"You're just a patsy doing someone else's jail time," E. Howard Hunt's (Woody Harrelson) daughter tells him. She's sitting with her brother in a prison yard. Her father is in jail for his various crimes committed over the course of the series. He has the option to flip on the CIA, but of course he won't take it. Hunt and Liddy (Justin Theroux), the leading men of White House Plumbers, have spent the series not questioning their orders and doing their best (which usually doesn't amount to much) without hesitating.
White House Plumbers' finale episode finds the two men wondering whether or not their crimes were worth it and reaching two very different conclusions. Both men are stupidly loyal to their government and country, but Hunt ends the episode rethinking his choices, while Liddy is as determined as ever to continue suffering. "True Believers" puts White House Plumbers and the story it tries to tell into perspective in a really interesting way, something that every finale should try to do. This wasn't just the tale of two men who horribly screwed up their task—it was the story of how those two men reacted in different ways to that failure.
Liddy's response is, of course, to act completely insane. Theroux takes Liddy's buffoonery to new heights as he schemes to act like a complete jackass at his trial and get the case thrown out (how he thought this would work is something I don't understand, but at least it was entertaining as hell). And it only gets more ridiculous when, of course, this doesn't work. (One of my favorite jokes of the episode is the visual gag of Liddy posing with his clearly miserable and exhausted attorney.) Liddy balks at the idea of testifying against the government, because this is a man who demonstrates his loyalty by constantly burning his palm for show. He's not going to sell out.
Hunt is consumed by the idea that the plane crash responsible for killing his wife Dorothy in the previous episode was staged—the runway lights were off where the plane was supposed to land, the FBI got to the crash site before the fire department, etc.—but he chooses to bury these thoughts when he believes that his superiors will spring him from prison after a couple of years of jail time. When his children come to visit him in prison, he sticks to the idea that her death was just a tragic accident, and only when he learns that Richard Nixon has been taking every measure possible to send people that aren't him to prison does he finally let himself question things.
Hunt is not even close to the smartest person in White House Plumbers. Even his other daughter outsmarts him; Hunt gives her Dorothy's ledger detailing all of their money laundering to use as collateral, which comes back to bite him when she blackmails him with it into testifying against the CIA. When Hunt and Liddy's superior refers to himself as a former "true believer" of Nixon, he's unknowingly describing the other men who worked to tap Watergate. All of them blindly followed the idea that no matter what they did, their country would protect them, but of course that could never be true.
"True Believers" is my favorite episode of White House Plumbers, but it's not without its flaws. The episode feels a little unbalanced with how short the trial and its buildup are, and the weakest scenes of the episode are in that trial period, mostly involving Dorothy's wake. I was hoping that we could see some real emotion from Harrelson, but despite the comedic incompetence he brings to Hunt, he hasn't done a ton in this series in terms of complex emotion.
In the end, Liddy turns on Hunt when he decides to testify, a shift we get to see in a very nicely done long shot that would've worked just a little better without the score behind it. (The score of the series has taken me out of some good scenes more than once.) He plans to have Hunt killed by another inmate, but like all of Liddy's plans, it never comes to be for one reason or the other. In the end, Liddy proudly describes himself to his wife as "the man who would not break," and it's a line that perfectly embodies the sheer stupidity and overconfidence of his character.
White House Plumbers ends with two discoveries: Hunt is told while ironing shirts in the prison laundry room that Nixon resigned, and in his eyes, this ends for the time being all chances of him getting out of prison. His country has abandoned him, and he learned far too late that they were never going to protect him. It also ends with closing titles—typical for most biopic series—explaining that both men were released within five years and never spoke to each other again.
It's deliciously fitting that, in a series littered with failure, embarrassment, and terrible decisions, that after the heist was all said and done, its organizers would have nothing else to say to each other. White House Plumbers isn't a perfect series, but it is one that manages to be a fun and mostly energetic look at one of the dumbest break-ins ever committed, albeit not one that had a ton of interesting things to say.
All episodes of White House Plumbers are now available on Max.