The Waterfront Recap ‘You can’t trust a Buckley’: The Hugger
- Cherish
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
The Waterfront Season 1 Episode 4 Recap and Review
The Waterfront picked up just as it reached the halfway mark, and we have Bree and the infamous Grady (Topher Grace) to thank for that. I’d like to get started with Grady, a name we’ve been hearing for a while, a personage Porter tried to gatekeep, which eventually led to his death.
The first surprise was that Grady was young, and his mad volatility injected The Waterfront with much needed energy. He greeted Harlan with effusive praise, and their meeting gave us more Buckley backstory. Harlan’s father played a significant role in the Cali Cartel operations in the South back in the 80s. He was tortured to death, and his murderer later died by ‘suicide’. All this was apparently available via Google, which meant that the Buckleys were not just known for their fishing empire, they were known for their drug ties. When Cane turned to drug running to salvage the family fortune, he was merely going back to the origin of the Buckley family wealth. I wanted to emphasise this because I’d like to get back to this later on in relation to Agent Marcus Sanchez and the DEA. Let’s put a pin on this for now.
Grady all but implied that it was Harlan who killed his father’s murderer, though he was never indicted. He was all praises for how Harlan did business, including working with his son and replacing the Sheriff he killed with his cousin’s husband. For his part, Harlan was having trouble believing that this massive operation was just all Grady’s.
Grady called it his ‘opium startup’ and said he had a friend in Miami who dealt with large scale orders. He intended to start planting in the spring. It looked like he had long term plans, which did not exactly match with the Buckleys’ idea of just doing a few runs so they could manage their massive debt.
Harlan laid out his terms – Allow him to do things his way. He would use his own guys. He would only run two shipments every week. He and Grady would deal with each other directly. Grady was fine with all this, but there was the issue of Stevie, who, before Harlan got there, had been mouthing off. Stevie said you could not trust a Buckley. He said people should know Harlan killed Porter. Whilst Harlan agreed they no longer needed a middleman, he did not agree to killing Stevie. He said he should keep his mouth shut and work for him, which, whilst he was held by Grady’s men, Stevie readily agreed to. As soon as he was free, however, he took off on a run. Grady had one of his men unsheath a huge gun and fire, large, empty casings dropping to the pickup floor as bullet upon bullet upon bullet hit Stevie’s body. Grady cooly watched, even mimicking the way Stevie’s body moved before a limb separated from the rest of him and he finally fell to the ground.
Cane would not be happy with this partnership.
Harlan took it all in stride. When he saw how emotionless Porter’s family was at his funeral, he started thinking of his own, of his father, of the kind of pain visited upon the Buckleys in the past. He told Belle that if she wanted to stop, they would stop. Belle, who put a stop to the development deal after sleeping with Wes Larsen, told him the money was helping, and that they could keep going a while longer. Belle also said that Harlan was good at it. That was not what he expected her to say, and the moment led to a reconnection between husband and wife.
Belle had shown how she survived being the daughter in law, wife, and mother of drug runners. When Harlan collapsed next to Porter’s bleeding body, it was Belle he called. She rushed to his side and helped him cover up Porter’s death. There were no freak outs, no recriminations. After they had put Porter’s body under the car he was working on to make it look like he was accidentally crushed, it was Belle who pulled the screwdriver off his chin. Cane kept seeing Hoyt’s violent death in his head after he witnessed it. Porter’s head was crushed here, a bid to hide the evidence of the screwdriver wound, and Belle just moved on.
Cane’s life was spiraling. His wife Peyton left him and took their child to her parents’ house. He wanted to stop their drug business foray. He even questioned if Porter’s death indeed happened in self defense. He thought his father was out of control.
Cane tried to persuade his mother to return to the development deal. With Belle adamant that the deal would kill his father, Cane arranged a meeting with Wes to find out what happened that caused Belle to change her mind. Wes all but told him he and Belle slept together, but Cane did not get it. This sweet summer child.
