We open “Part 9” in an Instagram-filtered past. A younger Sally (with the same braid of the future) boards a bus while present day Sally looks melancholy out on the porch.
John is doing some detective work. He goes to the bait and tackle shop/front and plays the part of laid-back sunglasses guy looking to do some fishing. He not only sees Quintana, but Lowry himself comes out and they bat white dude platitudes back and forth. (Sidenote: I love Kyle Chandler’s side-mouthed growl more than almost anything.) When he gets in the car he sees someone on the phone in his car, looking very cop like, and it makes Coach Rayburn hella suspicious.
Speaking of suspicious, Sally watches Carlos and Danny grab their fish and Danny smarms a bit about what a nice catch it is, but really meaning drugs. Is it weird I feel sort of badly for poor hapless Carlos? The drugs are in nice neat bricks and holy hell there sure are a lot of them.
Back at the police precinct it turns out the DEA is all over this Lowry situation already. John is all, hold on a second—it’s not just drugs, it’s murder. John and this DEA guy named Clay bark at each other for a while. (Interestingly enough John goes hard on the terrific f-u line “go have a sunshine-y day.”) Clay relents—they’ll share this case. Clay tells John they’re looking at a couple of local scumbags, and sure enough shows pictures of both Quintana and our pal, O’Dirtbag. “Do you know any of his associates?” John looks like he might barf.
Instead, he goes to see Danny at the dock. John starts joking around a bit about the girl from the other night but then gets down to business. He asks if Danny is seeing Chelsea O’Bannon. Then oh-so-casually he asks about Eric. Danny plays it pretty cool. So John moves on to, so, about Diana….he tells Danny that Diana said he was acting weird and aggressive and please can you be cool with my wife for the love of God. Danny is all sure thing. God, I love how much Kyle Chandler sweats on this show! So many shirts, just soaking.
Kevin is heading to his truck when he suddenly spies that jerk Nicky’s fancy car and he gets an idea. This being Kevin, it’s not the greatest—he takes a bat and beats the hell out of the car.
Danny and Sally have dinner together out. Danny asks about expanding the dining service—basically turning it into a restaurant that goes beyond the Inn. Rob Rayburn apparently nixed this idea ages ago, but Danny presses Sally on it. She finally is all, cool it. Can’t we just eat?
Danny gets a call to bring the drugs. He packs them in crappy-looking gym bags, locks the shed, and uses the shuttle service at the Inn to transport them. Carlos is there to make sure that particular bag makes it to the gas station where Quintana is waiting. Neat. Danny clearly has good drug managing skills in addition to being a good seafood cook.
Speaking of which, he’s fileting a big fish at the Inn when Jane Rayburn comes in looking for her grandmother. Danny is all, come here: I’ll show you something. Jane is drawn to her uncle because yeah, I get it—he smokes and seems sort of cool. But Danny is creepy as all hell, even when teaching young Jane how to properly de-bone a fish. Turns out her parents paid for his cooking school and he knows the way to pull the skin off in one banana peel swoop. Yuck.
Meg thinks she’s busting her mom looking at wedding magazines, not realizing that Sally was thinking about her mysterious bus ride in the past. Meg isn’t so into wedding planning, but Sally is—how about seersucker suits for all the boys. Oh boy, a butterfly just flapped its wings in Hong Kong cause we know the future of doom’s costume of choice is seersucker suit. Sally also suggests Danny caters the whole thing. Meg controls her spit-take and is all, let’s see. Meg also suggests hitting the brakes on all the changes Danny is proposing. Sally double downs: Danny is part of the future of the Inn.
Jane Rayburn, wonderful teen that she is, bitches about finding a bone in her fish. Diana—drinking a glass of wine Tami Taylor would approve of—is all, congratulations, put it to the side and zip it. “That’s lazy technique,” Jane says, parroting back what Danny told her. She tells her parents about her little cooking lesson. Diana is pissed. John is all, I talked to him! He gets it! Diana is unconvinced and also is like, hey whatever happened to that cooking school money. John is all, look over here at this delicious wine and did I mention how much you nailed dinner?
Diana is at her job at the nursery. Her work outfit is all flashdance shoulders and man, Jacinda Barrett sure is hot stuff. Danny shows up and asks if he they can chat. He apologizes. Diana is all, no problem with the look of someone who is not having it. She relents a bit and Danny shifts darker. “Don’t come between me and my brother—not a good idea.”
Diana comes home and talks to John (who is, the show notes, drinking more than usual). She tells him that Danny apologized but not in a good way. She called the cooking school and found out that he went for half a semester. John is like, it’s weird you called. Diana is like, hey, don’t you want to know what he’s been spending the money on?
