Task S1 E6 "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a river." Review

Wrongdoing and rightdoing, the sixth episode of Task, is a quietly devastating epilogue to episode five. It is the climactic moment of tragedy this entire show has been leading to, the hardest episode to stomach so far in this whole season. Not everybody survives. Secondary motives and loyalties are uncovered, tainting allegiances and even betrayals. And if tragedy weren't already enough, bureaucracy is also slowly overpowering any hopes that even the more upstanding characters in this show may have of doing the right thing.

Task has invested its entire runtime into developing its characters, and so everything that happens to them matters deeply. The acting is as phenomenal as ever, and every character has many sides, some of which we're only now seeing. Late in the game, some of these characters take a tragic turn, the type of turn that will silence a room full of people watching. Stories are ultimately machines designed to generate empathy, and Task does this better than I'm accustomed to. Whenever a character in this show dies, you feel the hole they leave behind.

Wrongdoing and rightdoing is, in the vein of the rest of Task, a quiet mic drop. The truth comes out in this episode, but not as if it's a bombshell headline you'd read in a grocery store aisle. The showrunners opted to quietly but urgently leak truths about both disloyalty within a close-knit task force and a crook with a good heart, instead. This series isn't reliant on melodrama, yet it ends up being more dramatic than if it had been trying to draw attention to itself. Task never feels desperate to force you to feel any particular emotion at any given time, and it rightfully trusts its complex, lifelike characters to carry it, which they do.

If I'm not mistaken, the finale of the freshman season of Task is going to focus more on the fallout of this investigation than on its climax, and that's by design. As far as the numbers of the case are concerned, Wrongdoing and rightdoing is the episode the entire first season has been leading to. It's not going to be an easy episode for everyone to watch, and the more the show worked for you, the harder it will be to stomach. It's the episode where all of the things that work about the show get ushered to their logical conclusions, and you're going to be forced to say goodbye to some of its fantastic cast. It turns out that life isn't always kind enough to forgive the well-intentioned mistakes of those it already left behind to be dismissed by the rest of the world as rednecks, hicks, or white trash.

Proverbs 10:2-3