‘The Drop’: What Happened to Lamar’s Parents? Asante Blackk Explains Bombshell Reveal

The Drop: A Snowfall Saga Episode 5, “Homecoming,” digs deep into Lamar Kinsey’s (Asante Blackk) family history, finally revealing what really happened to his parents — and why Gerty Kinsey (Nicki Micheaux) has been so determined to keep her grandson away from the music industry. Warning: Spoilers ahead for The Drop: A Snowfall Saga Episode 5, “Homecoming.”

The story begins in Los Angeles in 1950, at the Pentecostal church where a 15-year-old Gerty is pregnant. During what is supposed to be a portrait day commemorating the congregation, her father publicly announces her pregnancy, puts her out of fellowship, and tells her, “You will not remain in our home.” Gerty runs to a young Big Daddy (Mykelti Williamson), beginning a new family after being rejected by her own.

More than 40 years later, Gerty still won’t listen to gospel music and is resentful of the music industry because of everything that happened with Lamar’s mother, Rochelle. But she finally decides Lamar deserves to know the truth about the day his mother died.

Lamar already knows his mother died on Thanksgiving, which is why the family doesn’t celebrate the holiday. What he doesn’t know is how complicated his parents’ relationship really was — or how little time he actually spent with Rochelle.

She was away so often pursuing her music career that all of Lamar’s childhood photos with his mother were taken during a single weekend. Those happy family pictures were essentially staged because Lamar missed his mamma.

Ray Mickshaw/FX

“I think that Lamar has a little bit of a crisis in that moment because he doesn’t really know if his childhood was even real,” actor Assant Blackk explained to TV Insider. “He doesn’t even necessarily know if that was something that he truthfully lived, or if these were just stories that were told to him, and stories that he latched onto, that he was able to make images of in his mind and run with.”

“And so that’s a major and heavy thing for anybody to be able to say, ‘Hey, I don’t know if this is something that I actually experienced or if this is just a story that I’ve been told. And now what am I going to do with this? How am I going to move, and how am I going to push past it?'”

Lamar also learns that Rochelle had married Lamar’s father, Maurice (Zach Sowers), when she was only 16, and he was 26. He was supposed to be her manager, but as her career took off, their relationship became increasingly toxic. As Gerty explains, they didn’t understand what Maurice was capable of until he “sunk his claws in” and began changing Rochelle.

On that final Thanksgiving, Gerty invites Rochelle and Maurice over in hopes of putting the family back together. Rochelle doesn’t even want to go inside when she arrives. She wants to see Lamar and James Kinsey (Peyton Alex Smith), but James runs away from her because, to him, his own mother is practically a stranger.

Ray Mickshaw/FX

Rochelle is also furious that Gerty invited Maurice. She had previously called her mother and said she wanted out of the marriage, but Gerty encouraged her to stay because she feared leaving Maurice would destroy the family. Against her daughter’s wishes, she brought her estranged husband to the house.

The cracks only get bigger throughout the night. Rochelle has an audition for a Hollywood movie while Maurice is working an assembly line at a factory, something she mocks him over. She does coke in the house, where Wanda Bell (Gail Bean) sees her, and offers Wanda a warning from her own experience: Don’t let any “two-bit a**hole” suck away your dreams.

Drunk and high, Rochelle eventually sits at the piano and starts singing. She is clearly talented. Underneath all of that anger is a woman who knows her life has gotten away from her. Rochelle breaks down with Gerty on the porch, admitting that she feels “split in half.” Her children barely know her, and she questions why she ever had to become a star in the first place.

She also calls Gerty out for still chasing the approval of the family that disowned her. When Rochelle came to her mother desperate to escape Maurice, Gerty didn’t listen. Gerty admits she pushed Rochelle toward the entertainment industry, but she also believed Maurice could still be a good father and wanted him around for the boys.

That decision would have devastating consequences.

Ray Mickshaw/FX

Maurice takes Rochelle to an old lookout spot where they used to spend time together and says he wants to be a good father. Even if they don’t reunite romantically, he wants them to be a family again. But then the old Maurice resurfaces. He starts pulling “manager shit,” handing over music Rochelle wrote after already making plans for it behind her back.

Rochelle calls him a leech, and the argument explodes.

“I made your a**,” Maurice tells her. “You turned me out, so I turned you loose,” she fires back.

Maurice hits her while he is driving. Rochelle pulls a knife. And when the fight escalates, Maurice intentionally drives into another car to teach her a lesson. Between the song lyrics, the knife, and the stabbing, police eventually piece together what happened.

Lamar and James’ parents didn’t simply die in a car accident. Maurice killed them both on purpose.

James has been carrying that truth since he was 13, and Lamar is furious that everyone kept it from him. But James reminds his brother that Gerty and Big Daddy lost a daughter that night, too. Gerty has also had to live with the fact that she invited Maurice back into the house — and he ultimately killed her daughter.

Gerty tells Lamar that he carries his mother’s light and insists she only wanted to protect it. She knows firsthand that the music industry is filled with people like Maurice, “vultures” waiting to take advantage of someone.

But Lamar sees another reason Gerty kept trying to force his parents back together. After being rejected by her own family as a teenager, she desperately wanted the picture of the perfect family — almost as proof to the parents who threw her away that she had built something better.

And now Lamar realizes that Gerty’s fear of losing another member of her family has been keeping him from becoming himself. “I can’t be me here,” he tells her before leaving.

Ray Mickshaw/FX

Gerty immediately turns her anger toward Wanda, but Wanda isn’t having it. After hearing generations of the Kinsey family blame other people for their pain, she calls Gerty out for doing exactly the same thing. “Even after all this, you aim it at me instead of owning it.”

“Homecoming” ultimately explains far more than how Lamar’s parents died. It reveals why Gerty fears the music industry, why Lamar grew up with a carefully constructed version of his mother, and how Gerty’s own rejection as a teenager shaped the family she tried so desperately to hold together. But for Lamar, learning the truth also makes one thing painfully clear: If he wants to figure out who he really is, he may have to do it away from his family.

For all the secrets Gerty and the rest of the family have kept from Lamar, their overprotectiveness comes from a fear that he could fall into the same patterns that have already hurt so many people in their family. Asante Blackk explained to TV Insider that Lamar’s family recognizes something different in him, and they are desperate to protect it.

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“I think that everything happens exactly when it’s supposed to, and I think that they knew that Lamar was a little bit more special. In the best of ways, he has just a pureness of heart, to where what he’s trying to do isn’t necessarily coming to attack anybody. He’s not trying to bring anybody else down. He just wants to be heard,” Blackk explained to TV Insider. “And because of that, I think that they knew and saw what was going on with his older brother. And he says it in one of the episodes about, like, the way that I reacted was with guns and getting in fights, and we didn’t want you to get into that same downfall because everybody is a product of their environment.”

“I think that that’s what the brilliance of this show is, and the family relationships and dynamics, is that it shows how all it takes is one decision for somebody to end up going down the exact same path that somebody else that they are close to has went down,” he explains. “Lamar, that’s not his path. His path is to be able to be with himself, to be able to then go out into the world and keep that pureness of heart and share it in a way that is not corrupt, but is just truly inspiring.”

The Drop: A Snowfall Saga, Tuesdays, 9/8c, FX and Hulu