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The one with the gangland thug-turned-restaurateur looking for his missing son.
My goodness, Albert is a shit in this one, isn't he? I'm rather pleased by this revelation, as I never really bought his sweet old gentleman persona - Robert Vaughn carries with him an indefinable aura of inauthenticity, a hint of deep-seated sleaziness, that is absolutely perfect for a con man, and I'm glad to see this hint being developed. In fact, the whole episode does good work in undermining the rather irritating insistence that this group of people, whose life's work depends on exploiting others, and who see themselves as set apart from the rest of the human race, are somehow morally unimpeachable because they only con nasty people who deserve to be conned. We were told over and over again in the first series that the number one rule of the long con is "You can't con an honest man" (or, presumably, woman, but I'll save my rant about androcentricity for another occasion). In this series, Mickey performs a bait and switch and tells us Rule #1 is "Always stay one step ahead of the mark," and Danny specifically draws our attention to this new state of affairs by calling Mickey on the switch. The rules, it seems, are about as reliable as everything else in the world of the con, which is to say not at all. We don't steal, except when we do (My children, alert as only siblings can be to differential treatment of members of the family, instantly asked "Why is it okay for her to steal the money and not him?" when Danny and Stacie emerged from the bank vault). We play on people's greed, except when we don't.
And in this episode, we only take money off people who deserve to lose it, except when they don't. I loved this one, precisely because it does such a thorough job of muddying the waters. I don't get the impression that this is an accident, that the writers have somehow failed to realise that the con that's being pulled off here is pretty damn despicable - how much clearer can you make that, than having the mark be a DYING man, whose only child was KIDNAPPED at the age of one and never seen again; who shows such a moving mixture of pride and SENSITIVITY in dealing with the son he believes he's found; and who gets a tragic DEATH scene, in which he begs forgiveness for his terrible betrayal, and thinks he's found ABSOLUTION in the lie of a con man? No, I think you're meant to side with Danny here - the mark got under his skin, and would have got under the skin of any decent human being. But the Hustle crew aren't decent human beings. The lesson Danny has to learn is not, as one might expect, to apply more stringent criteria in deciding who is a "deserving" mark (for instance, don't just take Albert's word for it), or that nasty people are human too, but to be more ruthless in not letting sympathy for the mark get in the way of doing his job.
It's interesting how much focus there is on death, and on the meaning of life in this one. It opens with the serpent in the garden of Eden, so we know religion is somehow going to be a theme, and pretty soon we find Albert in a church (in an absolutely beautiful shot of the nave, I might add), where he establishes his credentials as a thoroughly nasty piece of work (all right, all right, as morally ambiguous, if you prefer) by pretending to be a priest and nipping into the confessional. This does not strike me as the action of a decent human being. Even less decent is his reaction to learning that the man is dying and is racked with guilt over the disappearance of his baby son. I'm not sure that any of the rest of the crew would have immediately thought "Great! we can screw him over easily by pretending to give him back his child!" Certainly Stacie thinks this doesn't fit into the category of fair game. But Albert reassures her - Albert, so often the voice of grifter morality, who tells them what is right and what is wrong within their ethical code, tells them that Keyes is an utter bastard who deserves everything he gets. Even though Keyes' gangster existence is firmly in his past - other men find God in prison, Keyes has found cooking, and with it has turned his back on his criminal life. Albert, however, does not believe in redemption.
I think it's interesting that they cast this story against a backdrop of Albert struggling with his own doubts about the meaning of life. He's appalled, at the beginning, that his friend died as a dentist and will be buried in that persona - alienated forever, as it were, from his own true identity. The only power he can think of to set against this is money - when his own time comes, and it can't be that far off, given his age, he wants to die with pockets full of cash. He knows he can't take it with him, but it's all the comfort he can think of. Albert surely isn't the only one who finds this a pretty thin excuse for a reason to live. By the end, he's become reconciled to the idea that being buried as a dentist means pulling off one last scam, even in death. He wants to die doing what he loves. Fooling people. But if you're buried by people who think you're someone else, grieved over - if at all - by people who think you're someone else, then that means that in death you're entirely isolated from your fellow human beings. It can't be otherwise if your entire relationship to them is a lie.
