Of course, any Coens admirer paying attention to the name knew it would be even before Rabbi and Satchel set foot inside. Milch (Japhet Balaban), a young man heading to Texas to make his fortune in oil. He’ll need it even more at episode’s end, even after making the acquaintance of fellow guests like the chatty, Dale Carnegie-inspired aluminum siding salesman Hunk Swindell (Tom Hopper) and Hickory J. Swapped, targeted for murder, and whisked away, Satchel needs some warmth and companionship in his life. And, as a bonus, Satchel finds a delightful little dog named “Rabbit” locked in their wardrobe, immediately claiming her as his own. It does seem like a place that attracts eccentrics, however, including a man receiving some kind of medical care from a teenager in the room next to theirs. This is not a place constructed with the comfort of its guests in mind. They just need to “steer clear of them.” They’ll also need to navigate the line running down the middle of the whole house that separates east from west. And though the desk clerk is Black, she warns them that the sisters who own the Barton Arms “don’t care much for coloreds.” But they can still stay. “We don’t follow politics,” he replies to the desk clerk.
OZ SEASON 4 EPISODE 7 SERIES
Once inside, Rabbi and Satchel have to answer a series of questions to determine whether they belong on the west or east side of the house, questions about their preference between Plymouth Rock and Sutter’s Mill and Eisenhower and McCarthy, whose voice Rabbi heard on the radio during the drive. (That the Mellon family was never caught, per the plaque, suggests a thread left dangling for a future season.) If the plaque outside marking it as the former home of “the infamous Mellon family, who lured unsuspecting travelers into their home, tied them and then dispatched them with a hammer” didn’t already suggest this might not be the most comforting way station, the contents of the Barton Arms surely do. That first involves a stop at Liberal, the “Pancake Hub of the Universe,” located just on the other side of an unfinished billboard reading the “The Future is…” But first, Rabbi needs to stash Satchel somewhere safe, choosing a rooming house called Barton Arms. We’ll have to wait a while to find out how that plays out, however, as the bulk of the episode flashes back to chronicle Rabbi and Satchel’s attempts to find safe haven away from the Kansas City gang war that’s left them both exiled. If he’s going to take on Calamita, Omie at least needs the numbers to be even. That doesn’t take long, and after Aldo attempts to make a break for it when Calamita arrives, Omie, no doubt frustrated by Aldo’s nonsense - shoots him dead. That talk mixes Aldo’s casual racism with some not-entirely-off-base insights about how people at their level of their respective organizations do all the work while the bosses reap the rewards. It also allows Omie to continue a conversation with Aldo Abruzo (Joel Reitsma), the Fadda henchman Omie’s stuck in his trunk. (Freeze the frame and you can read a somewhat baffled account of the episode’s final moments.) Then the image switches to black and white and the events leading up to Omie and his captor’s arrival at the fateful gas station.Īfter a quick stop at a plaque marking the birthplace of astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, we learn that Omie is still in search of Calamita and, after a brief conversation with the gas station attendant - the doomed Willy Bupor (Cedric Young) - that ends with Omie agreeing to do some painting in return for being allowed to sit and wait for Calamita’s inevitable arrival. Specifically, it lands on a page from the book’s seventh chapter, “Who Shot Willy Bupor?,” an investigation into a strange crime that transpired in 1950 at a small filling station.
“East/West” announces itself as an atypical outing from the start, with a Bertrand Russell quote, and a slow pan over some rubble that lands on some pages from the book The History of True Crime in the Wild West. That’s a major development in this season’s storyline, but it also mostly serves as a framing device for the episode, season four’s oddest episode and as wild a departure as the series has ever attempted.
In “East/West,” Omie begins the episode on a journey to make good on that promise, one that takes him to a middle-of-nowhere gas station somewhere between Kansas City and the town of Liberal, Kansas. When we last saw Omie Sparkman - former boxer and Loy Cannon loyalist - he was promising his boss that Constant Calamita would soon pay for the crime of killing Doctor Senator (and other offenses).
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