hit and run accident as a kid. John nods and we know Danny told her a lie. John then has a flashback to a young Danny running out of the house closely followed by Robert screaming. At this point in the episode I saw Robert following him in a “Come quick, something is wrong,” kind of way. I was wrong as we learn later.

At the marina, Kevin’s estranged wife is dropping off a suitcase full of clean clothes for him. As she expresses her sympathy about Robert to him, Kevin starts fuming about Danny. He thinks Danny did something to their father because he was fine the day before and now he has had a stroke. She tells him he needs to calm down and he gets even angrier (as most are apt to do when told to calm down) and storms off with his suitcase of clean clothes. Side note: It’s hard to look like a bad ass when you are rolling a suitcase behind you.

John pays a visit to Chelsea’s house looking for Eric who called in sick to work. Upon finding out he’s not there, he questions Chelsea about what Danny and Eric are up to. She repeatedly tells him she doesn’t know despite his increasing frustration and threats against Eric’s probation. John leaves after telling her to call him if she thinks of anything.

Kevin is Still Kind of a Dick

Back at the hospital, angry Kevin joins Sally in Robert’s room. Sally asks Kevin why he is so suspicious of Danny and says he is always expecting the worst from him. She knows Danny asked Robert if he could come home and that Robert said no, but she still doesn’t think Danny did anything to him.

This sets Kevin off and he calls John in (surprise!) a rage saying he let Dad take the fall to cover his own ass. John fires back saying he was covering ALL of their asses because Kevin wanted Danny gone even more than himself. Kevin is not buying Danny is innocent in all of this and goes to the fishing hole to see if he can find anyone who saw them, and can tell him what really happened.

We get a flash of Danny and Eric dropping off the fuel containers on a beach. This is split into two different scenes, but I am going to cover both now. Danny is sitting on a rock watching Eric schlub all of the canisters to the beach from the anchored boat. It’s taking a lot longer than Danny had anticipated, and Eric tells him if he helped it would go faster. This was basically a time filler to show Danny was anxious about how long he’d be gone with the family boat.

Kevin questions the fishermen at the fishing hole and is getting nowhere until he pulls some money out. The guy gives him some very brief answers that are fairly ambiguous, but Kevin interprets them as evidence supporting his case. The fisherman tells him they were thrashing around in the water, and that when Danny saw him he started waving and shouting for help. Kevin thinking he has the proof he needs, heads back to his truck. As he is getting in, he receives a call from Danny telling Kevin that he took the boat out and will return it to the inn.

Flashback

We get treated to another flashback from John. This flashback shows Danny was running out of the house away from Robert, and Robert throws him to the ground and starts kicking and beating him, resulting in his previous injury. After he surfaces from the flashback, he talks to Sally in the hospital and she tells him that regardless of what Robert said, she wants Danny back. She tells John to ask him because it will mean so much more coming from him because of how Danny feels about him.

John arrives at the inn looking for Danny at the same time that Danny pulls up in the boat with his backpack of belongings. John strides out to the dock and tells him they need to have a talk. He asks him what business he has with Eric and at the same time Danny spills his pain pills into the sand. John helps him pick them up and then reluctantly gives the handful back to him.

As they stand up, the perfect storm of brothers collide, Kevin comes storming across the beach yelling at Danny that he has witnesses and screaming at him that he hurt their dad. As he asks him once again what happened, Danny quips “I hit him over the head-“ and is cut off by Kevin attacking him. I guess this was the wrong time for sarcasm.

As Kevin and Danny are rolling around in the sand fighting, we get a montage of John watching them fight in slow motion and Sally in the hospital, seeing her young son Danny with a blackened eye looking at her hauntingly. As the montage draws to a close, John tackles Kevin knocking him off of Danny. Kevin gets up and storms off again. Kevin doesn’t walk, he storms everywhere.

The True Story

Later that night, Danny is sitting on the roof of the hospital drinking. Meg and Sally sit in a vigil in Robert’s room. Kevin is being comforted by his estranged wife. John and Diane sit in the waiting room.

As we flash back to Danny on the roof, we finally get to see what actually happened that morning. The scene picks up where the earlier scene left off, with Danny saying he won’t be coming back anymore. He tells Robert he needs to let go of whatever he is holding on to because Danny is letting go and just saying goodbye. Robert walks off toward the kayak and then turns around telling Danny that it was his siblings that decided he couldn’t come back. Then he gets in his kayak and rows off before collapsing in the water exactly as Danny stated earlier.

We end the episode exactly where we started with Kevin sitting in his office in the marina while John knocks on the door. Kevin gives John an untraceable gun while the voiceover says, “Could this whole thing have been avoided? Probably. We all gave Danny plenty of chances to leave, he just never got the message.”

This episode gives us a little more insight into the psyche of the family. The dark past has not subsided with time and seems to still be haunting some, if not all, members of the family. As with the first episode, Part Two left me with some lingering questions:

• What does the body in the water have to do with anything?
• Is Meg going to get interesting as the show goes on?
• Why was Sally so worried about the inn when her husband was laid up?
• Is Kevin’s ex-wife doing his laundry for him and then bringing it back?
• Is the final scene really what happened that morning, or was that a trick?

Join me this weekend as I recap Part Three and hopefully answer at least one of these questions.