The Waterfront Season-Finale Recap: Who’s the Boss?
Hey, look at this! For the first time this season, it looks like all four main Buckleys (five, if you’re counting Shawn) are working together as a unified team. Isn’t that so nice? Of course, it takes one of them getting kidnapped and held hostage on a yacht in the middle of the ocean with a homicidal sociopath to do it, but come on, let’s take our wins where we can get them. By the end of the episode, this unity among the family is ruined anyway, so just enjoy this time in which the Buckleys don’t hesitate to say that they care for one another. Cherish the softer side of Harlan Buckley while you have it, because if The Waterfront gets a season two and my dude finds out the move Belle pulls behind his back, we probably won’t see that man for a good, long time.
Harlan and Belle’s relationship really goes on a ride in this finale. Harlan, still angry with Belle about the land deal, is sleeping on the couch when Belle comes to tell him that Bree never came home. It is absolutely wild that it has to be Belle to posit that perhaps Grady is behind her disappearance when not but 12 hours prior Harlan, was all like, “We must keep all the women and children safe.” Is it because he’s mad at Belle that his response is “I have shit to do?” Yeah, those dead bodies in the ice room at the fish house should be on the to-do list, but maybe you have a little concern about your daughter going missing, just as the friendly psychopath in town vows revenge.
It’s really not until Cane shows up at the fish house that Harlan springs into action. That action is … him just calling up Grady to, I guess, ask, “Hey, do you have my daughter?” Grady does, in fact, have Harlan’s daughter, but what he wants is Harlan. He makes his demand: Harlan for Bree. He will send him his location and if Harlan arrives with anyone else, Bree is dead.
The Buckleys have a family meeting to figure out what to do here — obviously, if Harlan goes, Grady will kill him. Because this man cannot help himself, Harlan’s contribution to the meeting is that he has a plan (of course), and that plan is to go get his daughter. Everyone’s like, “Uh, that’s not really a plan, bud.” I have found it amusing that throughout this entire season, Harlan’s billed himself as the man who knows how to handle every crisis in the drug-smuggling business — he knows all because he’s seen all — and yet literally every time he says he’ll fix it or he’ll figure it out, none of his plans have any details, like, at all. At one point in this episode, he says that he is an old man set in his ways, and in that scene, he’s saying it to butter up Grady. But Harlan isn’t sincere, and it’s his most significant flaw: He thinks he knows better than anyone else and his way is the only way. Thankfully, in this particular moment, when Shawn pipes up that they have another option aside from sending Harlan to his death, Harlan listens.
Meanwhile, over on the yacht, Bree has discovered that Diller is aboard too. He heard Grady’s men attack her, and he jumped on their boat to protect her. I mean, Diller informing the rest of the Buckleys that Bree has just been kidnapped would’ve been way more helpful, but this is the kid who joyfully got in Grady’s car after meeting him for all of five seconds. He’s not a thinker, that one. Now, Bree really needs to figure out a way to diffuse the situation or somehow take control of the yacht. She agrees to a sit-down meal with Grady, who informs her that Harlan is on his way, but she doesn’t want to wait around for whatever Grady has planned. Instead, once she sees an opening, she smashes a vodka bottle on a guy, steals his gun, and shoots another guy in the leg, and for a brief moment, it looks like she could’ve actually bested Grady. He’s annoyed but also very turned on. Unfortunately for Bree, fucking Diller runs out of the closet she had him hiding in when he hears a gunshot (what does this kid actually think he’s going to do here?), and Grady’s guys grab him, which means Bree has to give up the fight. This is why you should never have children, people.
Bree attempts to maim Grady with a cute li’l shiv she made earlier, but she is outnumbered, and all she manages to do is annoy the psychopath in charge. In a choice that seems totally out of character for Grady and completely due to story contrivance, Grady declares that he doesn’t need to keep both Bree and Diller for his exchange with Harlan and shoots Bree in the thigh before throwing her overboard. “She’ll bleed out anyway,” he says. I mean, we’ve only watched Grady shoot several people point-blank in the head for doing much less, but sure, he would just send her off into the ocean alive. Diller finally makes one good choice and tosses a life raft pack in after his mother. Again, there is no way in hell Grady would see that and just leave. But he does. And Bree inflates the raft, uses her belt as a tourniquet, and proceeds to have a hallucination in which she releases her younger self from the guilt she carries over her grandfather’s death. It’ll be a nice change of pace for Bree if she survives!
