'Graceland' Recap — Episode 1.06, "Hair of the Dog."

Graceland is starting to heat up—it’s hard to believe we’re only six episodes into the series. I was a little disillusioned for the first four episodes, but I’m glad I decided to stick with it, because those were only the framework for episodes to come, and as of last week’s, I can definitely see it coming together.

Episode five left us hanging after Charlie was pressured into shooting up to save a case, and this episode starts out with the inevitable conclusion of that, with her coming down off of it and starting her recovery. Briggs, of course, elects to keep her secret, and finds her an apartment to lay low in for a while. Though she isn’t really psyched about it, she accepts the help, and attempts to get better.

But, of course, something has to go wrong, and she gets a call from Johnny telling her that one of the higher-ups wants to hear their side of what went on during their attempted drugs bust, since Briggs pulled her out of there before they could meet who they intended to. Since Charlie is obviously out of sorts, she’s worried about going, since if it’s discovered she did heroin, she’d lose her job. Briggs’ solution to this is getting her more heroin so she’ll be spunkier when she goes to meet the guy.

Probably not the best plan, but they didn’t have many other options.

Even so, Charlie nearly blows it when she gets little jittery and her story has a few holes in it, but Johnny covers for her and takes the blame for the plan failing. He does, however, notice that she’s off, and she eventually tells him what really happened, and they go back to Graceland.

Meanwhile, Mike is dealing with the whole bodyguard thing, and manages to convince Bello to take possession of some lost drugs himself—about $20 million worth—Mike’s intentions being to get the drugs into Briggs’ hands to see whether or not he’ll attempt to steal some for himself. But the drugs are inconveniently in a torpedo shell at the bottom of the bay, so Mike has to find someone who can track it down, and pretend to be working for Bello.

Fortunately, Johnny is to the rescue again, since he happened to have some Navy Seal training, and comes in to help Bello track down the torpedo. With a little help from Briggs the night before, he had found it, so he knew exactly where to take everyone to get the goods.

So Mike, Johnny, and Bello’s gang go out on a boat to get it, and Johnny goes down to retrieve the booby trapped torpedo.

Unfortunately, Bello gives a command for one of his men to shoot Johnny as soon as he surfaces, and all Mike manages to do is convince Bello to let him shoot Johnny instead. But he’s saved the trouble when he sees an explosion, and from Mike’s view, Johnny is dead and all the drugs are gone.

He’s understandably upset for a while.

But then when he goes into one of the FBI offices, he finds Johnny just sitting there, and learns that Briggs had had Johnny move the explosive to a different area and detonate it so it looked like he was dead, and that the drugs were gone, but obviously Johnny is alive, and the FBI is in possession of the narcotics. Yay, happy ending.

Except not quite.

When they open up the torpedo, Johnny makes a comment about how they could have packed almost twice as much in there, and it was weird that they didn’t—and Mike learns that Briggs had been in possession of the torpedo before they went in the room. Then he sees Briggs leave the office with a tote bag, looking shady.

So Mike follows him, in the dark, into a suspicious looking building, to find Briggs…

At a narcotics anonymous meeting.

The plot thickens.

Catch the next episode of Graceland next Thursday the 25th at 10/9c, only on USA