[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Lowdown, Season 1, Episode 3, “Dinosaur Memories.”]
The Lowdown‘s latest episode sent Lee Raybond (Ethan Hawke) and his daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), down different paths in search of one goal: to uncover Dale Washberg’s (Tim Blake Nelson) letters in the books from his family’s estate sale.
After learning that pal Ray (Michael Hitchcock) hadn’t picked up the books like he’d been paid and instructed to do, Lee sought out the arts and antiques dealer alongside Francis. “In my defense… I did go to get those books, but I was a little late,” Hitchcock says in defense of his character. “I just thought they were books, so that could wait until I closed my store.”
Little did Ray know that these letters left behind by Dale could solve the mystery behind his death, which was reported as a suicide. Part of the reason Ray hadn’t delivered the books was that he’d learned a woman he calls a witch, Catalina (Flavia Carbone), had purchased them. “The way my character describes this witch, you would think she was like some 90-year-old who flies on a broom, and then when you see her, she’s this very attractive woman, but I’m so afraid of her.”
Shane Brown / FX
While the trio sought out Catalina at the docks, Francis and Ray sat back at the restaurant on the shore as Lee approached Catalina’s boat. But before he could find her, two men kidnapped him. This left Francis to go in search of her dad and come face-to-face with Catalina. Meanwhile, Ray got drunk at the restaurant, “My character has to have a drink or two to get through the day, but I think sometimes he just wants to have a drink or two,” Hitchcock says with a laugh.
It turned out that one of the men who kidnapped Lee, a local paddlefisher, was Catalina’s ex, and he wanted her back. Francis’s concern for her dad led her right to the box filled with Jim Thompson books that belonged to Dale, and while she tried talking Catalina into selling them, the woman talked about deadbeat dads.
“Francis is in a really unique situation where she’s almost parenting her dad,” Armstrong tells TV Insider. “Sometimes we go through similar things, and she’s trying to look after him and do what’s best for him, meanwhile, she’s the kid.” Still, despite the challenges Francis faces as Lee’s daughter, it didn’t stray her from the mission, which Armstrong says, “was so fun…. I didn’t even see it coming. It was such a blast.”
Shane Brown / FX
In the end, Lee talked the men into letting him go in exchange for writing a letter for Catalina from her ex. When he joined Francis and Ray on shore, Catalina had run after Francis, who stole the box of books, but she outsmarted the woman by taking all of the letters out and handing them over to her dad, whose unbridled pride in her was palpable through the screen.
“It’s just a realistic look at fatherhood,” series creator Sterlin Harjo says. “You’ll see a lot of shows where the kids [show up] once every six episodes, and they’ll just be home for dinner. It doesn’t affect the character’s lives somehow, it’s like, no, it’s a struggle doing what you’re doing, and especially if you’re financially strapped and trying to tell the truth, and your endeavors aren’t gonna make you rich.”
Harjo was partly inspired to incorporate Francis into Lee’s mission based on his own relationship with his daughter, “I have a daughter, and especially when I was working at a specific time for this organization called This Land Press, which a lot of this is inspired by. I was just a struggling filmmaker trying to figure it out, and I brought my daughter along with me to a lot of these things,” Harjo explains.
“It’s like if I’m gonna fulfill my dream, I’ve got to bring you along. In turn, you’re also showing them how to live their dream, and I think that that’s what Lee is doing with Francis; she’s seeing the passion,” Harjo adds.
That echoes Hawke’s own connection with the storyline as he recalls a time when his daughter, actress Maya Hawke, was around 8 or 9 and he was doing a stage play. “She would listen to the show over the loudspeaker, and she would do her homework and watercolor, and we would go out to lunch in between shows, and… she saw how hard I worked and how much I cared… and she kind of fell in love with making stuff,” Hawke shares. “So I thought it was very much like Lee in the show. There’s a lot of love in it.”
Where the letters will take them next remains to be seen, but if Dale’s writing is any indication, his brother Donald (Kyle MacLachlan) isn’t to be trusted. Stay tuned to see what happens next, and let us know what you thought of the latest episode in the comments section below.
The Lowdown, Tuesdays, 9/8c, FX