Big Sky: A Crime Thriller Seeking Direction
Big Sky: A Crime Thriller Seeking Direction
Warning: Unlike a lot of the other media I review for this blog, this entry will contain significant spoilers from the first season of Big Sky. There’s just no conceivable way for me to talk about my thoughts on the show without spoiling it. You have been warned.
Crime thrillers that encompass an ensemble cast have a lot of work to do and ground to cover, especially when trying to tell a larger story while giving the audience smaller mysteries to keep them occupied as bigger ones build in the background. This is the case for long-running shows like The Blacklist (or at least what I’ve seen of its first two seasons), Grimm, or any program that has a larger “big bad” in the background while dealing with smaller trifles in the center of that week’s action. But there are some shows that simply focus on one case at a time, delving into a specific crime or conflict for many weeks in order to better develop the mystery in question. It also gives the audience time to understand what’s going on from multiple perspectives, especially when given the viewpoint of not only investigators, but of the perpetrators as well. ABC’s Big Sky manages to work with this cat-and-mouse game of investigator vs perpetrator, creating an entertaining set of episodes for an interesting mystery. Though that doesn’t mean the show is without its flaws, especially as its first season continues.
Big Sky follows private investigators Cassie Dewell and Jenny Hoyt as they become wrapped up in a case of two teenage girls who have gone missing in a remote area of Montana. As their investigation continues, they begin to suspect the girls have become caught up in a sex trafficking ring involving at least one long-haul truck driver in the area, one who makes a profit off of selling girls to the highest bidder. In a race against time, Cassie and Jenny attempt to find the girls and arrest the perpetrator before something untoward happens to the girls—or to anyone else that may become a victim. On the other end of this is Ronald Pergman, a 38-year-old truck driver who lives with his mother and the primary kidnapper of the girls and other women in Montana. Ronald is the suspect Cassie and Jenny are looking for, but his place in the whole scheme of kidnapping girls is more as a grunt than as anyone in the top chain of command. Ronald struggles with being someone who doesn’t want to harm anyone, but whose urges toward harming others cannot be entirely quelled. His involvement sets him down a dark path, one whose parallel interactions with Cassie and Jenny’s lead to major conflict. Especially when a Sheriff’s Deputy by the name of Rick Legarski gets involved.
The plot is very well thought-out and engaging, and the show is able to do and say some disturbing things despite the TV-14 rating. It pushes the boundaries about as far as something like this can, but it does so with enough tact that everything felt like it was building along nicely. The characters are interesting, though personally I felt as though the antagonists were more well-developed than the duo of investigators we got more screen time with (at least for the first half of the season). The girls were also well-rounded characters, in particular Jerrie Kennedy, played by Jesse James Keitel. The show utilized its characters and their purpose well for the most part, with everyone playing a role that interweaved with the story, showcasing the importance of developing character arcs and making them have some level of importance to the plot of a series overall.
And the first half of the series was pretty enjoyable. Many of the plot threads that were picked up and worked into this first half felt like they had a sense of purpose. In one episode, one of the girls—Grace Sullivan—manages to escape the location where Ronald is keeping them by breaking through a sewer grate. She manages to get far enough outside to beg a fisherman for help. However, he is shot down by an arrow from Rick Legarski’s bow, reveling to Grace that he is the man behind everything, with Ronald as his worker ant. While Grace is taken back as a captive by the end of the episode, the actual event wasn’t filler: Rick ends up shooting her to take her back, resulting in her needing antibiotics as the wound becomes infected. This plays into the following episode, where Ronald is forced to confront Rick about her need for treatment, genuinely wanting to help her despite also being her kidnapper. This helps not only to characterize the dynamic between Ronald and Rick, but also moves the plot along, as what transpired between Rick and Grace becomes important in later episodes.
But the show’s first half, despite being strong, is still not without flaws. The first major one comes in the form of the opening scene, which sees an angry Jenny Hoyt confronting Cassie about sleeping with her husband, Cody, who said that he and Jenny were over when they were only separated. The plotline itself, while a bit melodramatic at times, serves to accentuate the tensions between Jenny and Cassie despite their need to work together to solve the highway kidnappings. It also creates a subplot about reconciliation between the two after their manipulation by a third party. Yet this is not the focus of the show, eventually being put behind them come the second half of the season. The decision to open up the entire series with a scene about cheating was off-putting when knowing about the plot of the show going into it. The opening scene of a series is supposed to give people their first impression as to what the show’s tone is and what it will be about. While tonally the series remains the same throughout, this opening scene was very weak, and was one of a few strange decisions that were made throughout this first half. And a lot of this comes from scenes or even entire episodes involving Jenny and Cassie.
