Click here to read the full article.
One of the unofficial rules of prestige television is that the penultimate episode is for the mess and the finale is for the cleanup. This is particularly true for limited series — or any series with ambiguous renewals.
And “Task,” creator Brad Ingelsby’s Emmy-nominated HBO drama about the murky gray waters between avenging and forgiveness, followed both of those rules. While the show’s sixth episode, “Out Beyond Ideas of Wrongdoing and Rightdoing, There Is a River,” came with lots of surprise deaths and plot twists, its seventh episode, “A Still Small Voice,” is much quieter. There is plenty of bloodshed and adrenaline, but those action scenes serve mostly as retribution and to tie up loose plot points. The most important moments of the seventh episode involve what the characters say, not about what they do. As the series was later renewed for a second season, officially making it a drama instead of the limited series that many assumed it to be, these scenes also set up a clean slate of a plot and more rich character development for future episodes. The most pivotal moment of this is anchored by a monologue performed by Mark Ruffalo, who landed a lead actor Emmy nom. Ruffalo plays Tom Brandis, a former priest who now heads an FBI task force looking into a string of murders and drug deals — as well as a spur-of-the-moment kidnapping — that happened in the backwoods of Pennsylvania’s Delaware County. While spearheading an investigation that turns out to include everything from corrupt cops to child welfare, Tom’s personal life is a wreck. His adopted son, Ethan (Andrew Russel) is imprisoned for the murder of Tom’s wife, Susan (Mireille Enos), and it’s up to Tom to decide if he can forgive Ethan, who attacked Susan because of his disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, and help him get a more lenient sentence or send him away for life. Creator Ingelsby is Emmy-nominated for writing this episode, as are Keiko Deguchi and Amy E. Duddleston for their work in picture editing. Director Jeremiah Zagar also doesn’t let Tom off the hook during this speech, using various angles to encircle Ruffalo’s face and body so that the audience can feel Tom’s uncomfortableness and guilty feeling that whichever direction he chooses for his son will be the wrong one. The cast and crew blocked out an entire day to film the scene. Ingelsby knows this was an unusually long chunk of time for a monologue, but they wanted to do their best to perfectly anchor the words that are so much the crux of the story. Although Ingelsby says he had a lot of anxiety about nailing the mood, Ruffalo got the monologue done in two or three takes. Filming began with the close-ups before going into the wider shots, although the creator says they primarily used the tighter shots in the final cut because it felt more emotional and honest. It also drove home the message that no one — neither Tom’s other children, who are trying to hold it together in the seats of the courthouse, or the audience — has any real inclination as to how this is going to go. By the end of the speech, a tearful Tom does, if not forgive, at least exonerate his son. He says it’s what his wife would have wanted. And now, he doesn’t want this horrible thing, a thing Ethan could not control, to define his son’s life. “In order for the ending to land, you need to do some of the harsh stuff up front,” Ingelsby says of the monologue’s twists and turns. “If we allow those things to lead, then I felt like the audience would feel like this is coming from an honest place. So, when we transition into the joy section, it also felt like it was honest.” These words are also coming from a former priest, a man the world is taught to believe is infallible simply because of his profession. Ingelsby based a lot of Tom’s attributes on conversations with his own uncle, who is a former priest and is fond of a quote from rabbi and philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel: “We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.” With Tom, Ingelsby says, “He was someone that people would come to, and he would console them. He would have all the words, and he would know exactly what to say at exactly the right time. And yet, when it happens to him, he’s completely adrift.” Even before the scene was written, Ingelsby says he warned Ruffalo that his character arc would “all be leading up to this speech.” The original draft was “three whole pages” of dialogue, and after much whittling down and rewrites, Ingelsby provided Ruffalo with an emotional monologue that rubs raw the stresses of caring for someone with a mental disorder. Tom discusses how embarrassed he was to wear a nametag on parent-teacher night at Ethan’s school and expresses that, in his family, weekends were not relaxing but rather “two whole days” of mental exhaustion as he and Susan attempted to predict Ethan’s moods and actions and prepared to keep him and everyone else safe — and shows the love that they all had for each other. “I really wanted to make it honest, and the way to make it honest is to lead with just how hard it was and then have a turn in the middle where he says there’s also a lot of joy,” Ingelsby says. Writing about families of people with mental disorders is not new to Ingelsby. His other Emmy-winning HBO series that’s set in Delaware County, “Mare of Easttown,” was also about a parent who works in law enforcement and who had a child who needed help. Ingelsby says that he began to research these topics when his family was experiencing concerns about his own son. He read online message boards from overwhelmed parents and says he “just really empathized with that.” “In all the testimonies that I was reading, I could see how torturous that could be. How there’s moments of love and joy, but then exhaustion and throwing your hands up,” he says. “We don’t get to hear about those people … I’m just interested in being able to use this medium to tell a story about a group of people that often aren’t illuminated in that way and do it with a lot of empathy and care.”
