With lunatic Sully on the loose -- now abetted by the nearly-as-insane Mickey Donovan -- Ray sends Avi to babysit Abby and the kids in Calabasas. Surprise, Abby is a bitch about this and refuses to believe anything anybody says, about anything and everything. Conor gets a bit of a Tommy Wheeler crush on Avi after hearing about his days in Mossad, and by the end of the episode Abby sends the kids off to a hotel with Avi so she can start as much shit as possible with whoever's around.

After charming zero pants off the cops investigating Sean Walker's murder, Mickey calls Claudette down from Malibu for a quick meeting that, as usual, is suffused with equal parts gratitude and regret. Mickey's sad-sack love for Claudette is entertaining and touching as ever, and of course she agrees to say she was with him that night. One less storyline to worry about heading into the finale, I suppose, although that's still only one murder out of like four that he has an alibi for, due to being a crazy, constant murderer.

Given the limited amount of info at his disposal, it's pretty easy to understand why Frank, after discovering Van Miller's (sniff) dead body, assumes that Ray is behind his murder. (Even though actually that makes no sense.) Of course, maybe if Ray hadn't ridden him so hard and so blackmaily the whole time, maybe he'd see sense, but Ray is not his usual loquacious self when he gets Frank's call, thanks to having had the worst day in history.

To wit: Once he's got the babysitter Avi in place, Ray heads out to do (whatever, it's not clear) about Sully and Mickey, and calls to harass Frank again which sets up his finding of Van's body, and then has to drop all of that because Bunchy has just shown up at the Fite Club covered in blood, because guess what, he shot that priest.

Frances is of the opinion that the priest should go to the hospital, but the Donovans -- including Daryll -- decide to go a little bit of a different way. Namely, torturing him for the entire episode until he admits that he's the mad molester that ruined all of their lives. (A plot that has come to dominate at least one episode of every television show in existence, lately; it's like the new "underground fight club" trope). Spoiler alert, he is; shocker alert, he also molested Ray Donovan. Who shoots him in the head, after a protracted conversation about whether or not he's going to do just that.

So yeah. Ray got messed with. It flips the hard-boiled "broken dolly" noir thing around on its head in a brutally intelligent way, which means reversing the polarity of the entire show if you think about it, because everything magnetizes to that one nucleus of exploitation in various forms. I mean, not to say that it wasn't there to be picked up on -- his memory issues, his sexual issues, his obsession with his own children's bodies; his devotion to both protecting the helpless and cleaning up messes like they were never there -- but because we know so little about him and what is ever going on with him, it makes Bunchy's B-story as much misdirection as it is powerful in its own right.

In the end, Ray goes home and admits the truth about this situation to Abby, who saw just enough of the hostage scenario to seriously consider divorce. Although it's the emotional honesty she's been demanding this entire time, the fact that he's too fucked up -- and preoccupied with the eighty other things on his plate right now -- to accept her greedy comfort means she ends up out the door anyway, which is so Abby.

"Oh, you won't let me climb your body like a tree while we talk about how you got raped? Guess that means I'm basically being abused. Abby out!"

Anyway. Ezra's freaking out about all this, so there's now two stressful dads (and two dead priests!) in Ray's life, not to mention the Sullivan threat and whatever retaliation Mickey still has in store. Bunchy maybe will get better from this point forward, and possibly Ray will end up with custody of Sean Walker's test-tube baby in the near future. Which seems like a fine Season Two to me: Just shirtless Ray Donovan, holding a baby, making phone calls and driving around LA and having gruff feelings he keeps to himself while investigating his various scars and tattoos in the mirror.