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Painkiller Series-Finale Recap: It’s So Hard to Be a Robber Baron These Days

Season 1 Episodes 5 and 6 Editor’s Rating4 stars ****

Photo: Netflix/KERI ANDERSON/NETFLIX Legacy is all that matters to Arthur Sackler. It’s so important to him and so embedded in Richard’s psyche that we get a whole flashback scene to one Christmas in the 1950s dedicated to it. No wonder Richard doesn’t take his father’s advice seriously in the era of Oxy — Arthur’s tirade against gifts from Tiffany & Co. as gauche manifestations of Raymond’s lack of vision and deficient understanding of what the whole Sackler operation is for is too vivid, too visceral to eventually be softened or replaced with a more reasonable ideology. Like, say, giving a hoot about any other humans, especially those who might take OxyContin.

At least those hundreds of thousands of people have the Edie Flowers and John Brownlees of the world on their side. Dogged and undaunted, they face a deluge of internal Purdue documents in response to their subpoena and extract from it a case strong enough that in their courtesy meeting with Udell at Purdue, their opening offer is relabeling Oxy so it can only be prescribed for end-of-life care, a $2 billion investment in communities damaged by Oxy, and a public apology in which Purdue takes full responsibility. Udell’s bizarrely jovial and mocking counteroffer — a $10 million gift to Virginia law enforcement — is sufficiently insulting and unserious that Brownlee’s counter-counter is a $5 billion investment and removal of the drug from the market entirely. Behold the BDE this case demands.

And lest we forget why all these people are doing all this work, let’s return to Glen Kryger. Were Taylor Kitsch’s performance not so grounded in a believable, easy-to-root-for emotional realism, his situation might seem too cliché to accept. In the grip of an ever more intense addiction and estranged from Lily, he makes a desperate attempt to get Dr. Hartman to write him a new prescription. It’s heartbreaking and the most intense scene of the series so far, as Glen rages around Hartman’s office, screaming that his pain level is off the chart, that Hartman has directly contributed to his agony: “You told me and my wife, to our faces, that this was a safe medication!”

Glen’s rock-bottom moment comes as he betrays the people and things that mean the most to him, pawning his garage’s tools and equipment and his wedding ring, all for pennies on the dollar, then loses his cash in a mugging at the clinic parking lot. The worst of it comes as he chases a lovely and seemingly heartfelt speech about how much he loves Ty with a plea for money or a connection to a dealer. Ty’s howls of incensed, wounded grief chase Glen out the door and back to his pickup. Glen’s fate has felt disturbingly uncertain from the jump, but never more so than now. Is he even going to survive this episode?

Having been gravely mistaken for an out-of-his-depth rube, Brownlee embraces a new and more aggressive strategy against Purdue, instructing his team to begin cold-calling every Purdue employee they can. Just one slightly knowledgeable person can help them break the dam, and soon, one comes their way. Udell’s assistant, Debra Marlowe, has had it up to here with the Sacklers, who are cruel and have a penchant for evidence destruction. She’s ready to go on the record with Edie and Brownlee, but we’ve seen Marlowe secretly grinding up and snorting Oxy already. Unsurprisingly, she’s a no-show to her deposition, instead spending the afternoon pleading for another Oxy prescription at an urgent-care center. So much for this prospective star witness.

And so much for Shannon Schaeffer’s continuing education; she’s well on her way to disillusionment as the mentee she recruited, Molly, starts spouting even more exaggerated versions of Britt’s callous talking points as they pull up to Dr. Cooper’s clinic. Molly’s grateful for Shannon’s generosity in handing a whale (high-volume client) like Dr. Cooper off to her so quickly. Shannon says she doesn’t have the bandwidth for him with all her other clients, but she’s also keen to spend less time with him after he tried to put the moves on her with a Tiffany charm bracelet. This show really has it in for Tiffany & Co.!

What destroys the last vestiges of Shannon’s commitment to the cause is the next big bacchanal of clueless greed and inhumanity that Richard is insisting the company provide at their sales conference in Miami. He’s been taking a lot of heat from Arthur’s ghost lately, getting an earful from the Great Beyond about how his anti-lawsuit responses are insufficiently tough, how he needs to focus on the family legacy, and how the big Miami party is a bad look. No matter! The party is a corporate rave, including hot cheerleaders in OxyContin colors, a sing-along of an industrial-musical-style song about the drug featuring lyrics such as “Yeah, this miracle pill will take away your pain forever! Ready or not, we’re comin’ in hot!” (Yes, I did transcribe them all, and I will never get those 90 seconds of my life back.)

Even staggering drunk, Shannon can’t decide what’s more revolting: the song, Richard’s cringey awkwardness, the revelation that former U.S. attorney Jay McCloskey is now a consultant and keynote speaker for the company he described as creating “the greatest criminal and social threat in the state of Maine,” Molly casually wearing Dr. Cooper’s trademark Tiffany sex bracelet, or seeing so many of her colleagues crushing and snorting Oxy in the restroom-adjacent lounge. Craving a mental escape, Shannon caves to intense peer pressure to have a snort and enjoys a euphoric high that lasts until she falls face first into the swimming pool. She’s rescued, but it’s a serious wakeup call, emphasized visually by every moment of her brief, strange trip being intercut with Glen riding out hideous dopesickness as he manages to pull off a solo detox à la Ewan McGregor’s method in Trainspotting.

