From the moment Arnold Ridgeway takes out a flask and begins drinking whiskey from it, you know he’s in strange territory. Not literally, not at all—he’s returned to his family home for one last attempt at rapprochement with his dying father, “rapprochement” in this case meaning “my dad owes me an apology.” The strangeness is all in his demeanor, which takes a sudden turn for the fearful, the petulant, the anxious and uncertain—a far cry from his nearly supernatural implacability up until that point. “So Arnold Ridgeway is human after all,” Cora says after finding out the nature of their visit. He’s not a good human, but yes, something like that.
This episode of The Underground Railroad (“Chapter Six: Tennessee: Proverbs”) is essentially one drawn-out drunk for Ridgeway, who is absolutely hammered by the time he witnesses his father breathe his last breath. In one particularly galling scene, he drags Cora to a nearby saloon—in chains—for a meal and a drink, though in his case “a drink” means “an entire bottle.” He waxes philosophical and patriotic about Manifest Destiny and the American spirit—”The only ‘Spirit’ worth its salt,” he says, compared to the Great Spirit that his father borrowed from indigenous religious beliefs. The American spirit, he says, is a call to the people of the Old World to come to the New civilize the land, and either “lift up, subjugate, [or] exterminate, eliminate” the other peoples they encounter. “The American Imperative,” he calls this last bit. Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day.
I reviewed the sixth episode of The Underground Railroad for Decider.
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