From armed robberies to multiple homicide: How Task Episode 1 shifted gears in narrative with a cliffhanger conclusion 

HBO's latest crime drama, Task, starring Mark Ruffalo, recently had its premiere, and the show is already raising quite some social media buzz owing to its unique narrative. The story revolves around a struggling FBI agent (portrayed by Marvel icon Mark Ruffalo) who is assigned to lead a team of young misfit officers, a task force designated to investigate multiple local robberies and the violence associated with them.

Task Episode 1 sets up the perfect premise of a crime drama with the use of eerie atmospheric background scores (less dialogue) in the opening few sequences, which will easily get viewers hooked. The plot antagonizes Tom Pelphrey's character Robbie Prendergast, a local garbage collector working for a waste management firm called J&W, who eventually resorts to dark ways to earn money.

Every night, he raids houses (which have been potentially stashed with drug money) with guns, accompanied by two of his close associates, to bag some extra cash. However, what kicks off as an easy (yet illegal) way of earning soon ends in unprecedented mayhem. By the end of Task Episode 1, Tom Brandis' team is thus left to investigate a full-fledged murder investigation linked to armed robberies.

How HBO's Task subtly shifted gears in narrative in the very first episode

Task Episode 1 opens with two stories running simultaneously: one revolves around a senior FBI Special Agent, Tom Brandis, whose curve of life has been on the downslope for a while, and the other is about a struggling sanitation worker, Robbie Prendergast, who needs to find any possible avenue to earn extra bucks. As we witness in Task Episode 1, Tom has now taken a break from on-field duties and mostly works as a recruitment mentor in different colleges, where he analyzes the students' profiles and helps guide them in joining the FBI.

However, his personal life is quite tumultuous, as his son Ethan is on trial for third-degree murder, while his daughter Emily does not seem to be very close to him. Fighting his own battles, Tom finds it difficult to maintain a balance between two worlds and spends most of his free time watching birds, keeping track of baseball games, and drinking, a total mess of a person (though without any fault of his own, as it appears).

So, when his boss, Kath, assigns him the case of solving 9 consecutive burglaries, most of which took place at the houses of a local gang known as The Dark Hearts, Tom finds it quite difficult to wrap his head around it. However, he eventually takes up the assignment and is put in charge of a task force of three rookie officers.

On the other hand, Robbie also has his own struggles with his family. He has apparently taken shelter at his brother's (who is no more) house with his children, Wyatt and Harper, after his whole life went awry, and his niece Maeve also lives with them and helps take care of them. So, Robbie takes up the last resort (violence) to earn more money, as his sanitation job is clearly not enough to sustain such a big family.

Robbie, along with his co-worker and friend Cliff, tracks houses while picking up trash in the morning, trying to figure out which would potentially hold a good amount of money. The whole build-up thus centers on connected armed robberies, which the feds suspect might ignite a full-fledged turf war between biker gangs (if not decapitated at its roots).

So, Tom gathers his task force comprising State Trooper Elizabeth Stover, CD Anthony Grasso, and Sergeant Detective Aleah Clinton to investigate the case. As it appears, the three young misfit officers are like the vertices of a triangle with Tom sitting at the centroid of the unit. Not long after their work starts, Robbie, along with Cliff and one of their other friends, Peaches, plans to rob another gang house the same night.

However, things do not go as planned. Once the three of them arrive at the location wearing Halloween masks, an unnamed woman tries to resist, and Peaches' face is revealed. There was another guy inside the house who also tried to fight back but could not. The robbers could not make him speak a word about where all the money had been stashed.

Right at this moment, a third person arrives on a bike, and Robbie panics while struggling to find the money. Cliff, on the other hand, holds the man and the woman hostage at gunpoint, and Peaches goes downstairs to eliminate the new arrival at the scene.

However, in a shocking turn of events, Peaches gets shot and is left dead. While all this happens, the hostages manage to uncuff themselves, and Robbue and Cliff are caught off guard. The two robbers barely escape the scene, leaving behind three people dead, and the closing sequence brings another twist: a small child who was, all this time, sleeping in the basement of the house.

Robbie never had any intentions to kill anyone during the robberies, and Task Episode 1 reveals his moral dilemma once he sees the kid standing right there (whose parents he has probably just murdered). So, on humanitarian grounds, Robbie takes the kid away to his house, and moments later, Tom Brandis is seen waking up to Anthony Grasso's call.

The closing sequence of Task Episode 1 leaves us in the middle of a homicide investigation, which initially started as an attempt to eliminate armed burglaries. Viewers would not even realize how subtly the showrunners shifted gears in the narrative of this new crime drama.

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