Animal Kingdom recap: Show me the money

In the fifth episode, Animal Kingdom Season 4 cuts back on the action and embraces relationship drama as Pope finds a new love interest, J calls it quits with Mia and Adrian continues lying to Deran.

In comparison to other Animal Kingdom episodes, not much happened in “Reap”. Everyone appears to be going through the motions, all except for J who is still working towards becoming the new Smurf.

The same way Animal Kingdom was supposed to be J’s origin story but has since steered away from him as a singular protagonist, the flashbacks showing Janine’s origins has gotten a bit off track. It feels like Fantastic Beasts where the writers try so hard to connect the two stories that they don’t develop characters past two-dimensional outlines. This episode showed the start of Smurf taking over Manny’s crew thanks to Colin’s influence. Even though Colin is “crazy” and quite literally a ticking time bomb, Manny needs him.

This is why Colin is needed, but why is Smurf? That’s the question asked of Manny, but he doesn’t have an answer. I’m guessing he knows how dangerous she is.

Smurf has a job for them down south, probably somewhere in Southern California where the show is presently set in, but the others disregard her idea until Colin convinces them otherwise by threatening to leave if they don’t listen to her.

Baby J

Why do women throw themselves at J? Finn Cole isn’t unattractive, but J walks around like he’s in a state of permanent constipation until he stops for a second only to stare at people like a panther stalking a field mouse. Yet, women of all shapes and sizes want him.

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I don’t know how much time has passed since “Tank“, but he doesn’t take long to move on from Mia. Mia herself doesn’t seem to miss him at all, but she does hang the threat of telling Smurf about his secret building operation over his head. That’s something I found very odd about their relationship; he told her EVERYTHING.

Did he think she’d never turn on him? She’s a hit-woman he basically paid to be his girlfriend.

So, with Mia gone, J is quick to move on to Olivia, the rich girl from his college class who lives in an incredible apartment with her mother who is some sort of art curator for an auction house. He was going to rob Benji, but now that he’s seen what Olivia has to offer, it’s like Benji who?  J moves on from screwing Benji to literally screwing Olivia followed by a nice good metaphorical re-screwing of her by proxy of planning a robbery of her mother’s show worth an estimated $1.5 million.

Not everything is over with Mia though. At the end of the day, she sends a message in the form of Tupi’s raging fists. He gets away, but J got their message loud and clear.

Smurf and Pope

Not much is going on with Smurf outside of her illness. She tells Pope what’s going on, but doesn’t want anyone else to know just yet. Pope takes the news of his mother dying better than expected. He even comes straight out and tells her that he can’t wait for her to die. Ouch!

He starts spending more time with Angela who, other than being a reason to include Julia’s memory in the show, has done nothing for the plot and now her and Pope have begun a relationship that’s doomed to fail.

They sleep together in a move that feels like a way for both of them to feel Julia again. The whole thing felt wrong and extremely creepy once Smurf started listening outside the door.

Adrian

The drug plotline is a big mess caused by every relationship’s worst enemy, failure to communicate. During the last episode of Animal Kingdom, Deran found out through Colby that Adrian was moving drugs for a guy named Jack. While Adrian is overseas (he won the competition, by the way), Deran makes a very polite threat to Jack that may have sounded friendly but loosely translated to, “stay away from my boyfriend or I’ll stab you.”

The lovebirds have a confrontation after Adrian gets home where he points out their power imbalance and his desire to have something that’s just his and not given to him by Deran who owns just about everything around him. However, he still neglected to tell Deran about the DEA, so that’s going to be traumatic.

And just when you think it can’t get any worse for Adrian, everyone’s (least) favorite state detective, Pearce, appears and starts asking questions about the Cody’s. Tell him where he can stick his plea deal, Adrian!

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Craig

Craig is rubbing Renn’s pregnant swollen feet, which is a good sign they’ll get back together. Hit the road Frankie. The show does good in showing the differences between the two women, and how one is much better for Craig than a pretentious thief. Renn needs to stop giving him cocaine though.

In the meantime, Frankie makes on her promise and gets Craig the rest of the money except it’s $150,000 short. The statue guy it doesn’t want to pay, having renegotiated the fee but instead insists they do another job for him. Why does he think they’ll do another job when he won’t even pay them for the first one?

Getting their money back

Craig tried so hard to keep his brothers from finding out about Frankie’s inability to pay them, but he didn’t count on her tattling to his mother. Frankie went to Smurf to give her the cut of the job in an attempt to get in her good graces, and if Smurf wasn’t so sick, she might have ripped Frankie’s pretty head off for assuming it would work.

She later pretends the meeting with Frankie never happened and uses it to her advantage against the boys. Using her “word on the street” intel, she reveals that she knows they got ripped off and demands they get the money they’re owed.

They hunt down the statue guy and give him a harshly worded bill for $150K after taking his watch as a down payment. He actually looked shocked that the criminals he hired wanted payment for their services. Has no one told him that’s how business works? The Cody’s aren’t running a charity for billionaires in need of overpriced statues.

Don’t miss the next episode of Animal Kingdom on Tuesday night at 9:00 p.m.  EST on TNT.