In Episode 3 of Task, Tom Brandis finds out that Maria Herrera’s uterus isn’t the only thing that’s leaking: There’s a mole inside the task force who’s been slipping secrets to the Dark Hearts. Tom’s biker gang consigliere, Joe Easley, reveals that the club has been surveilling Cliff Broward’s house—and the only way they could have known he was involved in the robberies was from someone in Tom’s circle. It’s a real Departed situation, with rats inside the gang and the FBI leaking valuable info in both directions. Task might have made viewers feel like they were in on the loyalties and identities of all the key players from the get-go; after all, we’ve known for a while who’s responsible for the robberies and how the gang’s and the FBI’s investigations are going. And the third episode drops all pretenses of mystery by immediately revealing that Robbie’s Dark Hearts connect is Eryn, Jayson’s partner (and, we find out, Billy’s former lover). But not everything, or everyone, is as it seems in Delaware County. There’s still one major snitch we haven’t identified, so let’s try to sniff out the rat in the task force, ranking our possible culprits from least to most suspicious.
9. Father Daniel
Joe Easley said it first: “Suspect everyone.” Do I really think that Tom’s priest bestie is leading a double life as a Dark Hearts informant? No. But Tom did share some information about the case with the good father when he was absolutely blasted—a tried-and-true method for extracting info. But I don’t think Father Daniel would get much of a thrill out of working with a biker gang; he’d rather be reading articles about Richard Rohr and the universal Christ.
8. Emily Brandis
Emily’s also been on the receiving end of her dad’s drunken ramblings, and she has even more access to his case files and Google search history than Father Daniel does (like any enterprising teenage girl, she for sure knows her dad’s phone passcode, email log-in, and Social Security number). But something tells me that Emily lacks the motive to sell her adoptive father out to the Dark Hearts. Plus, between her troubled family life and busy shifts at Rita’s, she’s got other things on her mind besides joining forces with a band of racist bikers.
7. Tom Brandis
This would certainly be a shocker: Despite his drinking habits and dubious approach to parenting, Tom still seems like a good man underneath his (very earned!) pain. Tom may have committed some cardinal sins after leaving the priesthood, but I don’t think selling out to a gang is one of them. He doesn’t seem to need the money (what would he want it for besides handles of vodka?), and I don’t get the sense that they’ve threatened him or his family. Tom really did act like the bottom had fallen out from under him, once again, when Joe told him about the leak—so unless his acting ability is a match for Mark Ruffalo’s, I don’t think he’s hiding anything. (At least where the Dark Hearts are concerned—he might be keeping some secrets about how much he hates his life and/or surviving family members.)
6. Lizzie Stover’s Degenerate Ex-Husband, Eddie
We know Lizzie’s ex Eddie is a lowlife—first he cheats on her with her best friend, and now he thinks he has a right to her recliner? It seems like she’s mostly cut him out of her life (when he’s not showing up to her house uninvited and scrounging around like a little pack rat), but there is the possibility that, like vengeance-minded Kristen Doute of Vanderpump Rules, he knows all of Lizzie’s passwords and was able to get into her snickerdoodle223@yahoo.com account to read the case briefings she’s been ignoring. Eddie’s desperation to get hold of Lizzie’s Keurig does suggest that he’s hard up for cash, and more importantly, I don’t have much faith in her taste in men … or her ability to change her log-in info.
5. Joe Easley
As we sniff out the rat, we have to ask who would have access to the Dark Hearts to make a deal with them in the first place. After all, one doesn’t simply walk into Lefty’s Taproom and try to get a meeting with Jayson and Co.—you’d be much more likely to get a bottle broken over your head or a pair of brass knuckles to your eyeballs. Joe, on the other hand, has been investigating biker gangs and cultivating his own informants for years. But could he have been tempted by the gang’s swollen coffers—or threatened by retaliation to his family or himself—to turn into a spy? The Dark Hearts almost certainly know who he is, and they have a tendency to lash out against anyone who does them dirty (see: Billy Prendergast, plus Peach Boy’s poor fiancée). They probably wouldn’t stop at a cop, and if he did something wrong and they found out, they could blackmail him to get valuable information. The fact that Joe’s the one who tells Tom that there is a leak does throw cold water on this theory. But he might have just figured that Tom would find out anyway—being the first to tell him about the leak means he probably won’t get looked at as a suspect.
4. Aleah Clinton
I had my suspicions about Aleah just because we know so little about her. An informant would probably be cagey about how much they reveal to their partners, right? Perhaps Aleah’s maintained her tight-lipped, can-do persona just to get us (and Tom) to overlook her in our investigations. And while they seem to have a deeply racist history, the Dark Hearts are apparently willing to cross color lines if it benefits them, as they did with Freddy Frias. But even though she seems well positioned to be the leak, I doubt that Aleah would align herself with the gang based on what little we know about her so far. She’s got an iron backbone—we can see it when she stands up to Peach Boy’s misogynist coworkers and to Tom when he’s denying he has head trauma—and she clearly came by it the hard way, after pulling herself out of an abusive relationship. And she definitely has no patience for small-minded men who mistreat people weaker than they are (so, basically, the Dark Hearts). Even if the gang might try to hide their racist tendencies when it’s convenient for them, I doubt that Aleah—like Freddy—would have such a short memory.
