Wrangling Walker: Season Four Episode Twelve “Letting Go”

In this week’s Walker episode, “Letting Go”, Cordell survives being drugged and buried alive and plays a key role in stopping the Jackal, but everyone is still mad at him.

I realize that the writers didn’t know for sure that the show would be cancelled when they penned these scripts, but there had to be an inkling. I’ve been hoping that growth could happen from both Cordell and everyone else about his job, where Cordell takes fewer crazy risks and where the family gets therapy about how to be supportive of his job while handling their own insecurities. With one episode to go, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

“Letting Go” was a good episode in wrapping up the Jackal case and showing the payoff of all the ‘excessive’ research that came out of ‘obsessive’ focus on the details. So how come it still felt like Cordell and team didn’t really get to claim the win even if celebrating was off the table due to losing Luna?

Cordell vs. The World

I understand that fear for someone’s safety can manifest as anger after the situation is resolved, but Cordell sure didn’t get much of a warm welcome home, or the recognition he deserved in solving the case, in my opinion. Given that his family and Geri are not cut out to be supportive of someone in a law enforcement role, I think Cordell should end the series by quitting the Texas Rangers and running the Side Step.

(Maybe next week, Sam Winchester will wake up and tell Dean, “You won’t believe the weird dream I had. I was a Texas Ranger—imagine that!”)

Perhaps if we had seen the family be notified and rush to the hospital in a panic, then have a tearful reunion with Cordell instead of just standing around his room, it might have felt more loving and supportive. Instead, we get Stella, who very nearly just lost her father, mouthing off. Later, Geri makes her disapproval clear, even though Cordell just came so close to dying. Certainly their beefs could be set aside at least for a little.

Every day in real life, soldiers, police officers, FBI agents, Texas Rangers, EMTs, and other first responders do hard jobs that requires them to risk their lives. Their loved ones never know if they’ll be safe, or alive, to come home that night. I hope they get a lot more support than Cordell does, from his family that just doesn’t seem to understand what the job requires.

I’ve seen hospital teams work around the clock during a major emergency, and programming teams work 24/7 during an enterprise-wide software rollout. Critical response jobs can have stretches of regular hours and quiet, then kick into overdrive to deal with a crisis that requires all hands on-deck, 24-hour shifts, and obsessive attention to detail. Soldiers deploy for months at a time. Sometimes, the strain breaks up marriages, but the ones that survive share the load, support the responder, and accept the burden. I wish we saw more of that in Walker.

The final stretch of tracking down a serial killer who has eluded capture for years and left a trail of bodies is not the time to decide to emphasize work-life balance.

Cordell is the one who picks the pieces out of his muddled memories that let him crack the Jackal and realize that the daughter is part of the killings. Using himself as bait provided the break in the case to finally catch the killer—even though it nearly cost Cordell his life. Despite having just been drugged and nearly dead, he rallies to help the team chase down the Jackal. Go, Cordell!

But Cassie weirdly blames him for Luna’s death, even though it was Captain James and not Cordell (who was missing and being drugged at the time) who pulled Luna in for the bust on the Jackal’s compound. Geri doesn’t waste much time being grateful that he’s safe and sound before she’s angry at him for doing his job, and the kids don’t seem too happy with him either. Cordell deserves better.

As for Bonham and Abeline, I’m glad they were able to use their words and actually talk it out. Kudos for grown-ups acting like grown-ups!

A Few Other Thoughts

I appreciated the episode title shift from last week’s “Let’s Go, Let Go” to this week’s “Letting go”. Letting go of anything is always harder than you think, and if there isn’t something to take its place, what you’ve let go of leaves a hole. That’s true on many levels for Cassie, Cordell, and the Rangers.

During the interrogation, Hollis Miller said they were trying to ‘force him into a box’. There’s a lot of that going around. Stella and Auggie try to force Cordell into the box of being a ‘normal’ father despite his high-stakes, high-danger job. Geri doesn’t seem to grasp that Cordell might not fit into the expectations (box) she might have for him as a partner or their relationship. Bonham and Abeline worked through the ‘boxes’ they had mentally constructed for what their retirement would look like. Cassie clearly had a ‘box’ for how Cordell should act and respond and when he didn’t fit it, she blamed him for the tragedy. That’s a lot of boxes!

I noticed Captain James’ leather journal sure looked a lot like John Winchester’s.

Two good quotes that bookend important thoughts: “Don’t let your grief make decisions you’ll regret” paired with “Try not to throw away something good just because something bad happened.” I don’t know that the series will get to follow up on those in its final episode, but it certainly suggests the choices to be made.

I was so hopeful after last week’s awesome episode that we were going to get an important growth step forward for all the characters, but I guess not. Still, as always, Jared and the rest of the cast knocked it out of the park with great performances.

I’ll be sad to see Walker end next week, but I suspect Cordell and the Walker gang will live on with new adventures in fan fiction for a very long time.

What did you think of “Letting Go”? Please share your thought below!

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

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