You can outrun your decisions only for so long. Amid bullet hailstorms and rivers of blood spilled in five heart-stopping seasons of FX’s drama Snowfall, the vast majority of its core characters have escaped the deadly consequences of the crack cocaine epidemic of the ‘80s. But it’s the season finale, and Snowfall has been racking up surprising deaths to prepare us for the end all season. In this week’s episode, the second to last episode of Snowfall, the CIA agent turned megalomaniacal drug kingpin turned deadbeat dad turned exiled rogue spy Teddy McDonald (Carter Hudson) is finally killed, and everything on the show is changing.
After last week’s episode concluded with Teddy’s henchman Oso (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) saving Franklin (Damson Idris) from being hung by Teddy’s hand, it was Franklin’s turn to use extreme measures to coerce Teddy into giving him back the $73 million he stole from him at the end of Season 5. To get the truth, Franklin tried everything from making Teddy play Russian Roulette to burning skin off Teddy’s chest with hot cooking oil. It wasn’t until Franklin was set to fire up some more cooking oil that Teddy gave up and agreed to transfer half of the money he had stolen. One problem: Franklin’s mother, Cissy Saint (Michael Hyatt), wanted Teddy’s blood spilled after he killed her husband, Alton Williams (Kevin Carroll).
Cissy has been waiting for the day she could rid the world of Teddy, going as far as teaming up with a Russian spy in the KGB to take him down. Her resolve was more hardened after Teddy not only took no responsibility for the crack cocaine addiction wreaking havoc in Black communities thanks to him but manipulatively dangled the false hope of Alton being alive in a Puerto Rican jail as a way to convince her to free him. That’s why she was bemused and infuriated when her son told her he was planning to set Teddy free to get the money he had scorched the Earth to retrieve. To Cissy, if Franklin chose money that she warned him came with a lifetime target on his back over starting over fresh with his mother and killing his father’s murderer, she had no allegiance to her son or his plan. And she made that very clear when she put two bullets into Teddy’s chest as he was about to complete the money transfer.
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Snowfall is definitely an orgy of strange bedfellows looking to fuck each other over, one way or another, to carve out their vision of the American dream out of mountains of crack cocaine. But, the show was essentially told from two perspectives: Teddy McDonald and Franklin Saint. Teddy showed the clandestine machinations of the government behind the proliferation of crack cocaine in 1980s Los Angeles. Franklin showed how it affected the average Black person transmogrified into an addict, dealer, and user. Teddy mold a wide-eyed Franklin, simply looking to get him and his mother out of poverty into the biggest cocaine dealer in all of L.A.
The fact Teddy was still breathing air this long in the series was baffling, given what he went through. He survived being stranded in a Mexican desert, targeted by almost every gang from Nicaragua to South Central, LA, and shot in the chest during an ambush. The worst part was he probably deserved to die long before this final season because of his cold and callous treatment of human life in his quest to further the mission of funding America’s defense against outside forces. The man killed Franklin’s father in cold blood and acted like he did Franklin a favor. He robbed Franklin of his $73 million fortune because Franklin had the controversial idea to quit the drug game and become an honest man living on the spoils of his illicit labor.
The ends always justified the means in Teddy’s life, and now he’s met his end for that very reason.
Is Teddy McDonald Really Dead?
Unless the flesh on Teddy’s mangled chest hardened to Kevlar, and he’s mastered some CIA trick to play dead, he’s gone. In two shots to the chest from point-blank range, Cissy avenged her late husband’s death, kept her son from the money she warned him would come with a life on the run, and effectively severed her connection to a son comfortable never seeing his mother again if it meant regaining his fortune. The last we see of Cissy is dropping to her knees with her hands in the air, ready for the police to whisk her away to what indeed will be a lengthy prison sentence.
Deaths in the penultimate episode of a series aren’t usually reversed, especially for a show that has kept most of its core characters alive since the first season. Instead, this season has been one rooted in the finality in relation to one’s place in the world. Jerome (Amin Joseph), everyone’s favorite drug-dealing uncle, got a fatal bullet in the chest during a standoff with rival dealer Kane Hamilton after they kidnapped his wife Louie (Angela Lewis) and held her at gunpoint. This was after Jerome told Louie he was leaving the drug game because it wasn’t worth dying over. But, his place in this world was always by Louie’s side, a decision he made when he rushed to save her. There was a moment before he and Kane exchanged bullets when you could see in Jerome’s pensive eyes him wrestling with the fact he may have to die to save his wife.
Teddy made his choice of where he stood in the world when he cleaned out Franklin’s bank account at the end of Season 5 after the latter graciously gave him the heads up that he’s ready to leave the drug game to live everyday life with his wife, child and $73 million. Teddy made his decision when he abandoned his son and wife after she gave him one final shot to leave his rogue cocaine crusade to save America from communism alone at the end of Season 3, and he turned his back on her. Teddy’s fate was sealed after his brother and father died after Teddy’s narcotic frenemies got their hands on them. Teddy’s finally dead because he was a dead man walking for at least two seasons.
That doesn’t mean he won’t still have a significant influence on the final Snowfall episode ever.
What does this mean for Snowfall‘s Series Finale?
Teddy’s main leverage over Franklin and every person he worked with was the fact he was the linchpin in all of their American dream pursuits. In this week’s episode, Franklin figured out Teddy didn’t help him set up his offshore banking as a magnanimous gesture from a future lifelong friend but as a manipulative ploy from a surreptitious oppressor. With every person he helped rise from the slums of poverty to the wealth they never imagined, Teddy reminded them they worked for him, meaning they could live their dream as long as he kept them powerless. With no Teddy, there’s no future for many of our favorite characters.
Veronique (Devyn A Tyler), the mother of Franklin’s child and mastermind behind the cooking oil torture technique, already stressed to Franklin how the checks were bouncing on the downtown building they invested a large chunk of their money and future because they were tapped out financially. Teddy’s death practically shuts the door on Franklin ever seeing a cent of his $73 million unless he can devise a workaround similar to how Teddy stole Franklin’s money right from under him. Franklin was already taking desperate measures to find Teddy, so he’ll probably do unspeakable acts now that his only shot at getting back his money is dead. That could end up costing him his life, but he’s made it clear that poverty isn’t worth living for him.
We’ll have to see how it all plays out when Snowfall returns for one last episode before the series ends.
Keith Nelson is a writer by fate and journalist by passion, who has connected dots to form the bigger picture for Men’s Health, Vibe Magazine, LEVEL MAG, REVOLT TV, Complex, Grammys.com, Red Bull, Okayplayer, and Mic, to name a few.
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