Task “A Still Small Voice”

My girlfriend and I have something of a disagreement over Mark Ruffalo.  I think he’s a great actor.  She doesn’t.  I think that comes largely from the fact she’s only really seen him play Bruce Banner, and as much as we both like Marvel movies, those roles don’t often require a lot of heavy lifting.

However, I think if she had watched Task with me, that would have been a different story.  Ruffalo’s Tom Brandis is a lost man for most of this first season, so much so that I wonder where they’d even go from here with a second if Ruffalo will come back for more.  But here, his Tom has been described as a good man, and he is.  The only problem is his home life, where he drinks too much and has a hard time forgiving his adopted son, a young man with a mental illness, where the voices in the lad’s head led him to murder Tom’s wife, a woman who he still sees in the house however briefly.

Essentially, it means the episode shows Tom has finally made peace, and then he even does something that feels unexpected for a TV series in that he gives up young Sam to another foster family despite clearly developing a bond with the boy.  It is pointed out that Ethan, the absent son, will be coming home eventually, and Tom will need to devote more time and attention to him, something that would do Sam harm.  Tom wants to keep the boy.  I somewhat wanted him to keep the boy.  But the hard decision was the right one, and the episode makes that clear.  I would even think it was because Tom made the hard decision that he got to see his wife arranging flowers in the kitchen before the foster family showed up.

This all comes after he rescues Maeve, with help from Aleah, from Jayson and one of his goons, the pair looking for the money Robbie made sure Maeve got, and a wounded Grasso, disgraced cop that he was, firing the shot that took out Jayson and saved Maeve’s life.  Tom’s big contribution here is, arguably, looking the other way when he finds the money and letting Maeve keep it.

Still, this is Task, so not only is the shoot-out and hostage moment performed with maximum drama and tension, it comes at maybe the halfway point because solving the mystery at the center of the series was only one of the points.  It’s a show where we know Grasso is a dirty cop, but we find out it was mostly because he had financial obligations to his family, and he took money from someone he shouldn’t have.  It’s a show about redemption, so maybe Grasso got some.

Tom sure did, and Ruffalo delivers the speech where he explains what went wrong with adopted son Ethan and ends it with forgiveness and love.  Earlier episodes showed Tom saying he was unable to forgive his son, but clearly that didn’t happen, and he seems to be more at peace with himself as a result.  Considering the speech is one Tom reads instead of recites, and the man still gives a heartfelt performance out of it, I think I feel better about Ruffalo as an actor now, and I really liked the guy before.

So…how does a show like this work for a second season?

Eh, I’ll find out later.  For now, I think it’s time to finish off Andor in this spot.