On top of everything, Cane saw his sister Bree talking to Agent Marcus Sanchez. Cane pulled Bree into their office, where brother and sister had it out. We now know why Bree hated Cane; she blamed him for losing her son. Bree had set fire to her ex’s house whilst young Diller was still inside. She got him out but, according to her, she was declared an unfit mother due to Cane’s testimony. ‘I want you to get knocked down. It’s your turn to hurt a little.’
So what I got from this exchange was that Bree was so mad at Cane that she brought the DEA into town to have him investigated for drug smuggling. But, she did not really think he would end up in prison. As she said, golden boys with fancy lawyers do not go to prison. Why on earth would she think this? Was it because Harlan did not go to prison?
Bree declared there was no way their father was involved, not after what happened to their grandfather, their mother would not let him – which just showed the length of the distance between her and her family. Cane told her they were broke. When their mother borrowed from the bank, she leveraged all their assets. Cane was not the only one on the hook, the entire family would take the fall.
Bree finally asked if Cane was involved in Porter’s death, which Marcus suspected. Cane denied this. Bree told Marcus the same thing when the agent first broached his suspicion; Cane was many things but he was not a murderer.
Bree found Marcus in his motel room excited. She tried to tell him she was wrong about her brother, but this effort to put the toothpaste back into the tube was not working, not when Marcus was already entirely convinced that Cane was the villain in all this. He said that Bree saw Cane talking to Curtis and Troy, who drowned, and to Hoyt Piper, who was missing. The investigation into Sheriff Porter’s death was a joke, there was not even an autopsy. When Marcus brought up that Harlan found Porter, Bree again tried to defend her father. Marcus agreed, Harlan had nothing to do with it, he was protecting Cane. Marcus, who stayed behind even after the other DEA agents had gone, was now entirely focused on Cane, and nothing Bree said could change his mind.
Let’s go back to that pin from earlier on this recap. If the Buckley family involvement with drug running was fairly well known, available via Google, why could Marcus not convince his boss to even authorise a shadow surveillance? The daughter and granddaughter of a known drug runner said she saw her brother talk about drug running with three men, and that did not merit a more significant monetary investment in the investigation? Granted, sending DEA agents into town was already a commitment, but they did not come up empty. Two men turned up dead. Marcus confirmed that the AIS on one of the boats suspected of being used in the smuggling operation was disabled. It was a little thing that bugged me very slightly.
In any case, ‘You can’t trust a Buckley’ was The Waterfront’s strongest episode so far. When I wrote about Episode Three, I mused about how most of the tension came from Porter, and wondered who would fill the gap now that he was gone. Three did in this episode – Bree, who was struggling to stop what she carelessly started, Marcus, who redirected his struggle with his addiction to this single-minded pursuit of Cane, and Grady, who looked like the kind who would shoot someone just to watch blood flow. Things felt more dangerous, and dramatically, that could only be good.
Rating: B+
Strays
🛥️Jenna went with her Aunt Sylvia to Porter’s funeral, where Peyton saw her and Cane talk. Peyton warned her off her husband.
🛥️After Peyton left with little Savannah, Cane went to Jenna’s house to tell her he could not see her anymore.
🛥️Drew, who was acting Sheriff, worried about Marcus, who asked for Porter’s case file. Harlan told him to give Marcus the file, Porter’s death was an accident. Harlan expertly buttered him up, mentioned his wife and kids, and told him Belle was on the town council and could get him support to officially become the next Sheriff.
🛥️A man named Emmett Parker showed up at Porter’s funeral, and it looked like he was from the Buckleys’ drug running past. He gave Cane his phone number.
🛥️Belle finally told Harlan about Shawn, and father and son bonded. Shawn graduated from law school but had not yet taken the bar. He meant to return to Texas to study for the bar, but Harlan asked him to stay a little longer.
🛥️Melissa Benoist continued to do good work, especially on that scene with Bree after she found out from Cane how bad things were for their family. Bree’s face there looked stripped down, deglamorised, the emotion carefully controlled under that naked vulnerability.
🛥️Grady: ‘Sorry, I’m a hugger.’
Episode Title: You can't trust a Buckley
Episode Writer: Brenna Kouf Jimenez
Episode Director: Liz Friedlander
Original Air Date: June 19, 2025