Animal Kingdom recap: Smurf refuses to talk and throws a party

In Episode 10, Exit Strategy, of Animal Kingdom, Smurf throws a massive party as a farewell to her life while the boys unsuccessfully try to scramble together to plan the next job.

There are only three episodes left of Animal Kingdom Season 4 and everything’s happening at once. Smurf pretends like nothing’s wrong while the boys deal with their own troubles. The flashback went nowhere this week, just holding us over for the next one. The segment would’ve been a lot better if it was from its own show instead of needlessly crammed into Animal Kingdom‘s storyline.

The crew finds out Janine is pregnant and offers to ditch her for Colin’s sake. Instead, Colin chooses Janine and their unborn twins (that they don’t know are twins yet) with the promise that they can have any life they want. Is it just me or is Colin pretty sane for a violent, “crazy” guy?

Pope loses another anchor

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Angela relapses and Pope spends the whole episode looking for her. He finds out that J took her to the drug side of town and she bought heroin off a former dealer. He eventually finds her at Smurf’s party and it’s clear to anyone watching that she’s high.

In what’s a moment he’s probably remembering from his days with Julia, Pope violently searches Angela for track marks and locks her the bathroom when he finds one on her foot. The rest of Pope’s screentime is dedicated to him being a rigid stone reluctant to change. He doesn’t want Smurf’s death to change anything.

Deran and Adrian

Adrian discovers that he’s looking at a possible 15-year sentence and Deran isn’t taking it well. He was on the verge of tears when Adrian told him, followed by resentment towards his own family. As Adrian points out, he’s facing15 years for one mistake, while the Cody’s have been committing a long list of crimes for years and never get caught.

Deran isn’t a man of many words, but I think he agreed with this statement a little. He’s inching further and further away from his family, growing tired of their usual antics.

Meanwhile, Smurf’s police informant returns with a name for the alleged rat, Adrian’s name, which tells me there’s some kind of miscommunication within the force because he was never talking. Why would they consider him an informant against the Cody’s? Smurf tells Deran to “take care of it” or she’ll send Pope to do it for him.

Things aren’t looking good, and maybe I’m an optimist, but it’s running towards an outcome so obvious that it most likely won’t play out the way it seems.

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Renn and Craig

Renn’s mother Candice stops by, played by none other than Angie from George Lopez (Constance Marie)! She decides that she should be the one to raise Renn’s baby, as she’s more responsible, and expects Craig and Renn to just go along with her all so explicable logic.

Her uppity attitude gets to be too much and Craig tells her off, stating that she’s the root for everything that went wrong in Renn’s life. Renn first did coke after finding it in her mother’s purse, she was almost molested by her mother’s second husband and Candice did nothing to protect her, driving Renn to live on the beach for a week with Craig bringing her food and blankets (he was smitten from the start).

In the end, after Candice leaves and Craig plans to get sober for fatherhood, Renn decides to name their son Nick. Kind of wish it was Crest.

J was right, Olvia is an idiot

I’ll be frank and admit that I never liked Olivia’s character. She always seemed like a spoiled brat and it appears that J felt the same way. I’ll give her credit in figuring out J was the one behind her mother’s show getting robbed, but then again, it wasn’t hard to figure out.

Olivia finds out who J really is, and who his family is, and she makes the wise decision to blackmail him. But her demand made me laugh because it’s the kind of demand a high school jock usually makes of the skinny geeky kid in a 90’s teen flicks. She asks him to do her freaking homework. She gets $10K for every A she gets (!!!!!) but is failing Stats and wants J to do the work for her.

She couldn’t get a tutor or pay another kid to do it? No, apparently, her only option is to blackmail a criminal she’s known for about two weeks.

Of course, J reports her to the professor instead of playing games. She tries yet another attempt to force his hand, but he ends up threatening her with physical harm if she doesn’t keep her mouth shut. He tells her how disgusted her big house and conceited attitude makes him, living a life so easy her only problem is her large allowance will be $10K less, and I got to say, I agree. I think Jolivia (is that their ship name?) is officially over now.

Smurf throws the party of the decade

Smurf returns home determined to ignore her upcoming death and throw the biggest party imaginable as a final farewell. No matter how many times the guys (mostly Deran) tries bringing up her cancer, she completely ignores them and moves on to another topic.

She tells them about the Jed job and then gets working on her party. I think she might have put an announcement on Craigslist or something because there were more people at that party than necessary.

It’s clear by how she’s acting Smurf doesn’t plan on living long, especially with the Jed/Colin connection looming ahead. I’m going to take a wild guess and say Jed maybe had something (an indirect connection) to do with Colin’s death (if he is dead), and Smurf has waited this many years to take revenge, with plans to die in the process.

Her clock is running out and it shows. She doesn’t have a lot of time left, and if I didn’t hate her so much, I might feel bad.

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