A good crime show should feel like the toxic, luxurious relief of a well-earned cigarette break. “God, I needed this,” you sigh as you swill a nice, cold drink with your one hand while you exhale a nice cloud of smoke. Luckily, that’s precisely how “Family Statements” feels, a solid-world building effort by Brad Ingelsby that’s primarily interested in driving the plot forward. A truly expert crime serial knows how to build atmosphere, dangle new clues, and complicate our detective’s troubled family life.

The episode also has it all, including a strikingly hot Sam Keeley as Jayson Wilkes, the tatted-up leader of the Dark Hearts, the rival gang that Robbie has been targeting to siphon off cash. I’ve never been one for Mark Ruffalo myself, so it’s nice to have some eye candy, especially when he’s introduced buck naked in bed. Jayson is not entirely thrilled that two of his operatives are dead and their child, Sam, is missing. He spends most of the episode fuming, certain there’s a mole in his motorcycle gang.

Elsewhere, Sam is forcibly integrated into Robbie’s family. Maeve is frustrated that she now has yet another kid to take care of, but the two still form a tender bond as she helps him find a few stray shirts to wear. Robbie, too, is fond of the kid, even making him pancakes for breakfast. Task wants us to remember and invest in a lot of people and factions. Watching the show, I’m occasionally surprised to realize just how interested I am in the many characters on screen. Not all ensemble shows accomplish such a delicate balancing act. Mare of Easttown, in comparison, primarily asked us to care about a few generations of women. Task is still a character study, but it’s crafting a large, lived-in DelCo.

Tom’s task force is spinning out without any promising leads. They have to manage bunk tip calls from psychics and angry hordes of mice at their run-down home base. Aleah, Lizzie, and Grasso, however, come a little more into focus this episode. Lizzie’s the fuck-up, Aleah’s the strong and silent type, and Grasso’s the suave comic relief. He seems to be flirting with Lizzie despite her recent breakup. She hates being called snickerdoodle, so he admits his old username was DJgrassanova. Like Tom, Grasso was raised Catholic, so he worked the grade-school dance circuit playing Calvin Harris and Flo Rida while cautioning kids not to grind. Lizzie eats it up. She’s not the only one to open up to Grasso either; beleaguered Tom slowly reveals a bit about his family life and admits he used to be an FBI chaplain who ministered at a mass casualty site before his boss pulled strings and got him accepted to Quantico. More on that brooding past seems inevitable. The team has less success, however, in interviewing the deceased Peaches’ fiancé. She denies any possibility he was even mixed up in criminal activity.

When the task force does finally get a tip, it’s miraculously because of Maeve. After putting the pieces together while taking care of Sam, she realizes he’s not just a family friend’s kid in need of help, but he’s the missing kid from the news. The episode sets up her work life at a Chuck E. Cheese–esque playpen-arcade by introducing a friend who frequently covers for her when she needs to take care of her niece and nephew. She drops Sam off at a store and tells him to go pick out a toy before running over to her workplace next door and using a lost phone to call in a tip. It’s one of the first truly gripping sequences in Task. She’s basically ratting out her uncle. She discreetly rushes back into her car to try to make a quick escape. The only problem was that when she never came into the store, a terrified Sam climbed back in the car. To evade the blockade undetected while Sam’s in her trunk, she tells a cop she saw a lost kid at her job. She even briefly meets Tom, fingering a random kid in order to take back her near betrayal. “It’s a bum tip,” Tom says with a sigh. It’s the first time he’s been so close to the truth, and the first time he’s met someone involved in the kidnapping, he just doesn’t know it. Beautifully acted and beautifully shot, lit by the red and blue lights of police cars, it’s a great sequence to end the episode on. “What have you done to us?” Maeve snaps at Robbie when she gets home, her new charge Sam in tow.

Children cause Tom plenty of grief, too. We finally learn a bit more about his stormy backstory. He adopted two children, Ethan and Emily, after having one biological child named Sara, now an adult with her own child. Ethan, his adopted son, ends up having a plethora of mental health issues and pushes his wife down the stairs to her untimely and unfortunate death. That’s the horrible, traumatizing, painful reason that he’s in jail. Emily is debating whether or not to provide a family support statement, much to Sara’s displeasure. The many woes of family. Sara flies into town with her own baby for the sentencing. She’s quick to get a “bucket” of wine but slow to let Emily hold her child. It’s a tense scene, a long shot of Emily holding the child hearing her half-sister and dad fussing about in the kitchen. It’s almost easy to take on Sara’s perspective due to the uneasy atmosphere — I, too, wondered if Emily would drop the baby. The show seems to put the viewer in the same suspicious, voyeuristic position as Sara while still highlighting Emily’s pain.

The family dynamics seem complicated for a number of reasons, but none of the characters have explicitly mentioned that Emily is Black while the rest of her family is white. She’s certainly keyed into the difficult place she occupies in the family hierarchy. Earlier in the episode, her school counselor asks her what she’s most afraid of happening after the sentencing. She’s afraid that if he stays in jail, he won’t get better, but that if she testifies, he’ll get out. A double-edged sword. At a family meeting about the sentencing, things quickly go off the rails. It’s a vicious scene, a culmination of simmering resentment and sibling rivalries. When Emily announces she wants to make a support statement, Sara is livid. “She was my mother too,” Emily says. “Ehhh,” Sara mutters sarcastically. Emily runs out to the same place her brother once did during one of his past mental breakdowns. It doesn’t take long for Tom to find her and bring her home, but the cracks are showing. “I’m lost,” Tom admits to his family. He used to have stock answers on forgiveness and mercy, but now he’s not so sure he knows the difference.

In the Check-Out Line at Wawa

• Standout line readings: Sam: “Fluffy, definitely fluffy,” on his favorite kind of pancakes. “My mom said she would buy me a LEGO Batman set.” From Maeve: “Define a little while.” Both are delivering knockout performances. Everyone’s a great actor here, but it’s nice to see these younger actors holding their own against the heavyweights.

• Well, despite Peaches dying, all Robbie got was a massive load of pure fentanyl. They’ll have to sell it, another unnecessary (and dangerous) step in their get-rich-quick scheme.

• The music in this episode is beautiful, if a little wild. Eerie chants, tinkling percussion, zany strings, and plucky swelling piano. Bravo, Kris Bowers, who also scored Bridgerton and Inventing Anna.

• So far, this show hasn’t been as hard on cops as Mare. I’m curious to see if they end up dredging up any anti-cop sentiment. Tom is not nearly as “bad” a person as Mare was, either. He’s just depressed and mildly alcoholic.

• Contrasting Robbie’s third-rate tiny local bar with the Dark Hearts’ massive watering hole is a nice touch.

 Tom gets impossibly close to the truth, but Maeve’s change of heart means Robbie remains free for a while longer.