Trust Season 1 Episode 10 Review: Consequences
Caralynn Lippo
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What a gorgeous, brilliant end to a riveting season of television.
Trust Season 1 Episode 10 tied up each of the loose plots left dangling at the end of Trust Season 1 Episode 9. We got to see where each and every one of the most important characters wound up after the events of Little Paul's kidnapping.
Let's start with the Italians, who by far had the most straightforward, "neat" ending.
I mentioned in my last review that I was surprised at how non-lethal Primo was after the ransom came through. As it turned out, he just had a delayed reaction to everything going exactly according to plan for him.
Essentially, in a case of the world proving karmic justice isn't real, Primo got everything he wanted and seized control of the Calabrian mafia.
First, he visited his cousin Fifty. I knew immediately that the twitchy, nervous lawyer was a goner, as soon as Primo found out he'd shown Gail his face and told her his name on the penultimate episode.
Because Primo is pure evil, he didn't just kill Fifty immediately. No, he's far crueler than that.
Instead, he lured his cousin out to the ruins – the same ruins Paul visited with Bertolini back at the start of the season, I think – and convinced him that, though he knew about the betrayal, everything was fine between them.
Don't ever say that. Family is never finished.
Primo
Despite the above quote, Primo didn't feel an ounce of familial loyalty to the cousin he'd roped into this mess in the first place. After convincing Fifty he was safe and trying to give him a portion of the ransom money, he unceremoniously shoved Fifty off the building and to his horrible death below – leaving his ransom money behind.
That moment certainly wasn't surprising – I figured somebody would die there as soon as they wandered over to the opening. But it still left me with a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach to see Fifty die that way.
He wasn't one of the more interesting characters, but the writers made clear just how little he wanted to go along with the kidnapping and how much sympathy he had for Gail. He was relatively innocent, unlike Primo.
So to see everything go Primo's way while characters like Fifty were brutally killed was a real punch in the gut.
Someone I was less upset to see go was Salvatore.
That death also wasn't much of a surprise, since Primo had been talking about killing off his uncle and claiming the title of mafia don since the beginning.
The way Primo did it was rather clever – he had a prostitute who was visiting Salvatore let him into the old man's house, then shot him in the head while he lay in bed asleep.
I was worried Primo would kill Leonardo and his family too. But there, Primo actually did do something surprisingly smart and full of foresight: He asked Leonardo to be his second.
I thought this was slightly out of character for Primo, who'd been portrayed as a hot-headed, impulsive, impetuous young man all season long. Apparently, he had a more solid head on his shoulders than it appeared, because he knew exactly what to do with the ransom money and how best to make it happen.
In the end, Leonardo helped Primo use the money to build a port into Calabria, making them incredibly rich and successful "businessmen" (aka, drug smugglers).
While this was technically a "win" for the Italian characters, there was also the tinge of darkness: Francesco wound up working with the mafia, which was precisely what his father wanted to avoid.
Do exactly like I tell you, kid, and one day you could be running this place.
Primo [to Francesco]
The situation with Leonardo and Francesco was an excellent parallel to Getty's situation with his male descendants. The sins of the father corrupting the son, and all that.
Elsewhere, we saw how the aftermath of the kidnapping affected the Getty family.
While the show resisted flashing forward too far into the future, we did get glimpses of each family member's fate.
Paul, surprisingly, wound up confessing to his mother that he'd orchestrated the kidnapping, and this led to a bit of estrangement between them. In the end, though, Gail came through and attended Paul and Martine's wedding.
The wedding scene was absolutely gorgeous, but it too was tinged with sadness.
Intercut with the couple's first dance were scenes of the drug addiction and overdose that would eventually leave Paul severely disabled. This was a devastating but very effective way to hint at what was to come without saying it bluntly.
And Chace's comment on the event was equally depressing.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that didn't happen. Maybe... Just maybe you can outrun your fate on wings of gold. Google it.
Chace
Of course, it did happen exactly like that. Despite everything, Paul succumbed to the same demons that took hold of his father, despite having a wife and child.
