[Warning: The video above and below contain MAJOR spoilers for Task, Season 1 Episode 6, “Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing, There Is a River.”]
Task‘s penultimate episode has arrived, delivering some seriously shocking moments as more than one character met a tragic end in “Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing, There Is a River.”
Picking up where Episode 5 left off, the Salli Richardson-Whitfield-directed installment brought action to the woods as the Dark Hearts, FBI, and Robbie (Tom Pelphrey) converged. While Robbie seemingly had a plan to lure the Dark Hearts there, the arrival of Tom (Mark Ruffalo) and team mucked things up, as he then took a defensive approach, attempting to protect Tom from the Dark Hearts.
While Anthony Grasso’s (Fabien Frankel) task force team was unaware of his connection to the Dark Hearts, he juggled the two sides as he warned the gang members to leave. When Lizzie (Alison Oliver) shot one of the Dark Hearts, she was in their crosshairs and lost part of her hearing after a shot rang out next to her ear.
Peter Kramer / HBO
When they learned from Aleah (Thuso Mbedu) that Kathleen (Martha Plimpton) had been shot, Lizzie made a run for the vehicle she arrived in, as she searched for a first aid kit and called for back-up on the radio. Meanwhile, her impaired hearing left her unable to hear the Dark Hearts as they sped over the bridge, directly at her.
She was struck and killed on impact, and as Grasso rushed to her side in an attempt to comfort her, his resulting reaction hinted that, despite his crooked ways, he did care for her. “I found it emotional to shoot that scene, actually,” Frankel admits.
“The setup of it, they make it look so real,” Oliver adds. “There’s a lot of really sad losses in it.”
Meanwhile, Robbie faced off against Dark Hearts’ head Jayson (Sam Keeley), and he finally was able to let out his aggression on the man who was responsible for his brother’s death.
Sadly, Robbie didn’t walk away from that fight unscathed as he was fatally stabbed by Jayson. Ultimately, Tom managed to get to Robbie and helped him walk back to the road toward a newly arrived cop car. As Tom directed the cop to get them to a hospital, Robbie was fading, and Tom was there for his final moments.
But while it may have been the end for Robbie, the episode’s final moments revealed his contingency plan as his niece Maeve (Emilia Jones) received a big stash of cash, the earnings from the dope he’d stolen. In other words, he knew he was on a suicide mission as he faced the Dark Hearts, but it was all about how it was revealed to audiences as Pelphrey shares, “Well, a lot of it was then deciding for myself at what point Robbie really knew that that was the only way to go, and layering that in for myself in an honest way, that wasn’t tipping my hat or anybody to the audience.”
“It’s always fun as an actor to have a secret, to know something that you can’t let anyone else around you know,” Pelphrey adds.
And as these events unfolded within the first 20 minutes of the hour-long installment, plenty of other surprises followed. See what the stars, series showrunner Brad Ingelsby, and director Richardson-Whitfield have to say about Episode 6’s biggest moments in the full video interview above, and stay tuned for more on Task, especially after Tom uncovered Grasso’s connection to the Dark Hearts.
Task, Sundays, 9/8c, HBO and HBO Max