Wrangling Walker: Season Four Episode Eleven “Let’s Go, Lets Go”

Wow! “Let’s Go, Lets Go”* might have been the best episode of the entire Walker series. Lots of tension, plenty of character insight, and all the feels—plus what I felt were clear callbacks to some iconic Supernatural moments.

I’ll quickly recap and go right for my thoughts because there was so much to unpack here.

Cordell, Hoyt, Emily, and Everybody

Walker finds himself at home, but some of the details aren’t quite right. He seems confused about that, and then he sees Emily. He greets her like she’s been gone but she’s all about getting him dressed for Auggie’s graduation and picking out the right clothes like nothing’s changed. Cordell knows something’s wrong, but he can’t figure out what.

He sees Liam, but thinks he should still be in New York City. Outside, Hoyt arrives in the Mustang with Geri and Sadie. Cordell again zones out, and we realize it must be the drugs not quite taking hold.

Hoyt makes a comment about not being ‘six feet under.’ Abeline tells Cordell ‘You don’t have to be here.’ There’s talk of the new events business but the context is wrong.

Later, Cordell is playing poker with Bonham when Emily asks, “Do you know what game you’re playing?” Cordell admits that he feels like he’s forgetting something. Throughout everything, there’s distant radio music that doesn’t seem to belong (probably bleed-through from the Jackal having the radio on in his lair). Cordell is told ‘retrace your steps.’ Bonham tells him ‘there’s still time.’

I love how we’re seeing Cordell’s mind and will fighting the hallucinogenic drug that is killing him. He’s in a world where he has everything he wants but he knows something isn’t right and he’s going to keep picking at it. (Which reminded me of Dean Winchester in the Supernatural episode “What Is And What Should Never Be”, when a djinn gives him the ‘perfect’ life while it kills him.)

Hoyt admits that he always wanted the family life Cordell had, and says Abeline told him to ‘hold the quiet’ but Cordell pushes back that he never told his mother about that. Hoyt says Cordell is afraid of ‘the quiet’.

As Cordell defined ‘the quiet’ in the first episode, he means an empty house, empty ‘nest’, family off living their lives elsewhere. He’s uncomfortable alone, without distractions. Is that because it gives him too much time to think? Too much room for regrets and recriminations? We get the impression that the house might be quiet but his thoughts are definitely unquiet. Cordell values a tight circle of family, friends, and colleagues and he becomes wobbly if he doesn’t have them to ground him.

Some people might find solace in ‘the quiet’ but for Cordell it’s a dark room full of bad memories, disappointment, and grief. It’s a place of loss and loneliness, and he’s not comfortable with his own company, or with a past with which he hasn’t made his peace. ‘The quiet’ gradually morphs into a metaphor for death and the grave, a dark thread that runs through the episode.

Cordell’s subconscious is trying hard to get through to him with comments like “what happened before is not going to happen now” and the repeated mantra “it’s time to go.” Stella says, “let him write the (graduation) toast—we might be glad we have it someday”, a clear callback to the letters that Cordell/Duke left from his undercover assignment in case he didn’t make it back.

At Auggie’s graduation, we get, “Just get through it. Keep breathing.” The circumstances are wrong, but the imperative to breathe is part of Cordell’s desperate struggle as he’s dying.

The writers did a great job making everything dream-like and still grounded in what has happened before and what’s really going on outside Cordell’s mind. Ranger HQ turns into Auggie’s graduation with rows of white chairs where only Cordell’s friends and family are present.

“Don’t be sad that it’s over,” he’s told, which could apply to graduation—or his life. Abeline tells him again, “You don’t have to be here.” Kelly says Captain James couldn’t be there “after everything.”

Auggie’s clearly giving a eulogy. The white chairs turn black and Auggie is struggling. Stella supports him. Hoyt mentions them reading the letters later.

The crucial scene is Cordell and Emily standing in front of his coffin and Cordell realizing that he’s dead. “You can wake up,” Emily tells him. Heartbreakingly, Cordell argues that “Maybe I should stay.”

Did anyone else hear an echo of Supernatural’s “Sacrifice” when Dean is trying to get Sam to give up the third Trial and Sam challenges him: “What’s the upside of me being alive?” and then goes on to list all the ways he has ‘failed’ Dean?

Emily tells Cordell that he can still wake up. She reminds him that it’s quiet here and he is afraid of the quiet. The casket is empty. “You’re not supposed to be here,” Emily tells him.

“Even if I want to be?” Cordell counters, saying that he doesn’t want to go back to a reality where Emily is dead.

