TL;DR: Episode 5 of Task (“Vagrants”) turns the screws on every character in this HBO crime drama. The mole is revealed, the body count rises, and no one walks away clean. Brutal, brilliant, and beautifully acted—this is Task at its bleak, breathtaking best.

There’s a moment in Episode 5 of Task where I actually forgot to breathe. Not because something shocking happened—though, believe me, plenty does—but because Brad Ingelsby’s HBO crime saga has been slowly suffocating me with dread since the pilot, and “Vagrants” finally clamps its hand over my mouth. Every movement, every glance, every late-night phone call in this hour feels like a thread snapping in slow motion. And that’s the thing about Task—it’s not just about crime, or loyalty, or even redemption. It’s about inevitability. The kind that lives in your bones long after the credits roll.

When Task first premiered, I called it the closest thing HBO has had to a True Detective successor in years, and I stand by that. But this fifth episode—this grim, sweat-slicked middle chapter—shifts the series into another register. It’s no longer about the crime that started it all; it’s about the system of betrayal that keeps it alive. And watching Tom Pelphrey’s Robbie Prendergrast unravel under that system feels like watching a man fight gravity. There’s only one way down.

I’ve been fascinated by Robbie since the beginning. Pelphrey has that rare, tortured kind of charisma that makes you root for a man you know will ruin everything he touches. It’s the same desperate magnetism he brought to Ozark, but here it’s rawer, dirtier. Robbie’s been living on the edge of his own implosion since his brother Billy’s death, and this episode makes that literal. When we open on him sleeping in his car, eyes flickering open like a man waking into a nightmare he can’t shake, I could practically feel the stale coffee and fear clinging to the upholstery. The world around him has shrunk to the size of his paranoia.

And then there’s the death of Cliff Broward (Raúl Castillo), which hangs over this episode like a phantom limb. Even though Robbie doesn’t know the grisly details yet, we do—and that knowledge makes every choice he makes ache with futility. Watching him storm through Shelley’s (Mickey Sumner) house, gun raised and desperation etched into every breath, I found myself muttering, Don’t do it, man. You’re only making it worse. But of course, that’s the tragedy of Task: every character thinks they’re buying themselves a little more time, when in reality, they’re just paying off the interest on their own destruction.

Meanwhile, the FBI task force—led by Mark Ruffalo’s weary, morally fraying Tom Brandis—keeps tightening its net around Robbie, though it’s hard to tell who’s really trapped anymore. This episode finally gives us the answer to the season’s most tantalizing mystery: the identity of the mole inside the Bureau who’s been feeding the Dark Hearts gang from the inside. I’ll admit, I guessed it a few episodes ago, but that didn’t make the reveal any less devastating. When Grasso (Fabien Frankel) takes that phone call from Tom and then walks off to meet with Jayson from the Dark Hearts, my stomach sank. It’s not just betrayal; it’s exhaustion made flesh. He’s the kind of corrupt agent who probably convinced himself he was doing the right thing once, but now he’s too deep to remember why.

This episode, more than any before it, plays with the idea of rot—not just moral rot, but the slow decay of trust, of friendship, of faith in the institutions meant to protect. Every scene feels damp with it. Eryn (Margarita Levieva), whose arc has been a masterclass in doomed resilience, becomes the beating heart of that theme. When Perry (Jamie McShane) finally acts on his suspicion that she’s betrayed the Dark Hearts, it’s not just another death scene. It’s an execution by inevitability. Watching her sprint for her life, diving into that cold lake as music blares from across the shore, I felt the weight of every bad choice that led her there—not just hers, but everyone’s. Ingelsby shoots it like a baptism gone wrong, and by the time Perry’s hands are on her throat, you can almost hear the universe whisper, Of course it ends like this.

But what makes Episode 5 so unbearably good is how it weaponizes empathy. Just when you think you can neatly categorize the good guys and the bad guys, Task forces you to live in the gray. Take Tom, for instance. Ruffalo has always excelled at playing men who are one moral compromise away from collapse, and here he’s giving his best performance since Spotlight. There’s a moment late in the episode when he’s driving with Robbie, a gun pointed at him, and he starts talking about his late wife—about how they met, how he still feels her absence like a bruise. It’s the kind of humanizing moment that should feel manipulative, but Ruffalo sells it as survival. Two broken men, circling each other like wolves, trying to see who flinches first.

The show’s direction deserves a whole essay of its own. Jeremiah Zagar, who helms this episode, brings a tactile intimacy to Task that makes every environment feel lived-in. The quarry scenes, in particular, have a haunting beauty—all gray stone and stagnant water, as if the world itself is holding its breath. Even the FBI office scenes hum with quiet menace; fluorescent light becomes its own form of interrogation. There’s a visual language of entrapment running through this series, and Episode 5 speaks it fluently.

What I love most about Task is that it never treats its characters as pawns in a twist machine. Every revelation lands because it’s built on a foundation of character work. When Grasso’s betrayal comes to light, it’s not just a plot point; it’s a confirmation of something we’ve been feeling all along—that even the so-called heroes are compromised. Likewise, when Maeve (Emilia Jones) steps forward to turn herself in, there’s a purity to it that feels almost alien in this world of liars. Ingelsby has always been interested in the intersection of guilt and grace, and in that moment, Maeve becomes the axis on which the story spins.

By the time the episode reaches its cliffhanger—Tom holding Robbie at gunpoint in the woods, both men inches from annihilation—I realized that Task had done something rare: it made me care about everyone. Even the killers, even the traitors, even the ones too far gone to save. Because beneath the violence and the betrayal, this show is really about people trying, and failing, to do the right thing in a world that keeps moving the goalposts.

“Vagrants” is the series at its most confident, and its most heartbreaking. The pacing is surgical, the writing is knife-sharp, and the performances burn slow and bright. It’s an episode that doesn’t just advance the plot—it deepens the tragedy. Every conversation feels like a confession. Every death feels like a debt being paid.

By the time the screen cuts to black, I wasn’t just ready for next week’s episode. I was terrified of it.

VERDICT:

Task Episode 5 is a masterclass in slow-burn tension and emotional devastation. It’s where the show stops being a standard crime thriller and becomes something richer—a study of human frailty, loyalty, and the quiet ways we destroy each other. The mole reveal hits hard, the deaths hit harder, and the direction turns dread into poetry. It’s not perfect, but it’s damn close.