There are plenty of reckoning moments in the latest episode of Will Trent, but there’s one that’s sure to leave viewers of a certain age reminiscing about a classic movie moment.
While Angie Polaski (Erika Christensen) struggles with the death of her abusive mother by turning to alcohol, and Michael Ormewood (Jake McLaughlin) reluctantly prepares in case his brain tumor—and as-yet-unscheduled surgery—becomes dangerous, Will Trent (Ramón Rodríguez) is still dealing with his guilt over the death of his teenage son Marco.
While Angie and Michael come to the end of a fatal fall, Will and Faith (Iantha Richardson) are tasked with tracking down a barrel rider who stole an old horse, with a dead body along the way. They don’t believe she’s responsible for the murders, but they need to find her to get to the bottom of this horrific scene.
While camping in the woods, Will confesses to Faith that he’s still traumatized by the death of Marco, who died from Will’s bullet after a self-defense shot ricocheted and hit the 14-year-old. (He’s seen some kind of therapist who asks him if he wants to live, and we don’t get to hear the answer.)
Will tells Faith about how his younger brother visited him with a gun in his backpack, intending to kill him in revenge. Faith, like the spiritual healer he saw at the beginning of the episode, tries to use kind words to help—”God doesn’t judge us by our worst actions,” she tells him. “We’re always going to make mistakes. But the goal isn’t to be perfect. The goal is to be kind. We help people, Will… We’re going to keep accumulating those good deeds because that’s the only thing we have control over.”
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After finding the horse’s rider, Bernadette, Will determines that the horse has been poisoned by the rancher’s decision to traffic drugs through the animal’s organs. Then their tracker starts shooting and they have to gain the upper hand, which Faith does. Will is then asked to take a very sick Pancake to the vet and on the way, the animal starts to slow down.
He hugged the horse and said to it, “Hey girl, I know you’re not feeling well, okay? But we need to keep going, okay? I want you to see Miss Bernadette again, okay? So what do you say girl? Can we do it? Can you find the strength?” After he drank some of the “optimistic drops” prescribed by the healer and shared them with the animal, he felt pretty good. However, that feeling didn’t last long. The horse eventually collapsed from exhaustion, and Will turned to Atreyu from The Neverending Story with Artax—minus the quicksand—to plead with her.
“You can’t give up now. Come on girl. You’re okay… Please, please be okay. Listen to me Pancake, you and I, we’ll make a deal, okay? If you live, I’ll live… We’ll get through this because we chose to live, okay? We chose to live.” Millennials will no doubt know the trauma of this pop culture reference, but thankfully, the ending isn’t quite as bleak this time.
Elsewhere, Angie tells Michael she’s going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and he says it’s time to tell his kids about his health concerns. Only one of them follows through on his promise. After Michael tells his family, his son offers to drive him home from the hospital after surgery, and Cooper asks him a carefully crafted list of questions. Meanwhile, Angie toasts her late mother with a shot of gin and flushes her ashes down the toilet (which she immediately regrets) before pouring her drink out and telling her that “the cycle stops.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t pan out either, as she’s later shown in the middle of a fight with a couple arguing at a bar, and she ends up getting attacked by both parties.
It’s not over for either of them, but Will seems to end the episode on a bit of an upbeat note (whether it’s drug-based or not). On a brighter note, Amanda (Sonja Sohn) gets the punchline of the episode right when, after Faith jokes about needing to call the fashion police, she says, “I’m already here.”