Next: We learn what Danny has been up to in Miami.
Danny, meanwhile, cheerfully accepts more shady fish and with it, is an envelope full of cash. So much cash! He puts it in an envelope and mails it off. Little does he know that John is outside watching. John goes back to work and checks Danny’s name into the criminal system. Sure enough, his arrest record comes up along with the name of a woman named Beth who bailed him out and a restaurant in Miami that employed him.
Danny goes to see Meg and comes in hot: Why is she trying to dissuade Sally from listening to him? Meg is all, I have an opinion, deal with it. Danny plays the black sheep card and is increasingly more aggressive.
Nicky confronts Kevin about his car and they yell at each other for a while about restraining orders.
John drives to Miami. He finds Viva Caputa (which I’ve just wasted a lot of time googling to find out what exactly this translate to, and I’ve come up with nothing but “Living Caputa,” which can’t be right. I’m glad I took eight years of Spanish language classes.) John pokes around a little bit and a neighbor comes over to chat. The place has been empty for months since some kitchen fire. John shows the man a picture of Danny and the guy is all, oh yeah this was his place. John can’t believe that Danny was running a restaurant that apparently was doing pretty well. Just then he gets a call from the woman, Beth, who bailed Danny out and who agrees to meet with him.
Meg and Kevin are chilling in the kitchen. Meg is all, so what was up with what John was saying about the past? Kevin is like, come on surely you remember. Nope. So Kevin says the old, hey, well Danny did kill our sister. Oh and also what happened afterward when our dad beat up Danny and we all lied. Meg doesn’t remember this and Kevin doesn’t remember who told them to lie.
Danny continues to torture himself by listening to the tapes of his sibling lying. This time we cruise past lil Kevin’s testimony and on to even littler Meg’s. She says the same car lie but this time we know who told her the cover story: John. Healthy times.
John meets with Beth Mackey, a pretty lady who notes he and Danny look nothing alike. (Thanks for acknowledging this, show! I mean, who cares but still.) John tells her that he’s concerned about Danny and wants to ask her some questions. Turns out she bailed him out because he was in the hole to some guys for a lot of money. He had borrowed the money in the first place because of the restaurant and maybe his shady partners torched it. He went on a bender after the fire, and then “got weird.” (Duh) He was speaking to people who weren’t there, especially someone named Sarah. Poor John Rayburn: the barf look on his face says it all. She says that men still come by looking for him. She says she still drives past his apartment sometimes, wondering if she’ll see him. John is like: He has a what now? He uses his detective status to get himself into Danny’s sad sack apartment.
Marco, Meg, and Sally are having what looks to be a very pleasant drink outside, talking wedding plans. Danny and Chelsea sort of crash the party and the atmosphere changes immediately into full-on weirdsville. Even the wind gets weird! Danny smarms around, hugging Marco and then starts being bananas, asking Marco what kind of secrets Meg might be keeping. Meg knows what Danny is up to and the whole thing is so tense and strange and even Sally is like, oh quit it. Meg follows Danny into the kitchen so she can yell at him: She doesn’t want him holding anything over her head. Finally she’s like, fine just go tell him already. She’s over it. He’s like, soooo no to the catering job then?
Danny rolls a joint and gets busted in the cutest of ways by Sally. She joins him in the pot, which is hilarious, and the two of them are having a good time. They even talk a little bit of crap about Robert. Sally tells Danny she used to be fun and go out and pick up sailors. She tells the story about how she met Robert—she just picked him straight up at a bar called Ruby’s. She saw him, in uniform (now all of you imagine Sam Shepard in uniform: Wouldn’t you throw yourselves at him too?). They spent the night together in the back of the pickup that Danny is currently driving. He got transferred and she followed him down and married him. Was she pregnant? I can’t tell from this story, but it sure seems this way from the way she’s talking.
John sees the piles of envelopes on Danny’s table. He opens one (mail tampering!) and finds just wads of cash. Is that what we kept seeing Danny mail? This doesn’t seem good. John agrees with me.
Sally brushes her teeth, looks over at Robert’s side of the sink. She’s left everything of his there, which is tough. But it also reminds her of being on a bus, running away. But we see, when she pulls out a picture, that she’s running away from her family as the photograph shows her with all five of her children.
O’Bannon is cruising around, doing what he does, when he gets pulled over. The cop is all, get out, O’Dirtbag, and takes him to a holding room. John Rayburn comes and sits down. His hair is all business as he’s like, what the hell are you and my brother up to?
