Aahana Swrup
‘The Red Road‘ presents a thrilling crime series about a precariously give-and-take relationship between two individuals on opposite ends of the legal spectrum. Phillip Kopus, an ex-convict, returns to his Lenape community in the small town of Walpole, New Jersey. From there, it doesn’t take long for him to take his younger half-brother, Junior, under his wing, for better or for worse. Meanwhile, local cop Harold Jensen leads the investigation into the missing person case of NYU student Dennis Bradley. However, he finds himself set up for bigger trouble when his wife, Jean, becomes implicated in a serious crime. Consequently, before he knows it, he’s shaking hands with Kopus in a quid pro quo deal that might just become his undoing. As all of this unfolds, the death of Jean’s twin, an unresolved decades-old mystery, hangs heavily over the town, and particularly the two protagonists. SPOILERS AHEAD!
The Red Road Season 1 Recap
The disappearance of Dennis Bradley compels the local cops at the Walpole Sheriff’s department to venture deeper into the woods and ask questions around the Lenape community. Understandably, the latter aren’t thrilled at the development, especially given the cops’ otherwise disinterest in matters unraveling in their own neighborhood. Around the same time, Phillip Kopus returns to his hometown after serving a sentence in the slammer. This puts him back into the orbit of Marie, his mother. Although they’re close, their relationship seems fraught, as evidenced by the fact that the latter had apparently never told her younger son, Junior, about Kopus. Nonetheless, upon meeting, the two get on well enough. As a result, when Junior shows up at his brother’s dubious door one night with his girlfriend, Rachel, looking for a place to crash, he’s welcomed with no reluctance or question.
As it turns out, Rachel’s parents, especially her mother, Jean, are strictly against her dating Junior, or any other Native American young man. This vehement restriction is only made worse by Jean’s volatile and alcoholic deposition, which is what compels the teenager to run away with Junior in the first place. Yet, it’s only a matter of time before Jean grows suspicious and worried and decides to pay Marie’s house a drunken visit. After causing a big ruckus outside the woman’s house, the cop’s wife leaves, but not without gaining a shadow in the form of a few ATV-bike riders. On the ride back home, she ends up hitting one of the kids, Paul Morgan. Nonetheless, in her manic state, she simply overlooks the incident and returns home. Meanwhile, Harold manages to find Rachel and bring her back, warning her boyfriend to stay away from her. The next day, Kopus reaches out to Harold and sets up a curious rendezvous with him.
Kopus, who shares a teenage past with Jean and Harold, wants to extend his help in helping the cop cover up his disoriented wife’s crime. His influence in the Lenape community, including his connection to Marie, can help keep witnesses and other incriminating narratives out of the loop. However, he refuses to show his own cards about what he hopes to gain from this deal. Without any witness statements, the police investigation stumbles. Yet, Jean’s own inability to give a proper statement about the night’s events becomes problematic. Furthermore, her condition worsens until she eventually tries to fling herself out of her childhood home’s second-storey window. Consequently, Harold has no choice but to put her in the care of a psychiatric hospital, where she is eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. Meanwhile, Kopus’ uncharacteristically helpful motives start to become a bit more obvious once news starts popping up about robberies at pharmacies and nursing homes.
Soon enough, Rachel finds out about Junior’s involvement in these illegal ventures. Although she puts up with them, continuing to sneak around with her boyfriend behind her parents’ backs, it becomes harder to ignore after she ill-advisedly accompanies him on an errand. As a result, the teens end up breaking up around the same time as Jean returns home, her condition improved by her medication. Nonetheless, other spheres of Harold’s life begin to fall apart. Kopus had used his influence over the cop to get his partner-in-crime, Mike, out of custody after her had been brought in to the precinct. This attracts the attention of a pair of NYPD detectives who are still looking into Bradley’s case and have just confirmed Mike as a person of interest. Things escalate when Kopus uses Harold to frame his own father, Jack, for the NYU student’s death. Yet, all bets are off once Jean’s hit-and-run case goes away, freeing the cop from the ex-convict’s grasp.
The Red Road Season 1 Ending: Why Does Harold Save Kopus From the Albanian Gangsters?
By the end of season 1, both Harold and Kopus find themselves in drastically different places than where they started off. Initially, their dynamic remains in the latter’s favor thanks to the leverage he holds over the cop as a result of his wife’s involvement in Paul Morgan’s case. Nonetheless, all of that disappears once Jean’s father manages to make the whole thing go away by offering a settlement to the Morgan family. In the aftermath, the cop has no reason to continue playing by the ex-con’s rules. Consequently, it doesn’t take him long to try to arrest the other man for his various crimes. At this point, Harold knows that he’s involved in drug trafficking and that Mike is his partner-in-crime. Naturally, he tries to find the latter. After a meeting with his oblivious girlfriend, he soon realizes that Mike is dead, likely killed by his own partner.
Furthermore, Harold also discovers the criminal duo’s hiding spot, a mine hidden out in the woods. From there, he confiscates the stashed stolen pharmaceutical drugs, leaving Kopus in a pickle. Recently, he had made a deal with some dangerous Albanian dealers, who won’t take well to news of his inability to make good on his delivery. Furthermore, now that Junior suddenly has gold feet, he won’t be able to steal an adequate amount of product anyway. This compels Kopus to believe he must skip town in order to save his life. Yet, before leaving, he ends up paying a visit to Marie, a choice which costs him dearly. As his father, Jack, crashes the party, soon followed by an army of cop cars, the ex-convict inevitably finds himself in handcuffs and on his way to the precinct. As luck would have it, he ends up in the back of Harold’s cop car.