In the fourth episode, “Unfinished Business,” Jenny and Cassie decide they need to try and collect DNA samples from different trucks at a nearby truck stop to find out who kidnapped the girls. To do this, Jenny disguises herself as a prostitute and enters the truck of Brad Gunther, a character that has never shown up before but for some reason is considered a suspect in the kidnappings. While he does end up imprisoned for soliciting prostitution—something that is also happening to other truckers in the very same lot with other women as Jenny is undercover—he is cleared as a suspect. This whole plotline serves only to introduce conflict between the police and the investigators, in particular Jenny. Which is fine if that’s what the show is going for. But to do it in such a strange, out-of-place way was just odd. There had been no mention of Gunther outside this episode, and he only appears to be arrested and cleared as a suspect. If anything, this felt like strange filler that could have been better spent had they decided to start investigating leads, such as truck drivers in their area or something akin to this. There are a lot of odd holes like that throughout the season. It momentarily takes away from the story, though overall it isn’t presented in too jarring a manner.
That is until the second half of the season, which felt like a very strange veer away from the case that was being covered in the show’s first nine episodes. While it’s indicated in the first half of the show that Ronald and Rick’s operation was just a small part of a much larger puzzle, Ronald’s escape from the law—and subsequent relocation with a single mother, going by the guise of “Arthur” while in a relationship with her—is treated as a subplot compared to what takes up most of the back half of season 1. Here we are introduced to the Kleinsassers, a family whose eldest son, Blake, knows Jenny. After being put in jail for a crime he’s sure he didn’t commit, Blake asks Cassie and Jenny to investigate the goings-on of his family’s ranch. We’re introduced to a new cast of characters under the Kleinsasser family name—led by father Horst, well-portrayed by Ted Levine. The story told here is rather intriguing, acting as a family drama turned tragedy that involves another conspiracy in a nearby town in Montana. Once again, the series excels here, telling the story of the family while giving us good, memorable characters throughout. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this, as it feels like a well-crafted second chapter to the world of Big Sky. However, I couldn’t help but feel as though Ronald was expected to sit on his laurels the entire season without having much to do. Especially when a case as large as sex trafficking falls to the wayside for—albeit well-presented—family farm drama.
Some of the best parts of the second half involved Ronald and his whereabouts. Not only his strange relationship with single mother Scarlet, but also the investigation being led by newcomer character Mark Lindor as he works close with both Cassie and Jerrie to uncover Ronald’s whereabouts. What’s telling here isn’t just that the series still has a story to tell with Ronald, but also that this second half was more of a bridge to the next season. While I appreciated the way, they went about things by giving us a slow burn for Ronald’s development this season, it also felt a little out of left field for there to be another, unrelated plotline happening at the same time. It was good, don’t get me wrong, it just felt like a bit of a strange decision to turn 180 degrees in a different direction.
Although I must say that, while the back half of the season felt more like setup, the finale for the first season was probably the best episode of the series. Not only does it continue Ronald’s story directly, forgoing any secondary plot elements that have taken center stage up to this point, but it does so in a way that indicates the show will be moving in a forward direction in its upcoming second season. The conspiracy with the truck drivers and sex trafficking has deepened, and there are now many more players in the game than there were before. My only hope is that season 2 can expand upon this without veering off into a different direction as the first season’s second half did.
I would recommend watching Big Sky if you’re looking for an atypical crime show that spends many episodes pouring over different cases with perspectives from all fronts. It’s a bit of a slow burn at times, but the characters do well to sell the series, especially memorable ones like Cassie and Ronald (with an honorable mention to Margaret Kleinsasser, Horst’s wife, portrayed fantastically by Michelle Forbes). I feel like this show has a lot of potential to make its second season entertaining, and in some ways meaningful, depending on how far it’s willing to push the boundaries to create a suspenseful program. Give it a watch if it sounds interesting, even though it sometimes feels like it still needs to find its sense of direction.
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