Back on the yacht, Harlan arrives, and Cane and Shawn, who were hidden in some compartment, sneak onto the boat to look for Bree while Harlan chats with Grady. Grady sees right through Harlan’s speech about how he sees the error of his ways and knows deep down Grady is a good person. That last bit is what tips Grady off that he’s being played. No one thinks he is a good person! They beat Harlan, Grady reveals that he tossed Bree overboard and instead has Diller as his hostage, and it looks like he’s about to have one of his men blow Harlan’s brains out (Grady can’t bear to do it himself, which is a great character detail — he really is a fanboy) when Cane and Shawn appear and chaos ensues.
Eventually, Cane and Harlan trap Grady at the edge of the boat. He tries to get into both of the Buckleys’ heads. Taunting Cane for not being able to kill him. Getting digs in about how Harlan can’t possibly want a son like this, someone who is “too much of a pussy to pull the trig—,” but before he can even finish the word, Cane, who has had enough, pulls the trigger twice, right into Grady’s head. Hey, at least the guy goes out doing what he loves: talking. Grady is dead and this nightmare chapter in the Buckley family history is over.
They are able to reach Bree — who sets off a flare gun and, yes, like Diller tells her, saves herself — and she’s beat up but will eventually be okay. Cane is able to give Shawn props. Harlan is able to tell his son that he loves him in his own Harlan way — he admits that he manipulated him into staying in town because he didn’t want to run his business without him. Belle and Harlan mend the fissures between them; they love each other even when they hate each other. It’s all very sweet in a damaged, toxic Buckley way.
Too sweet, I say! Little does Harlan know that his wife has been making her own plans — real ones with actual steps and specifics and you know, basic plan necessities — behind his back with the Parkers. While everyone else is working to save Bree, Belle hangs back and deals with the dead bodies. She calls Emmett Parker to collect his henchmen, and Emmett makes it very clear that he is a fan of Belle’s and he thinks she should be in charge of whatever business the Buckleys should want to partake in. He tells her that he is available should she need help with anything.
And so we end the season back on that botched land deal. Emmett calls Belle to come meet him at the Buckley fish house, and there we find him supervising the brutal beatdown of Wes Benson. “Are you going to kill him?” Belle asks, not at all surprised to see Wes tied up, duct taped, and bleeding profusely in a chair inside her place of business. It’s almost like, hmm, she requested Wes be taken care of. But no, they aren’t going to kill him. Instead, they are going to use him. “We need his complete loyalty to both of us” to get this land deal back on track. Emmett wants to make sure Wes knows exactly who his boss is. He looks right at Belle as he tells her that he’ll do anything she wants. It’s Belle Buckley who is in charge now.
Bait & Tackle
• The characters’ priorities in this show remain hilarious to me. Peyton returns from Durham and gets Cane to vomit up the truth about everything having to do with him and his dad getting involved in a drug-smuggling venture, including the shootout at Grady’s farm, and it does not phase her one bit. Instead, she just wants to know if he cheated on her. When he says “yes,” that is what really sends her. Be angry, but now is not the time!
• It’s nice that The Waterfront winds up giving Peyton a little more depth than “woman who blames other woman for her own husband’s bad choices,” and when she goes to confront Jenna and Jenna tells her that her father just died, Peyton takes her in her arms as she sobs. It’s Peyton who helps Jenna get through an unimaginably horrible day. And because of that, when Cane eventually goes to see Jenna, she tells him this whole thing is over for good. She doesn’t want to see him anymore.
• Peyton looks downright menacing when she takes Cane back at the end of the episode, starts heating up some food, and tells him that “everything’s fine” and that she is going to make sure of it. I guess Peyton Buckley’s in charge now too.
• Diller and Bree have a nice moment of reconciliation, but I have to imagine she is nowhere close to processing what she did to Marcus.
• There has to be more to Shawn sticking around for this shit show, right?