Cinemax’s Quarry
Season 1, Episode 4: “Seldom Realized
Directed by Greg Yaitanes
Written by Michael D. Fuller & Graham Gordy

* For a review of the previous episode, “A Mouthful of Splinters” – click here
* For a review of the next episode, “Coffee Blues” – click here

On the dirty floor of a bathroom, Suggs (Kurt Yaeger) strips off his clothes, covered partly in leeches hanging off his wounds. He manages to cut them free with his buck knife before having a little laugh. Like you would.

Poor Mac (Logan Marshall-Green) is worried about the whole situation, after Joni (Jodi Balfour) spent time under the thumb of Suggs, who’s loose out there. Mac tells Karl (Edoardo Ballerini) over the phone that things need to get sorted, so he can go home. I love this part because we see Mac hiding out in a little motel, one with a dirty, closed pool. Yet he has a swim anyway; it’s in his bones, swimming. I wonder if we’ll see more on that because it’s obviously a big part of his life.
For now he tries to keep under the radar. To keep his wife safe, no matter their differences. A knock soon comes at their motel door. Joni readies a gun, just in case. Looks like it’s only housekeeping. Who can blame her? She was abducted, terrible things nearly happened to her. Things aren’t easy between the married couple, though. She cheated on him a bunch as he served in Vietnam; he returned the favour after getting home and discovering this fact. Mac’s involved with the Broker (Peter Mullan), doing bad things that got his buddy Arthur shot, stuff that Joni has no idea about. So the secrets between these two are thick enough to choke a horse. Plus, who knows what else Suggs will get up to now.
Speaking of the one-legged bastard, he’s made himself at home – in Mac and Joni’s house. He takes a shower, looks around. This is going to get ugly. Interestingly, Detective Tommy Olsen (Josh Randall) and his partner Detective Verne Ratliff (Happy Anderson) happen by the place. Tommy wants to talk with Joni, although after a couple knocks they get pulled away on a call. Fate almost pulled a good one.

Life at the motel moves slowly. Mac talks about back in the day, Joni looks disillusioned with everything. They end up arguing a bit about starting a family. “Like you woulda made such a great fuckin‘ mother, huh?” Mac spits at her before walking away. He winds up helping the motel owner, Harlowe (Bill Irwin), to try getting the pool back in working shape. At the same time a man in a nice car shows up, spooking Mac. Meanwhile, Suggs is posing as a Memphis detective looking for Joni at the newspaper where she works.
In the background at the motel, Olympic coverage plays. A swimmer named Spitz competes heartily. At the same time Mac hallucinates, seeing that Asian mask draped over the television; cutting to a vision of him in combat boots, falling in the water and reaching for the same Asian mask floating nearby. Then Joni gets back with beer, acting very unfair towards Mac by bringing up his military service. Seems that nowadays he has nobody on his side, not even her like it was first when he got home: “I needed you,” she tells him when he tells her that his men needed him (re: his 2nd tour of duty). There’s an in-depth look at how combat changes people. Particularly vicious combat, as it was during the war in Vietnam. He tries to explain it to her, about how swimming in a pool at home wasn’t comfortable for him while his “brothers” were over there, getting killed and brutalised. He also wanted to do something to make her proud.
Well, on her way for ice Joni bumps into the man in the nice car, the one who showed up the last time we saw the motel manager. He starts asking Joni questions, about where she and Mac are headed. Hmm. Back at the room – after getting a joint from a lady named Shaynie (Ariadne Joseph) – Joni gets high and relaxes a bit, remembering better days (“Mac n‘ Joni n‘ Cheese“), before her husband cleans the wound on her back and patches it up again. They come together a bit, but Mac can’t face their harsher realities just yet. He heads to hang out with Harlowe again for a while.

Suggs has a kid named Billy (Joshua Mikel) tracking down numbers for him; he’s trying to figure out where Joni called in sick from to keep tracking her. Tricky, tricky. And he’s cold blooded, too. Instead of paying his pal, he shoots him right between the eyes – there’s your service charge, ya bastard!
At the motel, Mac watches live on television as word from the Munich Olympics in ’72 comes on about the massacre perpetrated by Black September. Mac’s so desensitised he barely takes time to contemplate the implications of what’s happening. But he does have other things to worry about, such as: who’s driving that fancy car? He pokes around a bit before the guy notices. He asks Harlowe a bit about him, though nothing big comes of that. Then while the motel manager is running around doing a few things, unbeknown to him Suggs calls and finds out the location of Mac and Joni. They’re caught up arguing in the room. Gets fairly rough. “You have no fuckin‘ idea about over there, you understand me? You have not a fucking clue,” Mac screams at her after she accuses him of banging Vietnamese prostitutes. Afterwards, she drops a bit of nastiness about him being “too busy killing women and children” to do anything else over there. His paranoia boils over when he runs to the fancy car man’s room and nearly tears the place apart, believing it’s somebody in cahoots with Suggs. What a doozy of a scene.
Finally ready to talk, Mac asks about Joni and Cliff. Simultaneously we see Suggs pulling up outside the motel. Just as Joni asks her husband about whether he killed Cliff, a knock at the door – it’s Suggs, who kills Harlowe before pistol whipping Mac brutally. An amazing, quick gunfight breaks out when Joni fires a bullet into Suggs’ face, skimming him. Then the woman Mac kept seeing around the motel steps in, putting another couple right in the bad dude to put him down; a headshot to be sure. Turns out the Broker’s had her sitting on the place. A great, unsuspecting choice. Love it. She tells the married couple to flee, and flee they do indeed.

Back safely in their house Mac explains his relationship with the Broker, how Arthur got into business with him awfully fast. So, above all else, the truth comes out between he and Joni. I mean every last little morsel of honesty. He confesses to the murder of Cliff, her former lover. I wonder how this will ultimately affect their relationship going forward? Joni doesn’t appear overly surprised, though that doesn’t mean she’s happy, either. “How did this become our life?” she asks, exhausted by it all. Mac can only try and apologise, for everything. He’s a gentleman about it all. Offering to leave if she wants, explaining he’ll understand if she calls the police. But really, he wants them to move on. To live life and rekindle their love. Can they ever actually do that?
One thing’s for sure – for all that’s happened, Joni loves Mac. Let’s hope they can make it after all. Because you know there is a lot more struggle to come.

Another spectacular episode. One of my favourites out of the quartet so far.
Next up is “Horla” and I’m excited to see more of the Broker, Buddy, Karl, and the crew.