Animal Kingdom recap: Season 3, episode 5 Prey

On Animal Kingdom, Deran bonds with his father, J struggles being king, and Pope juggles fatherhood with being a Cody.

They’re a family, but it’s still an animal kingdom. The Cody house is piling up with Billy, Frankie and Mia squatting without permission, making themselves quite at home. Pope is having trouble playing father to Lena, it’s maybe the fourth time he has to demand she go to school, and he also has the Billy problem weighing on him. As if Pope didn’t hate him enough, he catches Billy going commando in his shorts and got a full frontal shot as he took them off. The look on Pope’s face just screamed “I hate you.” As the only one old enough to remember him, Pope is the only one, not counting Smurf, who desperately wants Billy out of the house.

Lena feels the trauma of losing both parents and attacks a girl at school. When Pope comes to pick her up, he breaks down in the car, cracking under the weight pushing him down. Baz is dead, Billy is back, Smurf is in prison; he can’t handle it all. He’s already dealing with extreme guilt for being the cause of Lena being an orphan, and it’s hurting him that he can’t make her life easier. He pleads with her to tell him whats wrong but she doesn’t seem too moved by the waterworks.  She sits silently in the car looking out the window, not willing to talk. Remember, Pope may be a fan favorite but Lena’s distance is justified, she’s being raised by the man who murdered her mother. Maybe on some level she knows Pope’s responsible.

Meanwhile, at The Drop, it’s a wild morning. Remember Linc? The nurse that just wondered in conveniently while Adrian was away? Last episode had Linc making heart eyes at Deran and after Deran x Adrian fans fretted over a hook-up, it eventually happened. It was a raunchy one too. However, the writers are quick to remind us who Deran’s heart still belongs too. Linc picks up the surfing picture Adrian took and Deran’s relaxed posture instantly tenses up and he shoves off Linc’s attempt to hang out. As a major Adrian fan, it hurt to watch the two of them rolling around on the floor, but it looks like Adrian is the only person Deran will cook breakfast for.

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J and Nicky’s relationship has been on the down-spiral since the season began. “Prey” opened with them in a tense conversation with Nicky trying to explain why she slept with another man, but J rebutted it. Apparently, it’s okay for him to sleep around with the crazy girl sleeping on their couch, but not for Nicky. Can we say double standard?

I love the Cody’s but all of them are two timing hound dogs; Baz, J, Craig, even Deran in a non-exclusive kind of way.

Nicky decides 20 minutes in that she wants to move back with her father. Moments before she’s about to board a train to leave, she gets a call that broke my heart. I never liked Nicky, she was immature and spoiled but hearing her father tell her not to come home, that he didn’t want her, was hard. Nicky’s a handful but not so bad to be disowned. Nicky really has nobody now. None of the Cody’s tolerate her presence, J ignores her and now her own father doesn’t want her. It’s hard not to feel for her.

While everyone is having sex or falling apart, Pope plays detective. Being the suspicious person that he is, he doesn’t trust Mia, as he shouldn’t. Like Deran said, “that girl has juvie written all over her.”  Pope swore to find his brother’s killer and unbeknownst to him, has been looking right at her for over two days. He finds out about Smurf’s protection plan in prison and confronts a member of the gang protecting her. Remember that Hispanic woman with the curly hair? He pays her a visit, and discovers that Mia is freelance. Doesn’t work for the gang protecting Smurf and is basically a ticking time bomb in their house. “That chiacs dangerous” she says and leaves Pope glaring at the glass. Now he really wants Mia out.

While all this is going on, Billy tries bonding with his son. I don’t like Billy. It might have something to do with how many times he says “Dude” or because he’s a shady freeloader. He plays the good father and tells Deran to have lots of sex with as many woman as he can, when Deran comes out as gay Billy doesn’t miss a beat, “then lots of dudes.” He then refers to himself as a “heterosexual bottom”, a term that I would like to hear more often. Deran has always been the more emotional of the Cody’s and Billy is clearly buttering him up. He’s stroking his ego by telling him that he should be in charge instead of J.

While everyone else is being proactive, Craig is becoming the ugly step-sister in this series. It feels like they give him meaningless things to do just to give him screen time. Craig’s story lines have been pretty tacked on so far and this new one is no better. He discovers that Smurf has been paying a family money for years because of an accident caused by him when he was younger. It felt out of the blue, but was a move in character development. When Craig heard that he accidentally injured a boy permanently, he broke down and cried. (Lots of crying in this episode). After years of living without consequence, he realizes it’s time to pay his dues and he does.

It was also pretty clear that Craig is eventually going to hook up with Billy’s girlfriend, Frankie. She’s a good combination of Renn and Nicky that he needs in a woman.

King J is working hard and wants to do things his own way. After avoiding his relationship problems, he starts his daily chores of laundering money. They have a great montage of J laundering money while Nicky does the actual laundry. At the prison, he starts back talking Smurf, sighing when she gets mad. They’re relationship is quickly unraveling and it won’t be long until Smurf sees her own grandson as a target. They detail his new work ethic when he runs into a problem with one of their tenants who has Dementia. Afraid she’ll become a liability he asks Deran to help get rid of her, but instead of killing her, they drive out to the desert and leave her there. I assume he asked Deran for help because he wanted her dead but couldn’t do it himself, but he’s slowly becoming a true crime king.

Detective Pearce has a bug up his butt about the Cody’s, one that he’s not about to forget. He’s been following J personally, after the first tail got duped, and gets front row tickets to J laundering money. He taunts Smurf over this information and begins the unraveling of her trust in her grandson, especially once he denies her phone call. The look on her face is priceless but also a little scary. If I was J I’d be nervous about the next time I see her.

At the end we see that Billy really does want something other than a relationship with his son as we see him laid back on the couch shooting up heroin. The multiple track marks reveal just how long he’s been an addict. This is the moment Nicky, fresh from rejection and eyes red from crying, walks in and sees him but Billy only smiles and pats the spot beside him, offering her to join in.

Nicky, a cocaine addict already, is about to add heroin to her long list of favorite drugs.

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After a nice wrap up of everyone’s day, there are tense stares between family members and moments before the credits roll, the two strangers, Mia and Billy, size each other up as wild animals sniffing around for easy prey. You have to wonder, are they thinking the other is a threat to their place in the house? They are both parasites sucking on two different Cody’s, one is eventually going to try and push the other out. This episode was a mixture of emotional conflict  and filler, each character was planting seeds to grow something later. Animal Kingdom has lots of builder block episodes used to bled story lines into the episodes after and it always pays off. I know every episode after this is going to be wild.

What did you think of this week’s episode? Tune in to TNT every Tuesday at 9:00 p.m. to catch the next episode of Animal Kingdom .