Apple TV+ comedy High Desert reaches its penultimate episode this week, as Peggy comes close to solving the many mysteries she’s been juggling as a first-time private investigator.
Arman and Heather squeeze Peggy for money she doesn’t have, just as her ne’er-do-well hubby Denny creates more problems for them by resuming his life of crime. Plus, the Gatchis demand answers about their missing sister. Entitled “This Doesn’t Have to Be a Tragedy,” it’s a surprisingly emotional episode of the zany noir.
High Desert recap: ‘This Doesn’t Have to Be a Tragedy’
Season 1, episode 7: Peggy Newman (played by Patricia Arquette) calls her husband, Denny (Matt Dillon), to apologize for being so hard on him. What with his impossible recidivism, she’s become used to him being a scheming crook and an asshole all the time, she says. He’s happy to hear this, but even as they speak he’s proving her point by robbing a head shop with friend Chunky (Dorian Martin). So much for that.
Peggy gets a call from Carol (Weruche Opia) saying that her daughter, Cooper (Jayden Gomez), found what she thinks is the body of Guru Bob’s (Rupert Friend) dead wife Dona (Tonya Glanz). Cooper flew her drone over Bob’s yard and saw what she thinks is a body. Peggy races over to the Gatchis’ place, owned by Dona’s brothers Leo (Michael Masini) and Nick (Carmine Giovinazzo), to tell them she found Dona’s body.
Peggy wants the $70,000 reward the brothers have been offering for information about Dona’s whereabouts. But they won’t just hand it over until they see the body. So they give her Dona’s old parrot Lionel Richie instead. She gives the bird to Carol, who loves it, even though by living in a brothel it’s learned to speak nothing but the foulest language.
It’s a family affair
Photo: Apple TV+
Peggy’s brother Stewart (Keir O’Donnell) and sister Dianne (Christine Taylor) come by Bruce Harvey’s (Brad Garrett) P.I. office to make sure Peggy’s employment is legitimate. They’ve been threatening to sell their mother’s house, where Peggy’s been living, while she’s been trying to raise enough money to buy it out from under them.
Naturally, when they arrive, Bruce is having a meltdown because he found out his wife cheated on him. He’s blasting Sheryl Crow and starts shooting at the cars parked in the office lot. Dianne and Stewart flee in terror. Peggy instructs Bruce and their office tech, William (Kellen Joseph), to tell the police that it was local thug Arman (Carlo Rota) and his daughter, Heather (Julia Rickert), who shot up the place.
In retaliation, Arman and Heather break into Peggy’s house that night to inquire about the money she promised them to spare her and Bob’s lives. They share with her the news that Bob skipped town, which means she’s on her own and the only one on the hook for the money and the forged art Bob sold Arman.
More threats from Arman and Heather
When Arman and Heather threaten to destroy Peggy’s mother’s house, it sets her off. She says she knows where the money is and takes them out to Chunky’s trailer, which is parked in her driveway. There they find Chunky and Denny counting the money they’ve been stealing from local merchants and dispensaries.
Peggy’s mad enough at Denny for lying that she doesn’t feel bad about giving Arman and Heather all of his stolen money (plus Chunky’s Airstream as collateral) until she can find the rest of the money she owes them.
Peggy’s still holding out hope that the father of her son Ethan (Alex Saxon) will come through for her. However, he gets arrested at customs with the money he promised to bail Peggy out of her fix (as Ethan tells her over the phone). Distraught that she won’t see her son — and that her problems are nowhere near over — Peggy drops some acid. She sees a vision of her mother, Rosalyn (Bernadette Peters), in her bathroom.
High Desert downplays the drugs
Photo: Apple TV+
The acid vision is a great little grace note from actors Patricia Arquette and Bernadette Peters. Arquette doesn’t often let Peggy’s full emotional range show, simply because the character’s so much a creature of pure impulse and ADHD. So I loved seeing her finally collapse this week. That allowed Arquette to dig into what we know Peggy’s been unsuccessfully covering up in her quest to seem like she finally has her shit together.
Peters finds herself in a peculiar mode on High Desert, playing dual roles as the closed-off and comatose Rosalyn and the closed-off and self-obsessed Ginger. So it was nice to see yet a third persona emerge this week — a caring but mysterious one that’s a projection of Peggy’s wishes for the mother she never really got to know.
High Desert doesn’t hit the drug stuff as hard as it could. That helps keep the tone of the show light, even though the hero is a recovering heroin addict, recreational LSD user and dependent methadone user. It also takes the show back from the brink of pure drama. But these little flirtations with drug craziness offer some consolation. It’s all part of the insane mess that is Peggy’s life.
★★★★☆
Watch High Desert on Apple TV+
New episodes of High Desert arrive Wednesdays on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
