“Task,” a crime drama that dares to embrace forgiveness

Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey) spends a lot of time thinking about escaping his life on “Task.” Before he heads into a heist with his boys, Cliff (Raúl Castillo) and Peaches (Owen Teague), he bolsters their bravery by having Peaches picture dancing on a beach. When a job that goes wrong puts the outlaw motorcycle gang he’s been targeting on his tail, he soothes himself with memories of swimming in the local quarry with his family or thinks about starting over in Canada.

In a recent conversation, Pelphrey told Salon that Robbie and the woodsy Delaware County burg he calls home remind him of where he grew up, how he grew up and the people he grew up with: “There were a lot of aspects of Robbie and his personality that I resonated with in a strong way.”

(Peter Kramer/HBO) Tom Pelphrey as Robbie Prendergrast in “Task”

If people have connected with “Task,” Pelphrey’s tender, heartbreaking performance is a major reason for that. The actor was best known for his Emmy-nominated work in “Ozark” and his standout roles in “Outer Range” and “Banshee.” “Task” makes him a co-lead beside Mark Ruffalo, who plays FBI Agent Tom Brandis, but his desperate grasping for the light carries the series. Until “Vagrants,” the drama’s fifth episode, Pelphrey and Ruffalo hadn’t shared a scene together; Tom and Robbie barreled along parallel tracks destined to cross.

“Task” has been steadily burning toward this meeting of its two flawed men, neither of whom entirely registers as protagonist or antagonist. Tom Brandis is a rumpled, pudgy wreck, an ex-priest who no longer believes in God and can’t absolve his son of a sin that shattered their family. But it’s Pelphrey’s portrayal of Robbie that carries the show’s tension.

Tom finds Robbie because Robbie is running low on options. The massive jackpot they were supposed to have robbed from the Dark Hearts, the bikers who killed his brother, turns out to be a bag of drugs, not cash, and it’s a cement block dragging him underwater. The Dark Hearts’ leaders, Jayson (Sam Keeley) and Perry (Jamie McShane), are out for blood. Peaches died early in this downhill slide, but now Cliff is gone too, having been abducted and tortured by the gang.

Robbie’s niece, Maeve (Emilia Jones), is also a target; she returned a boy whom Robbie kidnapped (for benevolent reasons!) to the cops.

What Robbie doesn’t yet know is that the person helping him exact his revenge, Billy’s lover and Jayson’s partner Eryn (Margarita Levieva), was discovered by Perry and drowned in the same quarry where Robbie and Tommy shared their best childhood memories.

(Peter Kramer/HBO) Margarita Levieva as Eryn in “Task”

Regardless, Robbie is aware that this whole terrible mess is the product of his darkest fantasies about revenge. By the time Tom has tracked Robbie to his home, the dreamer’s vast horizon has narrowed to a slit. Tom tries to trap Robbie, only for Robbie to get the drop on him. From there, he uses Tom to enact his next escape, forcing him to drive them away from Robbie’s house, which he assumes will soon be swarming with cops, or homicidal bikers, or both.

There’s a moment when Robbie tells Tom, a former priest, that there’s nothing waiting for us on the other side of death, and there’s nothing intimidating about his tone. Rather, Pelphrey’s delivery of that line – the entire dialogue he shares with Ruffalo’s scuffy agent, truly – is one of the saddest moments in a story that lives in its heartaches.

And yet, he asks Tom about his family, and Tom recognizes in Robbie a fellow nature lover. “Vagrants” is named for a type of bird that loses its bearings and turns up in zones where it’s not supposed to be. Often those wanderers end up dying, Tom tells Robbie, who doesn’t appreciate the metaphor.

“Even if I wanted to go home, I don’t know the way no more,” Robbie croaks.

“Task,” Pelphrey told me, is fueled by deep, beautiful, universal themes. “Some of these questions, oh gosh, they’ve always been important, but you can’t help but feel like they’re especially important right now,” he observed. Foremost is the idea that vengeance, that emotion driving so much of society right now, isn’t satisfying or invigorating. It’s draining and destructive.

“Robbie, there’s a lot of anger in him — anger over losing his brother, anger at his place in life,” series creator Brad Ingelsby told Salon in a separate video interview, “and I always thought of Robbie as a guy going, ‘Why should I accept my place here? . . . Why shouldn’t I go get something?’ And I think ultimately, his journey is a journey of sacrifice. You know, and he knows, in the fifth episode that it’s over. And we don’t see his plan. It’s an internal plan.”

(Peter Kramer/HBO) Thuso Mbedu as Aleah Clinton and Mark Ruffalo as Tom Brandis in “Task”

Dark as that sounds, Ingelsby, who previously brought us “Mare of Easttown,’ didn’t intend for that tone to color his new drama. He hopes people are embracing the thriller elements of “Task,” of course. “But I also hope they embrace that it’s a show about compassion, and ultimately, a show that’s really about forgiveness.”

“And I think that’s the lesson we all need now. I think we’ve lost a sense of decency here in this country, a sense of kindness and inclusivity,” Ingelsby continued. “That, to me, is what I like about the character of Tom Brandis. He’s not a great FBI agent, but he is a compassionate person.”

As such, when Robbie makes Tom drive to a secluded, wooded area, we register the anxious edge in this situation. Robbie’s a hopeless man holding a gun on the cop trying to catch him. Tom is a broken but noble man. And yet, Pelphrey has amply established the goodness in his thief. Robbie’s a screw-up, but he also recognizes the light in people. Before letting Tom go, he directs him to a picnic spot that he assures the bird-watching enthusiast he will find beautiful, telling him, “You’re a decent man.”

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Aside from his choice to seek retribution instead of venturing forgiveness, Robbie’s also decent. “Certain things on the surface seem so far apart, and maybe they even seem opposite . . . and when we get closer, we say, ‘Oh no, it’s not what I thought. It’s way more complicated,’” Pelphrey said. “Maybe both of these people are good, and maybe they’re both just struggling in different ways.”

The fifth episode ends with the table set for a confrontation in the woods between Tom’s small task force, the Dark Hearts, and Robbie. The vagrants, so to speak, are outnumbered.

Pelphrey likens Robbie’s story to a Bruce Springsteen song. “I’m from New Jersey. I love Bruce. I grew up with those songs. But it’s, like, a real celebration and respectful honoring of the blue-collar world that I grew up in, that a lot of us grew up in, and know well,” he said. “. . . I understand their value system. I understand how they joke with each other. I understand how they love each other. And then I want to see them figure this thing out.”

“Mare of Easttown” captured that sense of mutual understanding in such a novel way, the star observed, “that I thought it kind of caught like wildfire. The best parts of that are alive in ‘Task.’ ‘Task’ itself is obviously a very different story, but if they’re unified by something, I think that’s a good thing to be united by.”

New episodes of “Task” air at 9 p.m. Sundays on HBO and stream on HBO Max.