Godless episode 3 review: Frank Griffin’s surprise for John Cook

We are only a few episodes into Godless and we are hooked. The premiere introduced us to the players, episode two introduced us to the over all story arc and now with episode three we are hoping to dive into the dirtier details of the story. Bill is off to prove his worth by joining up with John Cook in his quest to bring in Frank, Roy Goode has been busted out of prison to help Alice tame her horses, and Frank is raping and killing his way across the dust plains to find Roy.

Bill the detective

Although he’s having trouble with his eyesight (his cheap spectacles only do so much), when he gets to the scene of the big shoot out that happened between Roy and Frank we see just how attuned he is to police work. He sees that everyone Roy shot was dead before they hit the ground, except for one person – Frank. Roy may have wanted out of the gang, but with Frank being the man who raised him we suspect that Roy didn’t have it in him to actually kill him. Wounding Frank was enough to buy Roy a bit of time to escape.

Frank is headed to Olegrande and after gathering information, both Bill and John are also headed there. When John arrives at a bar, he’s surprised by Frank and his gang and we are surprised at how fast Frank’s men killed John! Barely two words were spoke before John got a bullet in the head and Sam Waterston is shockingly gone from the show only 3 episodes in. Bill is the only lawman left hoping to stop Frank, so we are pretty worried to say the least.

Alice’s ranch

After breaking Roy out of jail to come back to her ranch and get her horses in order, she really sees the value in having him around. He’s able to get even the most difficult horses to calm down. Eventually Whitey is let out of the prison cell and heads up to Alice’s ranch to collect Roy and bring him back to jail (with the help of La Belle’s leaders). Alice strikes a deal with the leaders – she will sell them all but six horses at a seriously discounted price if they leave Roy to help her break them in and afterwards she’s going to leave her ranch and move back to Boston. Mary Agnes takes the deal since they are in serious need of horses. As Roy starts to break in the horses, he urges Alice’s son (Truckee) to get on one of the horses for the first time, much to the delight of Alice and his grandmother. Roy is clearly becoming a stronger part of this family.

Whitey in love

We learned a lot more about Whitey in this episode. While we already knew that he is fast on the draw, there’s a lot more to him then just that. Outside of being the deputy, he’s been sneaking off to a nearby town for violin lessons, but really he just wants to be close to the woman (Louise) who’s teaching him. We already knew that he was incredibly dirty (he never bathes), but after seeing Mary Agnes visit his place we also saw how dirty his home is (anyone else cringe when he took a spoon off the dirt floor to eat with?) Hygiene is not Whitey’s strong suit. Also there’s a bit of a cute flirtation between him and Mary Agnes, so we are hoping to see that develop a bit more since the romance she has going on with the schoolteacher seems to be lacking in the onscreen chemistry department.

The ladies of La Belle

Now that they made a deal with Valentine he has sent over the men to start getting the mines together – lead by a man named Logan who is as mean as a snake. With Bill gone from the town, Logan has named himself the new sheriff with his gang being the new deputies and they are taking over many of the buildings including the sheriff’s office. This isn’t going to end well.

CarterMatt’s overall thoughts

This was an incredibly slow episode – we spent at least 20 minutes watching either Roy break the horses in or Truckee learning to ride a horse, so if you are interested in watching horse training then this was the episode for you. For us though, we got the idea of what the show was going for in the first few minutes and didn’t need so much screen time dedicated to just this. That being said the last minute of this episode where we saw John Cook, killed by Frank’s men was so jarring that it almost made up for the slow pace of this episode… almost.

What did you think of episode 2 of Godless and are you still enjoying the series? Leave us a comment in the box below with your thoughts. If you want to check out more of our reviews of Netflix’s Godless then head on over to the link here. Also, be sure to join our CarterMatt Facebook group at the link here to keep up to date with all of our Godless coverage. (Photo: Netflix)