DTF St. Louis Recap: Thunder Boys

DTF St. Louis
Missouri Mutual Life & Health Insurance Company
Season 1 Episode 4
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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“We’re the Thunder Boys, we’re gonna ace that mothafuckin’ life-insurance phys-i-cal!” 

That’s been stuck in my head ever since I watched David Harbour and Jason Bateman belt it in unison from their weird recumbent dad bikes. Imagine my wife’s alarm hearing my random exclamations of the phrase “life-insurance physical” throughout the week. Anyway, the moment comes about halfway through the episode, when Clark and Floyd — having forged a closer bond on a wine-tasting bike trip — are getting Floyd fit enough to pass the aforementioned life-insurance physical so he can have greater peace of mind. Morbidity looms over Floyd’s description of the demons keeping him up at night, alongside stepson Richard’s borderline personality disorder and school struggles and the tax debt weighing down on every rung up the endless financial ladder. “When you lie down in bed, you feel like your heart’s supposed to rest,” Floyd tells Clark over one too many glasses of red. “My heart just races … like a bird heart.” 

​Harbour’s tragicomic delivery brings the cruel irony out of the phrase — this gentle giant’s rapid little bird heart will only find rest when it stops beating permanently — and his performance remains the most engaging element of the series, which makes it all the more a shame that the show’s nonlinear investigative framing device continues to get in the way of the drama. It’s saving key information for thinly drawn “reveals” that posture as profound without really adding anything to the experience. “Missouri Mutual Life & Health Insurance Company” also puts us back in the territory of a 48-minute episode that, with a tighter, less back-and-forth narrative construction, would have been a banger half-hour. 

​After last week’s seething portrait of Carol as a devious black widow, this week’s intro offers up a more sympathetic, if not equally incriminating, day in Carol’s life as evidence for her life-insurance plot. The morning starts with Carol having to remind a low-energy, bubble-bathing Floyd that she’s umpiring at Little League games at the park near their house for extra cash and to cancel with the lawn-maintenance guys like he said he would the month before. A montage of marginal cost-cutting measures that never quite add up to the extra cash they need for getting Richard into a good school, updating his room furniture, buying nicer plates and stuff for the household, paying therapy bills, etc. is followed by Richard’s milk-bombing incident at the grocery store — leaving Carol absolutely wrecked on a patio chair in the backyard just in time for Floyd to walk up and “be honest” about Carol’s umpire gear turning him off. Linda Cardellini offers up a killer breakdown to the roaring chorus of the lawn guy’s infernal leaf blower. Hardly justification for (allegedly) plotting your husband’s death for a life-insurance payout, but it stands out as a key moment of understanding rather than justification. People make drastic decisions inside the hamster wheel of a deteriorating upper-middle-class suburban milieu. 

On the present-day investigation front, there remains nothing concrete in the motive department to tie Carol to Floyd’s demise. No evidence of an insurance claim, but what’s up with this mystery key in their possession? Clark clearly recognizes it but won’t say anything about it. He’s more interested in reminiscing about how he and Floyd became “Thunder Boys” for life. A replay of his and Carol’s diabolical cornhole-party meet-cute with menacing Dutch angles deftly clues us in to how Clark is seeing this situation in hindsight. In contrast, showrunner Steven Conrad shoots the wine-tasting bike trip like the second-act fall-deeper-in-love excursion in a rom-com. By the time Floyd gives his “bird heart” speech, you can see Clark erupting with a deep desire to actually help this guy as a friend and not as an accomplice to his mistress’s opaque master plan. 

​For every physical gag or verbal punch line that doesn’t hit, this show continues to get a genuine belly laugh out of me every week. This week’s episode got me in the LOLs at the end of the Thunder Boys workout-and-diet montage when Floyd passes (not aces) the life-insurance physical and says “Clark is gonna be jacked,” to which the doctor replies, “Is that your husband?” I also love the display of platonic male intimacy inherent in calling someone your “cheese cop.” These pivotal memories of Clark and Floyd’s buddy romance amount to another darkly comic portrait of a nontoxic male friendship — complete with nontraditional definitions of manhood that place meaningful friendships over monolithic strength — all built on a foundation of lies and insecurities. Goodwill is corrupted on arrival by the modern virtue of avarice. Clark remembers Carol telling him that she wants a physically and emotionally intimate relationship with Floyd again, properly reading the room and pivoting to appeal to Clark’s genuine love for Floyd. As she told her son in the last episode, she’s in the grind-set now — do whatever it takes to secure the final bag.

​“No one’s normal. It just looks that way from across the street.” “Modern Love” delivers the thematic “key” to the series while unwittingly signaling to Plumb what the literal mystery key might be for. “That’s why everyone’s got a P.O. box.” Holding the conversation from the center of his roller rink — club lights blaring as Peter Sarsgaard delivers a cliché soliloquy on the virtues of sexual impulsivity — is a tad obvious. It also strains credibility that that’s what it’d take to get Plumb and Homer to think of checking a local P.O.-box facility, especially if suburbia is brimming with dildo-filled ones as “Modern Love” describes. As if on cue, the episode ends on our detectives finding an insurance-policy notification in the P.O. box that matches the mystery key, followed by a quick, cryptic flashback to Floyd finding and exploring Clark and Carol’s room at the Quality Garden. The missing pieces of his interior struggle remain a more compelling mystery than the precise events of his death.