I did it people! I am now current on TNT’s drama Animal Kingdom, and it was a wild ride!
The third season pretty quickly gives us the answer to that second season cliffhanger: Baz is dead. Which if you watched the original film, this shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise. Nor is it surprising that Smurf was the one pulling the strings while she’s in jail. With J as her power of attorney, she has him pay for her protection on the inside, which is how J comes into contact with the shady Mia. Nicky is not cool with Mia, and is tired of always being just on the outside of the family’s dealings. Towards the end of the season we see Nicky unravel and eventually leave. Pope has been taking care of Lena in the wake of her parents’ deaths, but DCFS isn’t having any of that.
Craig lives for a short time with Renn in Mexico, but he ultimately comes back to help with more jobs. I believe the most changed man in the Cody family is Deran, who’s bar is fully functioning, he’s pulling his own jobs, and is in a steady relationship with Adrian. The thorn in his side comes when his father, Billy, shows up with a girl named Frankie. Billy, whom Deran has never met is clearly a junkie, and ends up robbing Deran in the end. Once Smurf gets out of jail, without throwing any of her boys under the bus, she reigns everything back in and gets her money back from Lucy. All of her actions makes J furious and he promises to take it all away. We also see that Adrian gets busted for smuggling drugs at the airport.
And this leads to the most recent fourth season. Deran and Adrian are living together, but Adrian is also working with the cops. Initially this is just to bust Jack and his operation, but then a detective that’s been trying to bring Smurf down for years wants Adrian to give information about the Codys. Pope is on his own ride to crazy-town, which calms down a little when one of Julia’s old friends, Angela (Emily Deschanel) starts living at Smurfs. She got released from prison six years early which seems pretty sketchy to me, although nothing ever really comes of that by season’s end. Renn pops back into Craig’s life and the two end up having a baby together! Hopefully this gets them on the straight and narrow (or, the kinda straight and narrow).
J has made it his mission to bring Smurf down, but still plays all sides. Eventually, he ends up killing Mia for seriously injuring and stealing from the Codys. Woven throughout the season is an alternate timeline that takes place in the 70s, where we see how Smurf came to be. She’s in a gang with previously introduced characters, Manny, Jake, and then a new crazy guy, Colin. In the long run we learn that Colin is Pope and Julia’s father and probably Smurf’s one true love. In present day we learn early that Smurf has cancer and is inevitably going to die from it, and soon. The final blends well together the birth of her twins and her asking Pope to kill her when a job where she wasn’t supposed to make it out alive was thwarted. In the end, none of her sons could do it, so her sociopath of a grandson, J does it for them. It was truly an epic penultimate episode!
The finale sees the boys in a more somber attitude. Craig is grieving while taking care of his son, Pope is truly distraught with Angela still trying to worm her way into his life. J and Angela find Smurf’s will, which left everything to an old associate named Pamela, so they decide to rewrite that will in their favor. They hold a memorial for Smurf, where Billy shows up sober, and Craig’s father, Jake. Frankie is also trying to get in on the action, while former fence, Gia, wants nothing to do with the Codys since they aren’t really anything without their ringleader. Deran has everything worked out to leave the country with Adrian so he doesn’t have to go to prison, but ends up sending him alone (so, so sad). In the final scene, we see the Codys deliver a beat-down to show they’re still not to be crossed even though Smurf is gone.
I both loved and hated the finale, but I think it was excellently set up for a good fifth season! I could see Billy and Jake having a larger role, and I’ll be interested to see what becomes of Frankie and Angela. Renn seems like she could be dealing with some postpartum depression from the birth, and I’ll be interested to see if she sticks around or how Craig deals with it. I’m also holding out hope that it’s not the last we’ve seen of Adrian! He is clearly the love of Deran’s life, and I feel like one of them deserves a happy ending. Even though they’re on sort of stable ground now, I feel like a main focal point of next season will be the power struggle between Pope and J. But we’ve got nine long months to ponder all that…so buckle in!