The beautiful thing about television as a medium is that you get to watch things pay off. Nocturne Episode 3 moved the pieces around the board. This episode, the writers are capturing pieces. Set up, pay off. It’s a beautiful thing, and it makes Nocturne Episode 4, appropriately titled “The Courier,” one of Nocturne’s strongest episodes yet.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not interested in the smaller things, too. The episode starts with a flashback. Jonah (Liev Schreiber) visits Saga (Zazie Beetz) to inform her that her father shot himself after the disappearance of his wife. He’d also sent Saga a birthday card for the first time in many years. People are often kindest, studies have shown, before they commit suicide. They want to leave the people they love on good terms.
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“The Courier” really belongs to Beetz. She tries to play it off with Jonah; he invites her to dinner, but she claims she has work. You can feel Saga struggling here. She doesn’t want Jonah to see how hurt she is. And Jonah, perhaps wisely, is unwilling to push. But when she’s alone at her desk, long after everyone else is gone, with a box of takeout Chinese food as her only company, and she pulls out that birthday card? Beetz sells every moment of it.
Zazie Beetz convinces us of Saga’s fear.
“The Courier” has a few little moments like this. Ellison (Bill Camp) and Quinn (Poorna Jagannathan) bond over a shared sense of loss, and maybe shame (Quinn’s is in losing custody of her child; Ellison’s is in his fairly recent sobriety). But they are not always pleasant.
Saga knows that to get into the Restricted Housing Unit, she must continually break the rules, but doing so puts her at the mercy of Lloyd (Micah Peoples). You know this guy is a creep show because of the way he searches her mouth to ensure she’s swallowed her pills, the way his fingers linger too long inside her lips, on her tongue. Saga’s fear is not an act then. It is real, and Beetz sells every moment of it.
It also triggers her first run-in with Karl (Rory Culkin), who she is convinced – and we know – has been helping Jurek Walter (Stephen Graham) pass messages to his “lawyer.” But with Nate (Gary Carr) and Jonah watching, they come up with a plan that Quinn agrees to: tell Walter he’s being moved (even though he isn’t; the paperwork would take too long), watch him try to pass a message, and then track it and see where it was going.
While Rory Culkin’s role is minor in Nocturne Episode 4, Karl plays a pivotal part of the story.
All of this depends, of course, on Karl being stupid enough to take one from Walter. Culkin has a fairly minor role in this episode, but to his credit, you can see him grappling with it. While Karl initially turns Walter down saying he needs the job, his empathy eventually overwhelms his good sense, and we’re off to the races. In a particularly scathing bit skewering, one of the cops describes Karl as “a social justice warrior, but only online.” You hate to see it, but you expect to see it.
Graham also has a minor role in Nocturne Episode 4, but he’s menacing every second he’s on screen. It’s an excellent performance, but you do wonder how anybody in Nocturne falls for Walter’s “I’m just a little guy” routine. Contrast this with Carr, who has very little to do other than watch things happen to Saga and Be Concerned. Carr isn’t bad, but Nate is just kind of there so far, and I hope later episodes give him more to do.
All of this comes to a head when Saga’s attempt to escape (in which she delightfully overpowers Lloyd) lands her in the Restricted Housing Unit, and Jonah follows Karl to the drop-off point for Walter’s letter. Unfortunately, the FBI screws up, and whoever is coming to get the letter is alerted by a surveillance drone that’s flying too low.
“The Courier” leaves our heroes on unsteady ground.
Jonah pursues, but he knocks our hero unconscious and escapes. And when the FBI finds him, they show him the letter. It claims Jonah planted Walter’s DNA at the scene.
Our heroes exit Nocturne Episode 4 in a bad place, but as the saying goes, this is incredible content. And it works because we don’t know what will happen. Did Jonah plant that evidence? We don’t know. What happened all those years ago isn’t something Nocturne has explored, and that gap leads to tension. Similarly, we don’t know what’s going to happen to Saga. At this moment, Jurek Walter is ascendant.
How much, if any, will he get away with? Who knows? But Nocturne has turned what we don’t know into some really compelling tension. It is paying off both what it has and hasn’t told us. That’s good television.
Nocturne Episode 4 is streaming now, exclusively on Apple TV with new episodes every Friday.
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Rating
Our heroes exit Nocturne Episode 4 in a bad place, but as the saying goes, this is incredible content. And it works because we don’t know what will happen.