Keyes, by contrast, wants to connect when he dies. He tells his new-found son that he refused to pay the ransom and thus that it was his fault that the boy grew up in such miserable circumstances. He tells him even though he knows that he risks alienating him forever. The truth matters to him. It matters to him that the relationship be based on honesty, just as earlier on he didn't want to tell James he was a good cook when he wasn't. So of course it's a wonderful irony that the forgiveness he's given is a lie, coming from someone who has no right to offer it.
I should add at this point that I think only Danny, of all of them, could have pulled off that moment of forgiveness, because Danny's the only one who gets so caught up in his improvisations that he loses sight of the script, loses sight of the goal, and lives wholly in the moment. When he calls Keyes "Dad", I think for that brief second he means it. And the bottle being squashed feels like the end of more than just the con. Keyes' hopes of buying forgiveness are shattered - he has no other way to give James the money - as are Danny's reasons for playing the role. The smashing of the bottle creates the possibility, just for a moment, that the relationship Danny has built up with Keyes ceases to be purely about ripping him off, that it can be separated from the goals of the con. Because if, just for a moment, Danny felt as if Keyes really was his father, and Keyes believed that Danny was his son, then maybe that moment of human connection was a kind of real forgiveness after all. It's a bit of a slap in the face when, after the emotional intensity of that scene, it turns out that there's another fake bottle, and that the con has worked. The money Keyes wanted to give his lost son ends up in the hands of a bunch of ruthless con men, and Danny's hesitant moral objections are brushed aside in a rain of cash.
Oh, and I note that the existential meaning-of-life theme is rounded off when Albert makes a substantial donation to the church and the Sister points out that he can't buy absolution. In fact, you can't buy anything worth having between human beings, but Albert has made his decision about what matters to him. "I want to die rich, I don’t want any eulogies or tears. I just want people to say 'There lies Albert Stroller. He couldn’t take it with him, but by thunder, at least he has it all on him'." Oh yes, that's a code to live by, all right. Waters well and truly muddied.
On a less analytical note, I observe that Ash gets way more to do in the episode, and that every single appearance is a gem. My favourite was the harried deliverer of an organ transplant, but the doctor and the PR man-cum-restaurant critic were great as well. And I also note - getting back to analysis - that Mickey, Danny and Stacie all play really nice, caring, unassuming people, and that Mickey's "job" is to forge human connections by reuniting families. Oh, the irony!
My goodness, Albert is a shit in this one, isn't he? I'm rather pleased by this revelation, as I never really bought his sweet old gentleman persona - Robert Vaughn carries with him an indefinable aura of inauthenticity, a hint of deep-seated sleaziness, that is absolutely perfect for a con man, and I'm glad to see this hint being developed. In fact, the whole episode does good work in undermining the rather irritating insistence that this group of people, whose life's work depends on exploiting others, and who see themselves as set apart from the rest of the human race, are somehow morally unimpeachable because they only con nasty people who deserve to be conned. We were told over and over again in the first series that the number one rule of the long con is "You can't con an honest man" (or, presumably, woman, but I'll save my rant about androcentricity for another occasion). In this series, Mickey performs a bait and switch and tells us Rule #1 is "Always stay one step ahead of the mark," and Danny specifically draws our attention to this new state of affairs by calling Mickey on the switch. The rules, it seems, are about as reliable as everything else in the world of the con, which is to say not at all. We don't steal, except when we do (My children, alert as only siblings can be to differential treatment of members of the family, instantly asked "Why is it okay for her to steal the money and not him?" when Danny and Stacie emerged from the bank vault). We play on people's greed, except when we don't.
And in this episode, we only take money off people who deserve to lose it, except when they don't. I loved this one, precisely because it does such a thorough job of muddying the waters. I don't get the impression that this is an accident, that the writers have somehow failed to realise that the con that's being pulled off here is pretty damn despicable - how much clearer can you make that, than having the mark be a DYING man, whose only child was KIDNAPPED at the age of one and never seen again; who shows such a moving mixture of pride and SENSITIVITY in dealing with the son he believes he's found; and who gets a tragic DEATH scene, in which he begs forgiveness for his terrible betrayal, and thinks he's found ABSOLUTION in the lie of a con man? No, I think you're meant to side with Danny here - the mark got under his skin, and would have got under the skin of any decent human being. But the Hustle crew aren't decent human beings. The lesson Danny has to learn is not, as one might expect, to apply more stringent criteria in deciding who is a "deserving" mark (for instance, don't just take Albert's word for it), or that nasty people are human too, but to be more ruthless in not letting sympathy for the mark get in the way of doing his job.
