Mr Inbetween 3rd and final season

[rjd2]

With corona etc totally forgot about this show which I hyped to anybody I could.

Just finished episode one of season 3, its grim as plenty of violence and the humor is as usual quite grim, but very enjoyable half hour.

Anyone else watched season 3?

Might actually rewatch season 1 and 2 as have forgotten some stuff,,,but very hard to find online.

[Satchmo Distel]

Yes, I have just finished Series 3. It stays grim and violent, with some comedy subplots that don't belong at all. There's a prison episode that seems to be purely to fill a space. The best scenes are with Ray's daughter (Chika Yasumura), who is acted brilliantly for a child so young.

[13 schoolyards]

I liked the prison episodes - they filled in a gap in Ray's character ("how would this full-time criminal handle prison?") and once we had the (admittedly fairly obvious) answer the show moved on.

I've read people saying we didn't really need this season as the character was pretty much fully explored by the end of s2, and while I'd agree with that to some extent the series as a whole remained pretty entertaining. S3 ended up a little bit more sympathetic to Ray than I expected after s2 - I thought this would really swerve more into the price he was paying for being an anger-driven murder machine - but it managed to show enough bad shit going on in his life to (mostly) balance out the badass moments.

The very last scene (especially the final shot) of the whole series was great though, and wouldn't have worked at all if Ray had been shown as more flawed.

[Satchmo Distel]

*******SPOILERS*******

The third series showed a separation between Ray's character and the pure evil perpetrated by other characters, whom Ray is disgusted by. Perhaps that's because Ray has a daughter so draws the line at misogynistic violence? Everyone Ray kills is himself a killer AFAIK, either directly or via a crime that drives the victim to suicide.

That said, Ray does have major flaws in other ways. He can't communicate properly with his daughter and his only solution to her problems is to terrorize a child. He fails to reconcile properly with his dad even when the latter opens up. His violence eventually alienates his sexual partners. He has no other method of conflict resolution. He clearly couldn't do a job where he'd have to work with others.

[13 schoolyards]

Ray was always shown as a "crim with honour" though - he was firmly against violence towards women and kids from the start. What made the second season more interesting to me was the way it started to show the cracks in his facade of simply being a good guy who stood up against dickheads with his violence starting to get out of control.

The third season developed that a bit with him having to take on some grubbier gigs, but it never really pushed things far enough that he did anything truly unlikable (

Spoiler alert

even the disposal of those oldie witnesses out in the desert was somewhat justifiable after Jeremy Sims killed the first one

[close]

).

On the whole I think he was shown to be a decent dad though - he was a bit out of touch as a single father with a teenage daughter, but he was generally a straight shooter with her and gave her enough rope to live her life without outright murdering her boyfriends (yet). Needed a better lock on his guns though obviously.

[Satchmo Distel]

But he also

Spoiler alert

disposes of a young female overdose victim to be eaten by pigs

[close]

[13 schoolyards]

But he also

Spoiler alert

disposes of a young female overdose victim to be eaten by pigs

[close]

Doesn't he

Spoiler alert

take her to the pig farm, then feel bad about it and give her a decent, if secret, burial instead?

[close]

I kept expecting his occasional moments of decency to catch up with him, but I guess it was never that kind of "plot twist!" show