Wednesday, August 16, 2017

What I’m Watching: Ray Donovan


Ray Donovan: Season 5, Episode 2 “Las Vegas” (B+)

There’s something strange and a bit eerily dreamlike about these flashbacks to Ray and Abby spending happy time together, and it just doesn’t feel real. I think that’s because, even at his most romantic, Ray is still pretty cold and unemotional. He’s clearly so distraught about having lost his wife, but I’m not sure he ever truly valued her when she was alive, even in this more idyllic time. Abby knows what’s going on, and she wasn’t okay with the idea that Terry had sex with another woman and then proposed to Maureen on the same night, especially since she knew that Ray might do the same sort of thing. They had fun together getting Ray’s mother’s ring back, but then she had a seizure, and things just went downhill from there. This season’s prominent mess of a star appears to be Natalie James, played by Lili Simmons, who spoke about as much on “Banshee” and in this episode nearly made Ray miss his brother’s wedding and then shot her soon-to-be-ex, plays by Rhys Coiro of “Entourage,” when she went back for her dog. It’s too bad that the wedding didn’t go well even with the Donovan brothers behaving themselves, and it was the cops who started trouble that quickly turned into a brawl thanks to Bunchy jumping in to defend his brother with his fists. Terry does seem to have undergone a pretty positive physical transformation, but unfortunately happiness is a much more elusive thing for those in the Donovan family.

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