Task Episode 4 “All Roads” ends with Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey) and his best friend Cliff Broward (Raúl Castillo) walking right into a trap. However, that’s not what is so shocking and upsetting about the HBO drama’s end this week. Rather, it’s the fact that Task Episode 4 ends in a way that hammers home just how dangerous the Dark Hearts are and just how deeply they’ve embedded themselves within law enforcement.

**Spoilers for Task Episode 4 “All Roads,” now streaming on HBO MAX**

Task Episode 4 culminates in a sting operation led by FBI agent Tom Brandis’s (Mark Ruffalo) task force to capture Cliff Broward and hopefully rescue the kidnapped Sam (Ben Doherty). The FBI has been using Ray Lyman’s (Peter Patrikios) cell phone to connect with Cliff, tricking him into meeting up in a local park late at night. However, it turns out that the plan is a bust because someone within the law enforcement has swapped Ray’s phone out with a fake, giving the Dark Hearts the real Ray’s phone.

The FBI’s operation ends in confusion and chaos, while Cliff drives right into the Dark Hearts’s trap. Jayson Wilkes (Sam Keeley) and Perry Dorazo (Jamie McShane) capture him, torture him, and eventually murder him.

So how did Task pull that visceral death scene off? And who could the mole within the task force be? Here’s everything you need to know about the end of Task Episode 4 “All Roads” on HBO…

Task Episode 4 Ending Explained: How Does Cliff Die?

At the end of Task Episode 4, Jayson not only brutally tortures Cliff, but kills him in a grotesque way. He wraps cellophane — or cling film or Saran wrap, if you will — around his already beaten head. Cliff asphyxiates to death.

It’s a scene that’s brutal to watch, but was even more “rough” on set, according to the stars of Task.

“There was an energy in that room that day,” Sam Keeley said. “We were in this kind of industrial garage — like a big kind of shed, basically — and everyone felt that there was an energy in that room. We knew what we needed to do and we knew that we had to go there in order to really kind of portray that energy, but we did it. I mean, Raúl was a champ.”

If you’re wondering if Task Episode 4 director Salli Richardson-Whitfield used special effects or stunt performers to pull off Cliff’s suffocation scene, she didn’t. Actor Raúl Castillo did it all himself.

“He was just like, ‘There’s no way to fake this, so just cover my mouth,’” Keeley said.

“I don’t know how you did that,” Jamie McShane said.

“Yeah, he did it. He did it several times and it was rough,” Keeley said. “At one point he went to the point of basically not being able to breathe.” Castillo had to puncture the plastic in order to save himself from really suffocating to death.

According to Castillo, there were “some technical components in place” to fake it on set, but “both Sam and I found them a little bit restrictive at different points.”

“Whether it was the spit or the plastic, these things, just the end of the day, they were holding us back,” Castillo said. “I was like, ‘Just wrap [me]. Just do it.’”

Director Salli Richardson-Whitfield confirmed to DECIDER that they initially had a stunt performer in place on set, but, “Raul felt that he could do it.”

“I really think it’s a testimony to the trust he had for his fellow actors, for the crew, that we would protect him,” she said. “Whenever your actor can do it all, it’s better…It definitely, I think, gives you a visceral feeling.”

Jamie McShane echoed this sentiment, revealing that Keeley actually got “very protective” of Castillo on set. “Which was great,” McShane said.

“Yeah, that’s right,” Castillo said. “That’s right, exactly.”

“It was brutal,” Keeley said. “Just rough.”

Who is the Mole in HBO’s Task?

While we know that Eryn (Margarita Levieva) is the mole working with Robby to help bring down the Dark Hearts, where is the Dark Hearts’s intel coming from? How did they get Ray’s real phone? How deep does this betrayal go.

We can’t spoil the rest of Task, but it should go without saying that Tom Brandis can’t trust anyone at this point. Not only are Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel), Lizzie Stover (Alison Oliver), and Aleah Clinton (Thuso Mbedu) still potentially rats, but there’s a chilling scene where we see Tom’s boss, Kathleen McGinty (Martha Plimpton) make a distressing phone call immediately after shrugging off his concerns. She calls someone and suggests they have a problem. Is she the Dark Hearts’s mole?

Task returns next Sunday, October 5 on HBO and HBO Max.