Apple TV+’s noir comedy High Desert comes to a close this week with a nicely judged final half-hour where streams and plots cross.
Arman and Heather, the Gatchis, Carol and Denny are all looking for Peggy in the High Desert season finale, entitled “I Need a Hero.” Can Peggy make up for a lifetime of misbehaving and lying and self-interest in one gesture? It’s a perfectly ridiculous ending to this laconic, if fast-talking, crime saga.
High Desert recap: ‘I Need a Hero’
Season 1, episode 8: Peggy Newman (played by Patricia Arquette) had to give up her husband Denny (Matt Dillon), and his dopey sidekick Chunky’s (Dorian Martin) Airstream, to criminal father-daughter team Arman (Carlo Rota) and Heather (Julia Rickert) to keep from getting killed.
The two are after money owed to them by Peggy and Guru Bob (Rupert Friend), whom Peggy suspects of selling forged artwork and murdering his wife, Dona (Tonya Glanz). All of this, Peggy reasoned, would net her a ton of money and make her name as a P.I. in the eyes of her siblings, Stewart (Keir O’Donnell) and Dianne (Christine Taylor), and her boss, Bruce Harvey (Brad Garrett). The trouble is, of course, everything else.
Guru Bob tried to leave town, but Dona’s brothers Nick (Carmine Giovinazzo) and Leo (Michael Masini) found him and kidnapped Peggy so they can locate Dona’s body. And the police pull over Arman and Heather because the Airstream was involved in a bunch of crimes that Denny and Chunky committed the previous day. Heather tries to deal with the police, but Arman gets killed in the struggle. Carol (Weruche Opia) goes to Peggy’s place to kill her, but, finding no one, wrecks the place and steals Peggy’s car.
Just start digging
The Gatchis take Guru Bob and Peggy out to the desert and instruct them to dig their own graves, believing the two of them killed Dona because they were having an affair. Peggy gets Bob to admit that they only met a week ago, and then Bob finally admits how Dona died. She was an art forger, and Bob sold all her forgeries, so she left him. As she was trying to leave, she tripped and was impaled on one of Bob’s awards for excellence in his former field as a news anchor.
After this revelation, Peggy shifts course, saying she can get them good money for the remaining forgeries Dona made for her brothers. Leo wants to just kill them both. And when Nick tries to talk him out of it, the two end up tussling in the sand and shooting each other to death.
Next, Carol goes to Bruce’s office to ask for help while Denny calls Peggy’s associates looking for clues. Then Carol and Bruce head out to Bob’s place and find Dona’s body. Peggy calls Bruce and has him pretend to be a fence so she can tell him to meet at Pioneer Town, the Wild West ghost town at which Peggy still technically works. Peggy also dials up Dianne, and tells her to get the painting she stole from the Gatchis and meet her at Pioneer Town, too.
A powwow at Pioneer Town
Everyone’s heading there at exactly the right moment because Peggy promised to put on a big spectacular play. However, in the meshuggaas of art forgery and murder, she forgot all about it. As her Pioneer Town boss Owen (Eric Petersen) panics about the lack of a show, Denny and Peggy dummy up an art deal, get the drop on Bob and watch as he runs out into the desert.
Owen makes Peggy feel like crap for not making good on her promises to him all season long. And then she apologizes to Dianne for being such a lousy sister and daughter. (Dianne forgives her.) All of that falls on deaf ears because Peggy does something for someone else for once: She decides to go get shot out of a cannon like she promised Owen somebody would. She actually didn’t — it was a miscommunication — but she won’t back down now.
It was this lady here who supported all of us
Photo: Apple TV+
The ending of this season of High Desert came on so suddenly that it took me a minute to realize there wouldn’t be anything after that great last sequence of Patricia Arquette climbing into a cannon and staring down the barrel awaiting deliverance. It’s exactly the kind of ending a show like this demand, a show like Fargo except it traded the cold molasses pacing of its frozen midwestern setting for speed and sarsaparilla.
Nothing against Fargo’s pacing — more movies could stand to be that exquisitely plotted. But I also think High Desert director Jay Roach and writers Nancy Fichman, Katie Ford and Jennifer Hoppe and did the right thing by hurrying us from the show’s beginning to its end, and pulling the curtain before we had time to think.
From start to finish, High Desert delivered a very strong first season, with an all-timer central performance from Arquette. Now Apple TV+ should do the right thing and renew it. Considering I’ve sat through three seasons of Trying, it’s the least they could do.
★★★★☆
Watch High Desert on Apple TV+
New episodes of High Desert arrive Wednesdays on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
