“In Whom We Trust”
By Adrienne Saia Isaac | Posted Under TV Reviews | Comments (22)
Apparently, we trust in no one. I’m itching to tie all this business up, because I can’t take the creepiness anymore. The only relationships we can rely on are those between the Atlas MacDowell cronies and Spangler. They’re also the only ones whose motives aren’t suspect: they are keeping a secret and will stop at nothing to keep Will Travers from discovering it. Otherwise, nothing seems to be certain, especially after this episode. Can Will really trust an artist who doesn’t live in a shoebox who talks to her sister on the phone in the bathroom? Maggie apparently can’t trust her ex to be a good father, which Kale warned her about. The team isn’t legally allowed to trust Tanya since she lost her clearance. And in the spirit of equality, the homosexual relationship is just as trust fucked. First we suspected Kale of working against Will but now we wonder if boyfriend Walter is working against Kale. After all, if was the boyfriend who bought the lamp that had the bug that Kale found in the opening scenes. Kale, looking buff in his USMC t-shirt and all black ops with his spy tools. We can’t even trust his tough exterior; he gets sappy, resting his hand on his boyfriend’s moppy hair as he reads in bed, all audio recording devices accounted for.
First off, this artist chick and Will — it’s not working for me. She’s pushing the issue of him staying there and is telling people about him and he’s notably freaked. This situation began as a way to keep tabs on his apartment and has exploded into a clusterfuck of a budding relationship and the inevitable “we.” Will’s lost sight of the task at hand: find out who’s watching him and if they were involved in David’s death. Andi, desperate to keep him, gives him a set of keys and enacts an open-door policy. Her motives are suspect. Is she keeping him because she’s trying to get intel or because she’s simply dickmatized?
Over at API, Tanya’s back from rehab and stuck in the basement, filing intelligence papers. She bitches to Kale about having a PhD and he quickly reminds her that she failed a drug test at a top-secret government agency and to shut it. Hey, Tanya: there are THREE of us with master’s degrees at the retail store where I work. So do your penance and shut it. She gets humbled again at lunch when she sits with her old crew only to be reminded that they can’t talk to her about anything because she’s lost her clearance. Grant stops by her dungeon later to apologize and stays to help her with the filing (hey, anything’s better than getting harassed by an unemployed ginger hosebeast when you get home from your underpaid analyst job no one thinks is real). Tanya also has a pretty intense therapy session where she pulls a Lindsey and explains that she’s legally prescribed Adderall and Percoset, but the coke and pot she also tested positive for were a one-time thing. She almost admits to needing help, but not quite. It’s an interesting, if not stereotypical, look into her life.
Meanwhile, the New Mamas and the Papas meet without her and learn that another bomb went off. Turns out there have been a series of bombs, including Q’teb’s in Bali, that all went off at 4:20 EST. Julia inquires about the significance of 4:20. Well, my dear, let me enlighten you, it is the time where all shall partake of the green fruits of the earth and bask in its toasty goodness. Or, in Rubicon’s world, it’s the signature of Q’teb. He’s still alive and the group needs to get as much intel as possible and find him. But there’s nothing - Q’teb’s gone off the grid so they wait. Later, they learn that Yuri Popovich was gunned down in Moscow. George Beck will be the third to go, Will posits. Toward the end of the episode, we learn Will was right. The trifecta have been taken care of and the group has a front-row seat to the unfolding of a grand intelligence plan.
Maggie joins us again, albeit in her new job. Her daughter, Sophie, phones Maggie at work, distraught, because her dad left her alone in a hotel room for three hours. Maggie rushes over and exchanges words with Craig, who just happens to saunter up as Maggie arrives. She threatens to call the cops on him and he threatens to sue for kidnapping and joint custody. Kale learns of this when he confronts Maggie at work after seeing Sophie there and growing suspicious. He tells Maggie to sack up and that he’ll take care of it. He does, surprising Craig in his hotel room, packing his things and tossing a one-way bus ticket and some cash at him. Craig belittles him, calling Kale an “old man” and then gets served with a strangle sleeper hold and is brought to his knees. Kale’s a badass, no doubt.
Most importantly, the narratives of Will and Katherine finally intersect. He buzzes her door as she gathers intel on Spangler. She’s suspicious and lies to Will about the Atlas MacDowell connection and her knowledge of the four-leaf clover’s significance. He remembers her from Spangler’s awful party where she likened booze to oxygen (that’s my kind of woman!). Later, she has a change of heart and meets with Will. She’s worried about being followed, but more so that her life will never return to normal in the wake of Tom’s death.
Katherine admits to Will that Tom indeed committed suicide and tells him about the four leaf clover Tom left behind. She also mentions Joe Bradley, who killed himself 20 years ago and also left the four leaf clover and a confused widow behind. Unfortunately, Will’s got nothin’ to explain this. This will be the last time that Will and Katherine meet, as she is threatened by a large balding man. If Katherine meets with Will, they will both be “terminated,” as will her parents. He then does that creepy thing where he reads off the parents’ address to reinforce the fact that he means business. Katherine knows he’s serious and later reaches out to Will through the mail. She sends to Will (at work) an annotated copy of the black and white photo of the boys on the beach. This may not go unnoticed, as we learned that Spangler instructed the man to threaten Katherine. We learn that he is also responsible for Kale’s tail (ha), but that Kale very easily slips off the grid. Spangler seems to be unraveling a bit, trying to keep people apart and from (ostensibly) discovering some big secret that will make this series worthwhile. The only thing that we can trust in that we can’t trust him.
Meanwhile, Will searches the API library for research papers, and finds that many of the same ones in which he’s interested were last checked out by David. One of the papers was Will’s and the rest were on nations of interest to national security like Pakistan and Kazakhstan. That’s all we get with this; hopefully it will lead somewhere and isn’t a red herring. He’s also decided to go back to the artist after a quick visit to his apartment, where he drops a jar of pickles on the floor. He takes her phone to the bathroom (she was too busy badgering him about sending her to voicemail to notice). He wants to know who she was calling earlier in the bathroom. She catches him and insists that it was her sister and proceeds to badger him about it (god, she is not hot enough to be this annoying). He apologizes and ostensibly goes back to work, the only place here where men are free from the troubles of their home lives. This includes Kale, who has to convince Walter that replacing his bed lamp is a good idea. What an uncomfortable scene. But the entire episode is uncomfortable. There’s no trust among intelligence officers, like no honor among thieves.
Adrienne Saia Isaac is a journalist and Philly expat living in Colorado with two pairs of skis, seven Phillies hats and her pit bull mix, Juno. Her main goal in life (besides finding gainful employment) is to drink whiskey out of Lord Stanley’s cup with Chris Pronger. You can read her rants and rambling at Ex-Pat’s and Geno’s.
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Comments
Posted by: Porkchop Express at September 27, 2010 5:26 PM
You are on quite a roll with dickmatized(I am stealing this) and unemployed ginger hosebeast. HAHA.
It seems you didn't recognize the balding man as Donald Bloom, a contract killer and the man Will had followed to the lunch meeting with Kale back in episode 5 or so. He was also the guy who was replacing the bug in Will's apartment. He was apparently Kale's lover in Syria when they were CIA operatives.