SPOILER ALERT: The following contains spoilers for The Westies Season 1, Episode 5.
The good news is that The Westies Season 1, Episode 5 keeps most of the momentum from the prior episode’s quasi-cliffhanger. The bad news is the MGM+ show does this by essentially cramming in as much violence as it can manage, so while a lot happens in the episode, it starts to feel like more of a series of shocking incidents than one coherent narrative. There’s definitely a lot to talk about, but there’s not the sense of urgency that Chris Brancato’s other series have often stirred up.
“A Right Rose Tree,” which takes its title from a Yeats poem that Bridget quotes, is almost all about how hard it is to sell cocaine in Hell’s Kitchen. After opposing the idea last time—and being explicitly told to avoid it by Castellano—Eamon Sweeney decides to get into the cocaine trade. But, of course, he can’t get his hands dirty so he turns to Jimmy Roarke to be the face of the new business. Episode 5 doesn’t do much to explain why Jimmy is still loyal to Sweeney after the realization that Sweeney went behind his back, and that undercuts the episode’s final scene. John Gotti tries to lure Jimmy and Mickey Flanagan away from Sweeney, but there’s never doubt in the audience’s mind about Jimmy’s loyalty, which would have made the conversation a lot more powerful. Instead, even when Gotti says “they’ll be back,” it’s very hard to believe it.
But to get to that point, The Westies creates another mess. Sweeney sends Jimmy to Leon, and viewers already know that Leon’s right-hand man Charlie is in Gotti’s pocket. Charlie kills Leon and tries to rob Jimmy, but then Mickey kills Charlie, which naturally gets back to Gotti. If this sounds a bit convoluted, that’s how it plays out on screen. It’s not the first character death this season to come out of nowhere. And it feels pretty quick for Gotti to identify Jimmy and Mickey by name, as if the creative team knows they only have three episodes after this and want to accelerate the rivalry.
Most of the episode is taken up by the cocaine story—including a scene of Jimmy’s crew cutting the drugs in his apartment that’s more Office Space than Breaking Bad. But elsewhere, the one storyline that hits hard (literally) is Glenn Keenan’s. It’s predictable and yet incredibly painful. As soon as Polk orders Keenan to wear a wire, TV viewers know that Keenan’s screwed. It’s also obvious that she’s going to leverage his son against him to make him comply. An early scene of Keenan butting heads with Sweeney’s right-hand man Eddie Breen is foreshadowing for the fight between them, and as soon as that happens, the audience also knows that Breen will find the wire. After that, everyone is aware of what will go down.
Luckily for both Keenan and the series as a whole, the character doesn’t die. The Westies without Titus Welliver is a lesser show. But for Welliver fans, who are so used to him being the biggest badass in every room, it’s startling to see him on the losing end of the fight. And the fight sequence goes on long enough and ends badly enough for people to feel Keenan’s pain.
But with moments like that, Leon’s death, and Brendan Cahill shooting his explosives supplier in front of Bridget, The Westies Season 1, Episode 5 gives up character development in favor of shock value. Only one scene with Jimmy and Bridget has any emotional resonance. Everything else is just people plotting against each other and it ending badly. Even when Hotel Cocaine went off the tracks (and it did, given the title) that show always had an emotional heartbeat. The Westies loses sight of its characters in order to push the plot forward, and even some of those plot beats don’t fully land.
When Bridget finds out that Jimmy almost died, that scene could be longer than her offering one line—no matter how quietly cutting. More tension between them would also work in an episode where Bridget seems to be getting more sympathetic to her ex Brendan. Despite having more screen time, Gotti almost feels wasted in “A Right Rose Tree.” His arguments to Castellano and then to Jimmy could’ve been bigger; the latter in particular is begging for a great monologue from Hamish Allan-Headley. He could make the pitch to Jimmy, and by extension the audience, and get the viewer really wondering. “A Right Rose Tree” isn’t boring, and it gets the job done as far as keeping the crime stories moving, but it’s not that memorable either.
The Westies airs Sundays at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT on MGM+. Photo Credit: Brooke Palmer/Courtesy of MGM+.
Article content is (c)2020-2026 Brittany Frederick and may not be excerpted or reproduced without express written permission by the author. Follow me on Twitter at @BFTVTwtr and on Instagram at @BFTVGram. For story pitches, contact me at tvbrittanyf@yahoo.com.