It's interesting how much focus there is on death, and on the meaning of life in this one. It opens with the serpent in the garden of Eden, so we know religion is somehow going to be a theme, and pretty soon we find Albert in a church (in an absolutely beautiful shot of the nave, I might add), where he establishes his credentials as a thoroughly nasty piece of work (all right, all right, as morally ambiguous, if you prefer) by pretending to be a priest and nipping into the confessional. This does not strike me as the action of a decent human being. Even less decent is his reaction to learning that the man is dying and is racked with guilt over the disappearance of his baby son. I'm not sure that any of the rest of the crew would have immediately thought "Great! we can screw him over easily by pretending to give him back his child!" Certainly Stacie thinks this doesn't fit into the category of fair game. But Albert reassures her - Albert, so often the voice of grifter morality, who tells them what is right and what is wrong within their ethical code, tells them that Keyes is an utter bastard who deserves everything he gets. Even though Keyes' gangster existence is firmly in his past - other men find God in prison, Keyes has found cooking, and with it has turned his back on his criminal life. Albert, however, does not believe in redemption.
I think it's interesting that they cast this story against a backdrop of Albert struggling with his own doubts about the meaning of life. He's appalled, at the beginning, that his friend died as a dentist and will be buried in that persona - alienated forever, as it were, from his own true identity. The only power he can think of to set against this is money - when his own time comes, and it can't be that far off, given his age, he wants to die with pockets full of cash. He knows he can't take it with him, but it's all the comfort he can think of. Albert surely isn't the only one who finds this a pretty thin excuse for a reason to live. By the end, he's become reconciled to the idea that being buried as a dentist means pulling off one last scam, even in death. He wants to die doing what he loves. Fooling people. But if you're buried by people who think you're someone else, grieved over - if at all - by people who think you're someone else, then that means that in death you're entirely isolated from your fellow human beings. It can't be otherwise if your entire relationship to them is a lie.
Keyes, by contrast, wants to connect when he dies. He tells his new-found son that he refused to pay the ransom and thus that it was his fault that the boy grew up in such miserable circumstances. He tells him even though he knows that he risks alienating him forever. The truth matters to him. It matters to him that the relationship be based on honesty, just as earlier on he didn't want to tell James he was a good cook when he wasn't. So of course it's a wonderful irony that the forgiveness he's given is a lie, coming from someone who has no right to offer it.
I should add at this point that I think only Danny, of all of them, could have pulled off that moment of forgiveness, because Danny's the only one who gets so caught up in his improvisations that he loses sight of the script, loses sight of the goal, and lives wholly in the moment. When he calls Keyes "Dad", I think for that brief second he means it. And the bottle being squashed feels like the end of more than just the con. Keyes' hopes of buying forgiveness are shattered - he has no other way to give James the money - as are Danny's reasons for playing the role. The smashing of the bottle creates the possibility, just for a moment, that the relationship Danny has built up with Keyes ceases to be purely about ripping him off, that it can be separated from the goals of the con. Because if, just for a moment, Danny felt as if Keyes really was his father, and Keyes believed that Danny was his son, then maybe that moment of human connection was a kind of real forgiveness after all. It's a bit of a slap in the face when, after the emotional intensity of that scene, it turns out that there's another fake bottle, and that the con has worked. The money Keyes wanted to give his lost son ends up in the hands of a bunch of ruthless con men, and Danny's hesitant moral objections are brushed aside in a rain of cash.
Oh, and I note that the existential meaning-of-life theme is rounded off when Albert makes a substantial donation to the church and the Sister points out that he can't buy absolution. In fact, you can't buy anything worth having between human beings, but Albert has made his decision about what matters to him. "I want to die rich, I don’t want any eulogies or tears. I just want people to say 'There lies Albert Stroller. He couldn’t take it with him, but by thunder, at least he has it all on him'." Oh yes, that's a code to live by, all right. Waters well and truly muddied.
On a less analytical note, I observe that Ash gets way more to do in the episode, and that every single appearance is a gem. My favourite was the harried deliverer of an organ transplant, but the doctor and the PR man-cum-restaurant critic were great as well. And I also note - getting back to analysis - that Mickey, Danny and Stacie all play really nice, caring, unassuming people, and that Mickey's "job" is to forge human connections by reuniting families. Oh, the irony!