Task S1 Finale "A Still Small Voice" Review

A Still Small Voice is primarily an emotional footnote to Task season one, and I wouldn't have it any other way. This is a finale that reminds you of the humanity in all the characters you've spent the last several hours rooting for or against, and it takes the best things about the show and makes them even better. It slows down enough to let you process the emotional turmoil of everything that happened, and it exists to both affirm and challenge everything this show has taught you to take for granted; any remaining preconceptions you may have about it will not survive this episode. Task has always been interested in life's subtleties, though it's less interested in telling you what you should think about them, and more interested only in telling you to think, which is how it should always be. The bottom line of this show will land differently for each viewer, and that's special.

A Still Small Voice is about the surviving characters dealing with the fallout of the choices they made during the investigation, whether those choices were selfish, well-intentioned, or nothing more than hastily made in the heat of the moment. The big set-piece shootout of Task season one already happened in the previous episode, and now everyone is getting a chance to process the weight of the role they played in it. This drama is heavy TV, with this episode being among the hardest to stomach. Very often, it is heavy not because of what's in it, but what isn't in it, who isn't in it. You feel the empty spaces in this show's ensemble, spaces left behind by characters who died in earlier episodes.

This late in the game, that emptiness isn't a bad feeling. This finale is a lonely one, in a good way. There is a distinctive stillness to it, setting it apart from the rest of the show. In an already emotionally intimate drama, this episode is the most intimate yet, especially the second half, which features a court case in which many of these characters' deepest, most hidden parts pour out of them. A Still Small Voice is likely my favorite episode of the entire season, simply because of how insistent it is on emotionally following through on everything it said it would.

As a whole, Task doesn't entirely escape some of the more exposition-heavy habits of the mystery genre, but it remains a restrained, occasionally tragic, and supremely well-acted crime drama with more than enough heart to go round.' It takes some real-life angles you already thought of as intimate, angles like foster parenting, and treats them with a real sobriety that can only come from the sincerest of hearts. The cast of this show comes from diverse backgrounds, but I never felt as though the casting director had stooped so low as to work off a checklist of archetypes. Every character in Task is exceptionally well-written, well-cast, and well-acted. They fit perfectly with the rest of a cast that is wonderfully similar to them, yet beautifully distinct, and when some of them die, it really is difficult to say goodbye.

Task is ultimately a show about people, and everyone involved in making it understood the assignment. Perhaps the most impressive thing about it is that it remains so personal and so deep despite never outrunning a couple of less desirable stereotypes of episodic TV. Every character involved in this investigation brings something idiosyncratically new to the table, a trait that makes them both interesting and unique among the rest of the show's characters. Because Task spends so much time developing the people that make it what it is, you end up missing them when they're gone, and you eventually learn to value them while they're still here. This is acting and humanist storytelling at its very finest.

Task has been renewed for a second season, which will feature a True-Detective-adjacent standalone story once again starring Mark Ruffalo as Tom Brandis. I'll miss a lot of this old cast, but if HBO can replicate the quality of the first season, this drama could become even more special than it already is. Even if it isn't interested in advancing the stories of many of those involved in this particular case, I'd be totally on board with getting to live with Tom and those he loves for another season of television. That's what a well-written story can do to someone. Task doesn't insist on telling you when or where, but it does painstakingly draw a beautiful portrait of who.

With a cast of characters this brilliant, the thought of seeing even some of them again sometime in the future truly excites me.

Task Season 1 - 9/10

Romans 13:1-4