What I’m Watching: The Detour

The Detour: Season 3, Episode 8 “The Plane” (B+)

We got a pretty quick answer to the question of what happened when Nate thought about going into Edie’s motel room to talk to her, as he saw that she was working with a federal agency to bring him and his family down and then promptly fell down the stairs trying to run away. There’s no denying the brilliance of Laura Benanti on this show, always committed so much to the idea of this dogged postal police officer determined to catch the perpetrators of mail crimes. The fervor with which she was eating during their conversation was incredible, and the few passionate kisses she planted on him and then blamed him for took him by surprise, but she wasn’t even fazed by them, just continuing on with her ravings. Once he got away from her, things didn’t improve all that much, since his hiring of a pilot named Sleepy produced predictable results. The Parker family is always on the brink of some major crisis, and potentially dying in a plane crash was just the latest of their antics. Nate, to his credit, did his best to paint a picture of what heaven could be, while the other three in the back were far less optimistic about their chances in the afterlife. I love that Robin chastised Nate for giving a speech while he was pretending to be a pilot, prompting a hilarious response from him that he was literally flying the plane. We’re getting closer to the end of the season and to seeing how this case pans out, which I imagine will be in favor of the Parkers given Edie’s rogue status and her use of an Alaskan militia to help with her off-the-books investigation.