Having survived, Glen is doing all right. Being 30 days clean and doing well enough using methadone as a replacement for Oxy is a real achievement, and he’s trying to wear it lightly while looking toward the future. These tentatively hopeful scenes of reconciliation in progress with Lily, Ty, and Kaylee are a reminder of what a lovely person Sober Glen is. The warm, funny, responsible, attentive, seductive guy they know and love is back! (Related, breaking news: My campaign for Taylor Kitsch to be cast as a lead in a romantic comedy begins now.) But the song playing under all of this fragile hope is “Heroin,” by the Velvet Underground, a jittery, seven-minute masterpiece of nihilistic, narcotic inevitability.

For her part, Shannon decides she’s done with Purdue and shares all of her incredibly damning notes, emails, and other materials with Edie. She’s free! Penitent, somber, resolved never to do this kind of work again, and free. Britt’s response is a bunch of unhinged screaming and slapping, petering out to the repetition of a low-bar affirmation she plainly does not believe, “I’m not a bad person.” Kudos to Dina Shihabi for adding such depth and straight-up strangeness to a role that didn’t invite much more to the performance than bitchiness, girlbossiness, and conventional hotness.

Britt’s unraveling leads smoothly to my favorite, most telling line of the series, as a shaken Mortimer screams at Richard about Brownlee’s lawsuit: “You didn’t take them seriously, and now these hillbillies are going to try to disembowel us!” It’s an elegantly economical distillation of the Sackler family’s arrogance and deeply offended realization that they’re being treated — gasp!!! — as though they’re not above the law. How can that be? They’re helping millions, and if a few druggies in the hinterlands get addicted or die, what’s that to Purdue? Hillbillies aren’t people, not the way the Sacklers are. Rules aren’t for the Sacklers: They’re hindrances to the natural flow of products to consumers and of wealth to their coffers. What are for the Sacklers are things like loopholes, undocumented and unprovable quid pro quos, and the ability to wriggle their way through any obstacle — and who’s going to stop them? A bunch of hick lawyers from West Virginia? No, no, no, these uppity Appalachians aren’t going to get in the way of the Sacklers of Connecticut, whose name bedecks every art-museum wing and hospital and university from here to kingdom come!

And so they lawyer up for real, recruiting heavy-hitters like the prosecutor who got Teflon Don John Gotti convicted, a former FBI general counsel, and (in the funniest moment of the entire series) Rudolph William Louis Giuliani.

It’s a smart move, as Rudy Giuliani facilitates a settlement so toothless that it’s practically an apology to Purdue for putting them through the stress of bringing charges against them at all. A little whisper down the lane from trial-averse Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, to Rudy, to Congress, to the White House, to the Department of Justice, to Brownlee yields a corporate guilty plea to one measly count of fraudulently misbranding OxyContin and misdemeanor guilty pleas by executives Udell, Friedman, and Goldenheim to the same charge. Rules really are just for the little people, huh? In a series full of tragic moments, the looks on Brownlee’s and Edie’s faces — without words, both positively screaming, “After all we’ve been through and worked for, this is how it ends?” — are among the most awful. Brownlee’s warning to Udell at the end of their first meeting, “Tell the Sacklers that I’m not intimidated by their money or connections, and I’m not going anywhere,” now rings terribly hollow. No wonder he couldn’t look Edie in the eye in the courtroom.

Surely, the ghost of Arthur Sackler was appeased by this development, but no! Not only is he not appeased, he is aghast. Rudy Giuliani? He rants at Richard about the foolishness of “lawyering up with the lowest, filthiest krill specimen on earth,” going on to describe Giuliani as “a swamp creature [who will leave Purdue] permanently covered in a very specific flavor of shit that will never wash off!” This characterization is grossly unfair to krill, who lead what appear to be blameless underwater lives wholly unrelated to criminal conspiracies that lead to the preventable and senseless deaths of over 500,000 people and who, on those grounds alone, don’t deserve to be associated with the likes of Rudy Giuliani.

As the series finale winds down, we see Glen’s heartbreaking relapse and fatal overdose, Edie’s crushing professional disillusionment and heartwarming reconciliation with her incarcerated brother Shawn, and Richard’s final, defiant confrontation with Arthur’s ghost. Nothing new here; Arthur can’t believe how badly Richard has betrayed their family legacy, and Richard is unbothered as he explains that the $6 billion settlement the Sacklers must pay will be disbursed over a period of ten years and will be paid primarily by the sale of investments and interest income. Sure, they’ve relinquished ownership of Purdue, but they can never be prosecuted for anything related to Oxy again, and in the end, it’ll be as if it never happened, and they’ll all still be richer than Croesus.

Given how toothless the conditions of the bankruptcy settlement are, what is left to appreciate is anemic but is still worth mentioning. At least Richard Sackler is alone with his thoughts in his enormous mansion that has all the personality of an abandoned hotel lobby. At least the legacy of the Sacklers is now series like Painkiller and best sellers like Barry Meier’s Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic, Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain, and Beth Macy’s Dopesick. At least the removal of the Sackler name from the wings of art museums and hospitals and universities is now commonplace. At least Richard doesn’t even get to escape into the peaceful oblivion of true silence. That unreachable smoke detector is always, always beeping.

Odds & Ends of Interest

• The OxyContin victims whose parents open the final episodes are Matthew Stavron and Riley, whose deaths leave unfillable holes in the hearts of those who loved them.

• I still believe that Painkiller would have better served its audience and its own storytelling had it included just two or three fewer of the montages it loves so much, but I also viscerally get the reasons behind repeatedly deploying a technique that boasts all the subtlety of an anvil. Oxy isn’t subtle, either.

• As of this writing, the U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily blocked the Sacklers’ $6 billion prosecution-blocking bankruptcy deal to investigate the legality of resolving the lawsuits against them via bankruptcy court rather than through civil trials.

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