Abhiroop Das
Created by Sterlin Harjo, ‘The Lowdown‘ returns with a brand new mystery for its second season, one still connected to Tulsa, but through a completely new set of nodes. This time, the person of interest is a public defender named Ginger, who seems to be on a quest to locate an inmate she knew. With incidents of systemic violence on the rise, neither Ginger nor Lee discard the possibility that something grimmer is at play, and just like that the game is afoot. What this new investigation ultimately leads him to, though, is that the ability to outsmart the enemy using their own strategy isn’t as easy as it sounds. Episode 1 of the season, titled ‘Rupidoop,’ explores this idea by pitting Lee in the middle of a new mystery. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Lee Makes Friends With a Public Lawyer With a Target on Her Back
‘The Lowdown’ season 2 episode 1 begins not with Lee Raybon, and not even Tulsa for that matter, but on its wee outskirts, tailing an old man who seems to have lost his way. As a police car approaches him, the man seems too dazed to even know his age or current whereabouts, but remembers just fine that his name is Lee Raybon Sr., and that he is headed to his town to settle some old dues. With that, the show cuts back to the Lee we are more familiar with, one who is rather unhappily basking in the success of his recent journalistic endeavors. With an upcoming award ceremony where he is about to win a citizens’ choice award, Lee cannot help but feel that he’s becoming too mainstream, and thus he decides to have some fun with it.
That night, Lee arrives at the award ceremony high on mushrooms, and when the time comes to pick up his award, he deviates from the usual speeches, lambasting everyone for being sellouts and not reporting on the injustices embedded in the nation’s history. While the crowd expectedly turns sour, one person in particular appears to have been impressed by this speech. Ginger, a public defense lawyer who is alone at the ceremony, ends up having another chance encounter with Lee at the bar, where she praises his words, but is quick to dismiss his work as puff pieces. That doesn’t stop Lee from flirting, though, and Ginger eventually reciprocates by revealing that she is being followed by two men, and he might have a chance if he can spot them.
Though Lee isn’t sure at first whether Ginger was joking or not, the doubts soon dissipate when he spots the two men later in the washroom. One of them appears to be sporting an SS tattoo, which tells Lee all he really needs to know. While discovering them doesn’t exactly land him a date with Ginger, it does create enough of a distraction for her to escape without them noticing. Before Lee can react, he is forced into a new subplot and spends the rest of the night dealing with journalists who felt personally insulted by his speech. The next morning, he wakes up to see Francis, who reveals that she was at the ceremony last night, but simply got too embarrassed by her dad’s speech. This, however, only adds to Lee’s fear that he and his family are becoming too normal and well-adjusted, and the only way he can think of undoing that is by stirring up trouble.
Lee (Almost) Gets Conned by a Covert Prison Mafia Gang
After tracking down Ginger’s legal office and showing up there unannounced, Lee expresses his eagerness to help her with her stalker situation, though in reality his goal seems to simply be in touch with her. Though Ginger tries to brush him off at first, her mind begins to change when she learns of how he employed a degree of confidentiality in his reporting on the Washbergs. As it turns out, there is something that has been troubling her for the past few weeks, and it’s connected to an inmate named Mekko Dean whom she once defended and was regularly in contact with. Ginger and Mekko had been talking almost every day for quite some time, but that stopped abruptly a few weeks ago. Since then, Mekko seems to have cut all ties with the outside world and has not shown up for any court proceedings, which compels Ginger to fear the worst.
Though Lee doesn’t quite understand the finer details of the situation, he nonetheless volunteers to help her by going to Boontill Prison under the pretext of being press. The person he meets there, though, doesn’t feel like Mekko at first glance. Lee’s suspicions are soon confirmed when the man seems unprepared to answer the questions, and amidst a heated verbal exchange, Lee accidentally slips up about the fact that he was sent by Ginger. While hurriedly leaving the prison, Lee then gets stopped by a prison guard, who turns out to be one of the two men stalking Ginger that night. As the man lets Lee go with a soft threat, the journalist later learns he fell for a fake inmate trick, locally dubbed as a “rupidoop,” and that nothing but misery awaits.
Later that night, when Lee reveals his findings to Ginger, albeit with some embarrassment, her blood understandably runs cold. If a potential Neo-Nazi gang of prison officers learns that she has been digging into them, trouble is bound to show up, which means that Lee has officially made her life worse than before. Not long after she angrily asks him to leave, Lee hears the sound of gunshots and is forced to take a U-turn. While reaching the house, he finds a lanky masked man bleeding and running away, as it turns out that the shot was from Ginger’s self-defense pistol. While the disaster may have been averted for now, she identifies the man as her other stalker, who is most likely part of this network too, which means that unless they go completely dark, the bad times are only getting started.
Read More: Is The Lowdown Based on a True Story? Is Lee Raybon a Real Writer?
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