3. Lizzie Stover
Over post-bust Yuenglings and cigarettes with Anthony Grasso, Lizzie acknowledges that good people can end up doing some very bad things (which could be the tagline for this show, actually). I agree with Grasso that Lizzie is a good person, if not always a great cop. But she’s clearly got a habit of backing herself into some tight corners. It’s easy to imagine the Dark Hearts getting some damaging, potentially career-ending information on her that they could leverage for details about the task force’s investigation. Did she make a big mistake on duty that they found out about? Or did she freeze at the very first sign of a threat, agreeing to go along with them just because she couldn’t think of another way out?
Lizzie’s clearly been at loose ends, at work and in life. It would be a good cover if she could blame her lackadaisical approach to detective work on her divorce and aversion to mildew, instead of on the fact that she’s sharing intelligence with the Dark Hearts. And if she’s more devious than her partners give her credit for, maybe the reason for her shoddy work isn’t just a lack of preparation or confidence: If she’s closely allied with the Dark Hearts (who knows—maybe Jayson et al. were her best friends growing up?), she could be trying to sabotage the task force so that the gang has a chance to go after Robbie before the FBI does. Generally, Lizzie does seem too hapless and disorganized to make for a good informant—but those absent-minded qualities could have put her in a good position to get extorted by the Dark Hearts or cover up their crimes in the first place.
2. Anthony Grasso
It’s a tale as old as time: A character wins the audience over, only to turn around and stab us in the heart. Since we met him, Grasso’s been leveraging his Philly-accented charms throughout the task force, making Wawa runs for the team, flirting it up with Lizzie, talking shop with Tom. Why would he be so intent on ingratiating himself with everyone in task if he didn’t depend on them for information—and if he wasn’t trying to get them to trust him implicitly? He’s turned himself into Brandis’s right-hand man, accompanying him to question the Dark Hearts and Ray Lyman—and putting himself in the best position to get the most information before anyone else. He bandies theories around with Tom, and he seems to have deep inside knowledge of the Dark Hearts, as if, maybe, he’s actually inside the organization. He’s also a county detective, which suggests that he’s been on the force longer than Aleah or Lizzie has—and gives him more opportunity to get cultivated as a source by the Dark Hearts. A few times, he’s made offhand remarks about money, or his lack thereof, especially when he was growing up. He was willing to sell out to the kids he resented so much when he performed as DJ Grassanova; maybe he’d do the same thing to get a piece of the Dark Hearts’ drug pie. (Plus, his DJ stint clearly proves that he has main character syndrome—and that he can read a room and do what it takes to win them over.) We also know that motorcycle clubs tend to be all-white, all-male organizations that don’t put a lot of stock in the opinions and abilities of women, and Black women in particular. If the Dark Hearts are sticking to that racist, sexist ethos, it would rule out almost every suspect here except Grasso.
Maybe Brad Ingelsby saw how convincing Fabien Frankel was as House of the Dragon’s Ser Criston Cole—a character who changes allegiances when he thinks he’s been slighted and whose charms curdle sickeningly along the way. Pretty boys like Grasso should always make you suspicious. He can sweet-talk Lizzie out of a bad mood, which means he might also think he can sweet-talk everyone else into spilling their secrets. In his toast to Lizzie, he also mentions how many dirty cops there are out there—could he just be airing out his own guilty conscience?
The only hole in my theory is that it’s almost too obvious that Grasso’s the leak. I’d expect the show to zag a little instead of playing along with cues suggesting he’s involved with the gang. After all, early on in Mare of Easttown, most people didn’t suspect that (spoiler alert!) 13-year-old Ryan Ross was Erin McMenamin’s killer. There’s bound to be more mystery in this show than any obvious answers can account for. But either way, I’ve still got my eye on Tony Grasso, and not just because Frankel is so hot when he’s not wearing medieval armor and doing Alicent Hightower’s dirty work.
1. Kathleen McGinty
Think about it: Why is it that the task force is so inexperienced and so ill equipped? Maybe we need to trace their lack of preparation all the way to the top, to Tom’s boss. Maybe Kathleen put the bereaved, distracted Tom in charge to undermine the case, and to say “fuck you” to the FBI as she walks out the door into forced retirement (she might also want to pad her nest egg with some Dark Hearts blood money). Clearly, she hasn’t been doing a bang-up job of policing the Dark Hearts so far; their business was absolutely thriving in Delaware County until Robbie showed up.
Back in Episode 2, Jayson mentioned that information on the FBI’s doings was “trickling in”; if his informant is one of the core four closest to the case—Tom, Aleah, Lizzie, or Anthony—wouldn’t he be getting a constant feed of intelligence instead? The Dark Hearts also show up to Cliff’s house after the FBI has already been there; if they were getting their info right from the source, couldn’t the bikers have beaten the FBI to the scene, to punish Cliff before the cops got their hands on him? If information is taking time to get to them, it would make sense for Kathleen to be the informant. She’s apprised enough to get all the intel the task force has, but she might be hearing about it in more occasional briefings from Tom and the crew.
Kathleen’s also been part of the FBI long enough to have made close contacts with the Dark Hearts over time—unlike the much more green members of the task force, whom the bikers would have had to bring in at the last minute when they found out a task force was forming. Kathleen, on the other hand, formed the task force in the first place and would have been perfectly positioned to tell them all about it. Tom’s worked with her for so long and so closely (peep Kathleen in the background of his adoption day celebration) that she’s probably the last person he’d suspect, and her betrayal would twist the knife in his gut more cruelly. If we know anything about this show, it’s that it really seems intent on torturing the poor ex-priest at its center.
