Monday, September 16, 2013

Ray Donovan Pops A Child Abusing Priest - Episode 11 – Thunderous Applause in the Audience!




There is something quite primal in the new Showtime Series Ray Donovan, it attracts as with a moth to a flame.

Ray Donovan, without any job description in the beginning of the series, seems by acts and deeds to be some sort of Private Detective working for a high powered law firm in Los Angeles.  

As time progresses, Ray is a fixer of all the things that the rich and famous break and might go to jail for. But he has his bag of tricks and network of paid muscle, contacts and brains to hold together the power behind the throne of the rich and fabulously rich law firm protecting the fabulously rich and fabulously ugly and stupid Hollywood icons that pay huge retainers to be protected from the press, the public, truth, justice and even reality.

Behind the bone crunching, PR pizaazz fixing, bribing and body burying is the background story of Ray’s extended blood family, transports from the poverty, crime and grit of Irish South Boston in their origins twenty years previously.


Ray Donovan is played by actor, writer, director and probably Emmy Award winner Liev Schreiber for his performance in this drama vehicle.

There, in the background story of his scumbag gangster dad (played by Jon Voight) recently released from prison by the FBI to spy on his son and bring down the powerful men of the powerful L.A. Law Firm headed by veteran actor Elliot Gould - is also the story of Ray's younger brother, emotionally lost in adulthood and scarred forever by being abused by a priest in Boston some twenty years back.

Ray’s younger brother “Bunchy” gets a $1,400,000 dollar settlement check from the Roman Catholic church for services and abuse rendered in the name of holy mudder church.  Bunchy, a clearly disturbed and drug and alcohol dependent individual paces back and forth in an eternal daydream filled with fears, anxiety and doubts about himself as the result of the institutionally sanctioned abuse and cannot sleep.

Without giving too much away about perhaps cliché settings and characters of this brilliantly conceived, written and performed TV Drama, Bunchy finds and begins to stalk his priest abuser from the past, now transferred to a parish in Los Angeles.

Bunchy shoots the priest, has regrets and brings the wounded cleric to his other brother Terry’s (played by Eddie Marsan) boxing and training Gym in gritty downtown L.A..

The brothers circle the wagons and try to decide what to do with a wounded and probably dying priest.

Ray, with his seething undercurrent of personal and controlled rage begins to interrogate the priest who denies being Bunchy’s abuser. As time and script allow, the priest admits his crime but in a state of holy RC denial will not apologize to Bunchy, perhaps because his sins have been forgiven in the confessional and he basically does not give a shit about his victims through the years.

Finally, it comes to light that Bunchy was not the only brother molested by the priest.

Ray pops the bastard with a clean gunshot right in the forehead, blood splattering onto the background side of the boxing ring.

The crowd went wild, the audience in my mind that is, to do what the courts in Rome or America have not done to these predator priest bastards protected by the bishops like Bishop Robert Finn in Kansas City Mo. here in America. Whatever.

All in all a great episode.  In an even greater series.


Final episode of the season next week.  The FBI is closing in…


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