‘Bad Monkey’ Episode 2 Recap: “A Hundred Bucks Says You Won’t”

Fucknuts. Not saying it’ll replace very demure in the current discourse, but like everything else about Andrew Yancy and his Florida Keys life in Bad Monkey, his favorite descriptor is really growing on us. In Episode 1, it was his go-to reaction when the severed arm he delivered to Rosa Campesino, the Miami-Dade PD medical examiner, wasn’t in her database. (“Fucknuts.”) In Episode 2, it’s his frustrated response when Sheriff Sonny Summers (Todd Allen Durkin) makes him the Keys’ the new restaurant inspector instead of reinstating him as a detective. “Roach patrol? Fucknuts.” (This is despite Bonnie’s douchebag doctor husband dropping the assault charges that led to the suspension.) And it’s really the only thing Yancy can say when he’s forced to evade a GMC Yukon that’s actively trying to kill him with a desperate leap through a plate glass window. Crash. “Fucknuts.”  

Clearly, things are escalating in South Florida. “I’m trying to stay out of this,” Yancy swears to Rogelio, and he’s not lying. The arm belonging to the departed Nick Stripling. Nick’s widow Eve Stripling. Her boyfriend Christopher. Eve’s step daughter Caitlin. Yancy’s really trying to stay away from all of it, be good, and hopefully get his badge back. However. “It’s like there’s somebody who’s keeping an eye on me because of what I know, but the problem here is, I don’t really know what I know.” In Bad Monkey, we’re still learning about what’s happening, too. But only two episodes in, it already feels like Vince Vaughn has been playing Andrew Yancy for like four seasons’ worth of sunlit dark comedy criminal intrigue. We’re glad he survived almost getting pancaked by an SUV, because the near-miss proves that whoever wants Yancy silenced is making moves on the street. And do you know where else things are escalating? Of course you do. The Bahamas.  

To hell with the mad reign of Rob Delaney’s Christopher, the developer and scooter-riding drive-by shooter who ordered Neville’s lovely little seaside cottage destroyed and transformed his buddy’s outdoor bar into a Curly Tails Resort tourist trap, complete with Jimmy Buffet on the sound system. With his own house flattened and Christopher’s influence overtaking Andros Island, Neville laments to Dragon Queen that her directed magic went the wrong way. But she isn’t trying to hear that. If he pays more money – or they come to a different kind of agreement – her Obeah powers could still attach themselves to Christopher. So what can Neville do? He tucks Driggs the monkey in his bag and hops a puddle jumper to the Keys, where he visits his half-sister Samara (Aba Arthur) to collect his cut of the land deed cash. 

“Bonnie, sometimes I feel like I’m in a movie that you’re writing in your head.” While his married girlfriend pops in briefly to say she’s leaving town that night forever, Yancy can’t shake what he learned during another meeting with Caitlin, about Eve and Christopher living it up in Andros and the matter of a five-million-dollar insurance policy, payable upon Nick Stripling’s death. And on the snoop at the couple’s Florida pad, he runs into Rosa, who couldn’t leave well enough alone, either. Together, they discover bone shards and blood residue while hiding in the fancy shower, and in these moments, the bantering energy between Vaughn and Natalie Martinez could not be more delightful. It’s not quite provable – he’s still not a detective, again – but evidence and suspicion is swirling around Eve and Christopher. And for her part, Caitlin isn’t giving up her assertion that Eve did her dad dirty for the money. 

Rosa is right when she observes that Yancy can’t stay out of trouble, even when not snooping would be the very thing to get back his beloved detective’s badge. But what’s cool about Bad Monkey is that she doesn’t want to stay out of trouble, either. The forces of good are aligning against the surging crest of bad stuff in South Florida, and maybe they do have a little bit of cosmic help, because when Yancy and Rosa meet for breakfast, it’s at the restaurant owned by Samara, and Neville’s serving their coffee. Which aligns with a scene of Dragon Queen and Ya-Ya (L. Scott Caldwell), her wise grandmother, on the beach in the Bahamas. Neville and Yancy, still independent of each other but now in close proximity, each feel like they’re being sucked down into chaos. And on Andros, Dragon Queen sees omens in her shells and scrying. “All kinds of bad people getting in the water now.” All of them – the good on one side and the bad on the other – are being drawn together into the heart of the storm.

BAD MONKEY EPISODE 2 – KEYS POINTS:

• “I’ve never seen a house that looked like it was on coke before?” Ashley Nicole Black has joined Bad Monkey as Johnna Russell, an investigator from Oklahoma who’s hunting down “Clover Chase,” aka Bonnie, who she says is wanted for sexual assault of a minor. Appearing on Yancy’s porch with digs at the garish yellow mansion next door, the one Yancy sabotaged with bees to needle smarmy real estate agent Evan Shook (Alex Moffat), Johnna explains that she was brought to the Keys by the YouTube video of Bonnie watching Yancy push her husband’s golf cart into the harbor. Talk about going viral.

• Does anyone else think John Ortiz’s Rogelio, Yancy’s friend and detective partner, seems a little too checked out on the whole severed arm/Eve Stripling case? Not saying he’s in on it – yet – but Ro didn’t even really care when somebody aimed a 2-ton SUV at his supposed best pal.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.