‘Too Old to Die Young’ Episode 8 Recap: Scum Sodomy & the Lash

And now, five observations and one question about Too Old to Die Young Episode 8, “The Hanged Man,” in which Martin quits the force, Janey rats him out, and Jesus murders them both.

1. Martin Jones doesn’t feel things the way you and I do. Emotion is a simulacrum for him, a performance. The performance can be satisfying, deeply so even: Witness the tenderness with which he tucks his ailing ally Viggo into bed, or the “all is right with the world” smile on his face as he walks hand in hand with his girlfriend on the beach. But it’s the satisfaction of a job well done, the successful completion of a task, not the satisfaction of deeply held passion and fully realized human interaction. Martin Jones is no more Janey’s “boyfriend” or Viggo’s “friend,” in the senses we understand those words, than he’s the emissary of the mother of a pederast, which he pretends to be in order to get said pederast to lower his gun long enough to be murdered. He’s no more connected to them, really and truly, than the actor who plays him on the show is.

2. Yaritza is the High Priestess of Death because she enjoys killing. None of the hollowness experienced by Viggo and Martin for her, I don’t think. Marin and Viggo are empty vessels, and they’ve poured vigilantism into the hole within in order to ex post facto justify their ability to murder without guilt or regret. Yaritza’s life shows that kind of backfilled rationale to be so much bullshit. The influence she holds over Jesus, and Don Ricardo before him, would enable her to put an end to their cartel’s human trafficking in a heartbeat. The boys might dislike it, but this is not a person who cares about what the boys think. Yet she stands and watches as her soldiers gang rape their female prisoners despite having both the opportunity and the authority to stop them. She waits until an opportunity to commit murder presents itself, and she takes it, making sure that the women she “saves”—whom she’d previously been content to water in their jail cells like plants—know her nom de guerre.

3. Aside from Fargo Season Three and David Thewlis’s hideously acquisitive character V.M. Varga, Too Old to Die Young is the only show I personally have seen that responds to the Trump era with appropriate and unvarnished disgust and fury. In the person of Martin’s openly fascist colleagues on the Homicide squad (sample quotes from this episode: “DEMOCRACY’S MY BITCH! FAKE NEWS! JESUS!”) and Janey’s perverted billionaire father, this show identifies the enemy, hones in on the twin poles of their reactionary politics—a belief in the virtue of violence against the unclean and a belief that the vulnerable exist to be exploited, abused, and discarded, both of them privileges of the select—and creates narrative situations that alternately expose them for the monstrous cretins they are and punish them appropriately.

4. Janey is a child. A kid. It winds up being a moot point, since neither she nor Martin survive the episode, but her alternately guarded and guileless responses to the woman detective investigating her father’s disappearance reveal her immaturity, and by extension condemn Martin for exploiting it. Janey is a person who can ask why a cop is so interested in her sexual partner, a fellow adult cop, and be genuinely unsure of the answer. After she spills the beans she can ask “Did I get him in trouble?” and sincerely mean that, too. When she’s seconds away from being shot to death, she says “Mom?”—her overloaded brain retreats to the only true comfort she’s ever known, the comfort of a half-remembered childhood vacation to a cabin in Montana with the woman whose job was to love her more than anything in the world and who wound up ending her own life right in front of her baby. Martin is never more contemptible than in the moment when she gets shot in the face as he lies on the ground unconscious, temporarily oblivious to the tragedy his own actions wrought.

5. Jesus will never be satisfied. It can’t happen, won’t happen, no matter what. His mother’s murder opened a hole in him that can never be filled, and yes, that is intended as a double entendre. His reign as the cartel’s Los Angeles chieftain has thus far been a pursuit of escalating excess. He doesn’t just whip his men into shape, he makes them get down on all fours and bray like a mule. He doesn’t just kill the men responsible for his mother’s death, he tortures and murders them in passion-play spectacles that invert his given name (and the passion play staged by Martin’s lieutenant in honor of his departure from the force, to the tune of Handel’s “Sarabande,” aka the theme from Stanley Kubrick’s Barry freaking Lyndon). His sex life with Yaritza is a cavalcade of kink: roleplaying sex with his mother, getting jerked off and seemingly beaten in the testicles simultaneously, being made to eat his own ejaculate with an entire hand crammed into his gullet, getting choked and sodomized with a whip so hard that it appears to draw blood. He may start by wielding a whip like a supervillain, wearing it all around his compound, but by day two of his whipping of the captive Martin it’s visibly providing diminishing returns. When he finally delivers the killing blow, his teasing movements with his machete tellingly give way to wanton, pointless hacking, long after Martin’s head has been severed from his body.

6. What does Jesus unleash when he kills Martin? The actual killing blow has come and gone and he has set himself to the task of defiling the corpse when it appears a hole opens in the show itself. It reveals a blank-eyed silver demon child, a red circle of light from which something threatens to emerge, cross cut with his toiling body and Yaritza’s knowing smirk. Both director Nicolas Winding Refn and co-creator/co-writer Ed Brubaker have dallied in the land of David Lynch’s Black Lodge in the past, Brubaker in Lovecraft pastiche Fatale (in collaboration with artist Sean Phillips), Refn in his horror film The Neon Demon. The beings in the Lodge feed on suffering; they both unleash it and are summoned by it; they are a hole in the world, caused by human cruelty. Is this where, in the end, Too Old to Die Young is headed? Is there any other show this year that is this ugly, this uncompromising, this beautiful in its hideousness?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Stream Too Old To Die Young Episode 8 ("The Hanged Man") on Amazon Prime