That gave me definite ‘barn scene’ vibes from Supernatural’s final episode, “Carry On”. “Yeah, but I don’t want to,” Sam Winchester told his dying brother, who urged him to keep on going.

It also reminded me a lot of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” episode when Sam’s mental wall—which kept the memories of the Cage in Hell—was broken and he struggles through a nightmarish hallucination where he has to confront and kill different sides of himself, including the badly broken persona that remembers the torture. Only by integrating the pieces of himself and symbolically ‘killing’ them can Sam be whole again.

Clearly Cordell is more broken than we realized, internalizing the fault-finding of his family and colleagues—which is nothing compared to his own harsh, unrealistic, relentless criticism of himself. He believes, deep-down, that they would be better off without him because of his failures, and that none of his attempts to make amends for his mistakes and misjudgments atone.

Jared has spoken and written about his own struggles with depression, and he brings that knowledge to give a deeply nuanced and sensitive portrayal to Cordell, who has been stripped bare of his defenses and is weighing whether to live or die.

Was Cordell suicidal in going alone to bait the Jackal into attacking him? Did something darker than his obsession with solving the case lead him to take on a serial killer without backup? 

Cordell’s family and colleagues seem to think he doesn’t hear what they say. In reality, he has taken every criticism not just to heart, but to his soul, and believes the worst.

In “Sacrifice”, Sam Winchester said: “Do you know what I confessed in there? What my greatest ‘sin’ was? It was how many times I let you down.” And also, “You think I screw up everything I try.” The echoes of that scene are very strong here. Not to mention that part of Dean’s response was, “Just let it go.”

The other echoed Supernatural scene is the fight between Sam and Dean in “Prophet and Loss” when Dean is intent on forever trapping himself with the archangel Michael in the Malek box. Dean says he’s out of ‘cards’ (ideas) on how to defeat Michael, and Sam tells him, “You have one card today! But we’ll find another tomorrow. But if you quit on us today, there will be be no tomorrow!”

Emily is the voice of reason here. “You can still stop this,” Emily tells him. “Let’s go. Let us go” (*clarifying the meaning of the first half of the episode’s title.). 

That small shift made all the difference to the meaning—Cordell needed to leave the dream, and to do that, he had to let Hoyt and Emily and that ‘perfect’ life go. In order to live, he had to let go of past failures and criticism, the ways he let others down and failed his own ideals. He needed to choose to live for himself (*fulfilling the second half of the episode’s title), not just the roles he played for other people. He needed to be enough to fill ‘the quiet’ on his own.

In other words, he needed to ‘always keep fighting’.

The Rangers

Cassie figures out Cordell is in trouble, and even though he had turned off his phone’s tracker, they are able to use his credit card to find out that he checked into a motel. Cassie is furious that Cordell went rogue again without them, but Luna urges her to give Cordell ‘a little grace.’

At the motel, the security cameras don’t pick up video of Cordell’s kidnapper, but they do get a laundry van in front of his door on a day when the hotel laundry isn’t picked up. Following the plates leads them to the Jackal’s lair, where they find an empty, shallow grave intended for Cordell. Good detecting!

The Rangers split up. When Cassie talks to Luna she hesitates, and we think she’s going to say she loves him, which she didn’t say before. Instead, she jokes about celebrating afterwards with barbecue.

I’m not quite sure how the Jackal managed to drag Cordell out to the grave and bury him without being caught, but James and Trey dig him out and he is still alive. Trey administers the antidote, while Cassie goes looking for Luna.

She finds him, badly injured and dying, and holds him as he goes still. Is he dead? Will they be able to save both him and Cordell? Tune in again next week….

Last Thoughts

Kudos to the writers and also to the awesome cast. I want to make it clear that even in the episodes that haven’t been my favorite, the cast of Walker has done an amazing job in bringing their characters to life.

Jared gives us a fantastic performance as he uses his intellect and his Rangers’ training to figure out what’s going wrong, even as his heart aches to stay. The themes of loss, grief, second chances, disappointment, unrealistic expectations, perceived failure and finding something worth fighting for shine through. Tapping those emotions had to be difficult, and Jared turns in an incredibly nuanced and vulnerable portrayal.

Two more episodes to go! I’m really hoping that, while cancellation hadn’t been confirmed when the season was filmed, they give us a final episode that could also be a suitable season or series finale, just in case. It’s going to be a wild ride.

What did you think of “Let’s Go, Lets Go”? Please share your thought below!

Find more of Gail’s commentaries on her Writer’s Page.

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