The writers managed to squeeze in one other gut-punch, with the brief scene between Martine and Jutta in the hospital where Martine basically admitted that she felt obligated to follow through on her engagement to Paul because he had no one else left in his life.
What a sad life that young man led.
Strangely enough, his dad had a more hopeful ending than Little Paul did.
Victoria, finally having enough of Big Paul's addictions, tricked him into checking into a clinic to get clean – and shockingly, he did it. The last we saw of Big Paul, he was happily spoon fed soup by a young female nurse.
From a quick Google check, it seems that Big Paul did manage to get clean after his stay in the clinic in 1984. He lived another 19 years after that, to the age of 70.
Finally, there was Getty himself, who was left old and alone in the end.
As I've said before, there is no way that Donald Sutherland doesn't get at minimum a nomination for his role in Trust, if not a win (or several).
His performance in the finale was one of his best all season long. Sutherland was particularly great during the scene where von Block read him the negative reviews of his failed museum.
Like a child, Getty had a tantrum over being told that his project was no good. He'd poured his entire heart and soul (and fortune) into that endeavor, so he felt the rejection keenly – it was like the rejection of yet another of his progeny.
As a result, he ripped it apart and destroyed it with his bare hands.
Sutherland emoted such visceral rage and disappointment in that scene; it was almost too intimate to watch. A truly fantastic performance, yet again.
There were smaller moments, too, that underscored just how sad and alone Getty wound up in the end.
Only two of the initial four girlfriends remained behind at Sutton Place, and by the end, they were making fun of him for seemingly having lost all interest in sex. In another scene, it was revealed that Getty's vanity led to him getting plastic surgery in the hopes of appearing younger.
Belinda, yet another girlfriend, had left with his child. Feeling alone and rejected by the museum from which he'd tried to purchase the Parthenon frieze, he turned to Belinda to try to convince her that they should send their child to Eton, simply to show up all the hoity-toity people there.
Belinda, of course, refused – like Gail, she truly loved her son and wanted to be a mother to him. And there was the small matter of the fact that Getty had forced all the girlfriends to sign a contract agreeing that their progeny would have no claim to the name or fortune.
For Getty, getting that kid into Eton was just a matter of sticking it to Eton graduates like Mr. Jeffries. He didn't intend to do it in the best interest of the little boy. The kid's best interest, like Belinda pointed out, was to be with his mother.
At least as it's depicted in the finale, Getty also didn't see Penelope again. After trying to visit her where she lived with Patrick, the flight instructor, he was turned away. In a thematically fitting moment, he was left outside in his car in the rain, staring in at Penelope and Patrick's loving embrace inside.
We don't see Getty's death. Instead, we got the absolutely stellar scene where the King Midas myth came to life for the old man – all of his food and drink turned to gold, and eventually so did the rest of Sutton Place.
Left alone with only his wealth, Getty, in the end, had nothing. It was a depressing but fitting ending for the man we've seen be varying degrees of horrible all season long.
I'm not sure how the show would continue and what story they would tell next, but I would want to see more of it. The cinematography, performances, and writing have all been wonderful.
If Trust Season 2 becomes a thing, I'll be tuning in to watch.
Stray Thoughts:
- I'm torn about whether I liked Chace narrating the finale. At times, I thought it was a bit heavy-handed, though it did work really well in some spots. And, of course, Brendan Fraser was excellent in his delivery, even when the actual lines were a bit cheesy.
- Like I've said continuously all season, the camera work has been perfection. The way the King Midas sequence was filmed was a fitting combination of dazzling and disorienting. Just fantastic.
- I was so glad to see Bullimore leave Sutton Place behind and reunite with his gardener. It was such a wonderfully fulfilling, poignant scene between the two. In my headcanon, the two went off to have a cozy little life together.
What did you think of the season finale? Share your thoughts by commenting below, and don't forget that you can watch Trust online here at TV Fanatic anytime!
Caralynn Lippo is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow her on Twitter.
