The third installment of Trust set FX ablaze last night with an opening sequence that included cocaine snorting, twin sister models making out at a photo shoot, an out of control antiwar protest, public fountain sex, and the return of Harris Dickinson’s John Paul Getty III. Last week’s episode focused on the beginning of Brendan Fraser’s James Fletcher Chase character’s investigation for the missing JPG III who seemed to be kidnapped at the end of episode one. Episode three opens with Getty being pulled from a car and handed over to the mobster Berto who owns a cafe and sold JPG III 7K in white stuff that the hippie billionaire never made good on.

Last week’s episode was a lot of fun and Fraser did not disappoint, but Trust is a story about John Paul Getty III and it was great to get back to him and his story. Berto stuffs JPG III in the trunk of a car before Getty III falls into a reverie of recent memories and the whole episode becomes a series of long flashback that finally invites viewers into the Roman decadence that caused all the trouble in the first place. The recent American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace was gaga for flashbacks, telling its whole tale in a reverse chronology. Trust has been less predictable in its jump-around plotting, but I’ve enjoyed the way Boyle has confidently danced across his character introductions, action sequences and exposition in a manner that’s juggled these elements into three very compelling chapters.

By the end of the episode JPG III dropped from Berto’s frying pan into the fryer of another group of gangsters he doesn’t even know. This third chapter finally confirms that JPG III might have been involved in a conspiracy to profit from his own kidnapping, but as soon as the possibility of that kind of plan is presented nearly everything that might go wrong absolutely does.

Next week will likely be a return to the John Paul Getty I’s English manse, and the intrigue of one of the wealthiest men in the world who’s promised not to pay a single cent to this grandson’s kidnappers.

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The second episode of TRUST debuted on Easter Sunday night. Honestly, was caught up watching JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR LIVE before I switched over to TRUST and started it over to catch it from the beginning. SUPERSTAR was about as good as any bad musical might be — Alice Cooper’s Pontius Pilate stole the show. But TRUST started with a bang and helped to push all those terrible Andrew Lloyd Webber lyrics out from between my ears.

The show opens with Brendan Fraser’s James Fletcher Chase donning his ten gallon hat and heading off in search of John Paul Getty III who was kidnapped in Rome at the end of the last episode. Fraser talks directly to the camera talking about how 1973 was a bad year for America — Nixon, Vietnam and the kidnapping of JPG III. Fraser looms large in this episode and a meeting with Donald Sutherland’s JPG I and JPG II at the family’s British estate is Fletcher Chase’s first real introduction. He’s ordered to Rome and he’s off with a tip of his hat and a red white and blue bandanna around his neck, and Bible quotes on his lips.

Fraser’s doings make this episode feel like a procedural shot with split screens in taxis, in police offices, hotel rooms and at the home of JPG III’s mother’s house — the always captivating Hilary Swank also comes into her own here in the show’s second installment. Fraser’s early roles found him typecast as kind of a hunky dolt in movies like George of the Jungle and Encino Man and The Mummy franchise. Fraser is older and burlier now, but his physical gravitas serves him well here, and his goofball charms have now become distilled into a kind of homespun sincerity that masks the doings of a dead serious fixer working to negotiate the release of the grandson of one of the world’s richest men. It’s a great turn and it might signal an unlikely renaissance for an actor who many of us might have written off. I’m glad I was wrong about Fraser because Chase is threatening to outshine Sutherland’s JPG III in this series which only got better the second time around.

This latest installment of Trust continues to feature soundtrack gems like “Prisencolinensinainciusol” a number one hit in Italy in 1972 featuring gibberish English lyrics over a groovy dance track…

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