During the drive over, Kopus tries to agitate Harold, likely in an effort to create enough of a diversion to stage an escape. This brings them to an off-route confrontation, where the cop ruthlessly beats the other man up as a climactic culmination of the tension brewing between them from he start. However, the unfair and one-sided fight is soon interrupted by the Albanian gangsters who have arrived to take Kopus with them as a means of revenge for his missed delivery. Nonetheless, even though Harold allows it at first, he ends up changing his mind at the last moment, leading to an intense shootout where he and Kopus work together to kill all the Albanian gangsters. The cop’s change of heart is likely rooted in his own sense of justice, something he has steadfastly tried to hold onto throughout the season despite the concessions he has had to make for his wife. Therefore, he could have wanted to ensure that the criminal receives his punishment through the proper and legal channels instead of at the hands of some gangsters. Additionally, it’s also possible that Harold’s climactic actions are driven by an underlying sense of guilt he still feels over what happened between him, Kopus, Jean, and Brian during their teen years.
What Happens to Junior?
Throughout the season, Junior remains something of a character parallel for Kopus. The two half-brothers seem to have the same penchant for trouble, which risks driving them to their ruin. Off-the-bat, the teenager is eager to participate in his brother and Mike’s less-than-legal exploits out of a misguided sense of anger and injustice. On some level, he believes that the odds are stacked against him enough that a criminal’s life is the only possibility for him. Even so, unlike Kopus, Junior actually got to have his mother around for his upbringing. Therefore, while the older brother grew up with his egotistical white father, Jack, who pushed him toward a life of crime, the younger one has an actual role model for morality. Therefore, he’s quick to draw a line as soon as he begins suspecting his older “business partners” of being involved in the murder of Dennis Bradley.
This also compels Junior to back out of his and Kopus’ latest robbery plans. However, by then, much of the damage has already been done. The older brother knows that the Albanian gang would be looking for him, which also makes his family a target. As a result, while he makes plans to skip the town himself, he informs the young teenager to deny ever knowing him and sever all ties with him. Additionally, he also gives him a gun as a means of self-defence should the need arise. Eventually, this gun becomes his undoing when Jack crashes Marie’s party in a crazed haze to take revenge on his son for framing him for Dennis Bradley’s murder. During this time, Junior ends up pulling the trigger on Jack when he fears for Kopus’ life. As a result, he ends up committing the same crime that had driven him to doubt his brother in the first place. The moment is a pivotal one for the teenager as it would determine the fate of his future. In the end, Junior gets arrested, but his future remains up in the air.
What Really Happened to Jean’s Brother? How Did Brian Die?
Amidst all the various narrative threads, Brian’s death remains at the center of the story in significant ways. He is Jean’s twin brother, who passed away a good few years ago. Although he died by drowning in the turtle lake in the woods, much of the town had always blamed Kopus for his death. During their teenage years, Kopus was involved in drug dealing and used to often hang out with Brian due to his close relationship with Jean. On the night of the teenager’s death, he was believed to have been hanging out with Kopus. Therefore, the entire town started believing his death came as a result of some drug-fuelled hijinks that the other boy was a silent witness to, if not an active participant in.
For the same reason, even though there was no legal case against him, Kopus was shunned by the Walepole town. This is what drove him to leave New Jersey and end up away from his community and family. Similarly, the grieving twin grows a strong distaste for Kopus and starts to become paranoid when Rachel starts dating Junior, a Lenape boy. Jean is worried that his daughter is repeating history by making the same mistakes she had made in her youth. Her manic actions in reaction to this paranoia are a result of her schizophrenia and substance abuse. However, through it all, one person possesses the right knowledge to correct everyone’s wrong assumptions about Kopus: Harold. As it turns out, on the night of Brian’s death, the teenager was actually with Harold instead of Kopus. It was Harold’s interest in Jean that compelled him to hang out with Brian occasionally and without other people’s notice.
On that night, the two teenagers got drunk by the lakeside. Yet, while Harold passed out on the forest floor, Brian recorded his suicide note for Jean, telling how he needed to move on from his unhappy life. Afterward, he walked into the lake and to his death. Initially, when the other boy wakes up, he is none the wiser to everything that unraveled the prior night. He assumes Brian went away and makes his way back home, nervous about the big football game awaiting him. Eventually, once he learns about Brian’s apparent death, he’s thrown off his groove and sustains a career-ruining injury. Nonetheless, he decides to keep his mouth shut about the events of the previous night, letting Kopus take the fall.
Harold kept this secret for years until the search party for Dennis eventually found Brian’s cassette, in which he recorded his last message. While everyone else is oblivious to its contents, Harold manages to sneak it out of the precinct’s evidence lock-up. In the end, he decides to play the recording for Jean, realizing she deserved to have the closure that her twin had wanted her to have before he walked to his own death. This momentarily shakes Jean up, compelling him to seek Kopus out to beg for his forgiveness. Yet, ultimately, it leads her to the same turtle lake in an effort to achieve the same fate as Brian. Fortunately, Harold is able to find her and rescue her in time. As such, it’s evident that even though the mystery surrounding Brian’s death is out in the open now, it will continue to have some influence over Jean’s life.
Read More: Is The Red Road Based on a True Story?
