HBO's 'War' Is Brilliantly Cynical

For two episodes, HBO’s War has been a very expensive game of chess between two rich people who both hate and deserve each other. With its third episode, “Chip Off the Block,” the show flips the board over and stomps on the chess pieces. It is nasty.

Quick catch-up: Dominic West, as always playing a man who believes consequences are for other people, is Morgan Henderson, the billionaire founder of a social media company called Zephyr. Sienna Miller is Carla Duval, a movie star who is over the age of 40. When they married, Carla had the money, so a prenup made sense. Now Zephyr is worth hundreds of millions, and Carla would like half, thank you very much.

To get it, she set a honeytrap in the premiere, sending her friend Flora to see whether Morgan would cheat. Morgan cheated because Morgan is played by Dominic West, an actor who has never played a character who did not cheat (it’s very good casting, ahem). Morgan’s lawyers found out what she was up to, so he had her served with divorce papers on the red carpet at her own Paris premiere, then smiled for the photographers with his arm around her. Romance!

Episode two was mediation. Morgan offered £17 million. Carla laughed in his face. Then Morgan, who cannot stop talking, admitted Zephyr’s value had exploded since the wedding, which handed Carla’s lawyers a reason to nullify the prenup. Meanwhile, Johnny, the scrappy junior lawyer working for Carla’s firm, is secretly working for Morgan’s firm too, which is going to end badly for somebody, possibly Johnny, who is engaged but also has the hots for Carla.

Which brings us to arbitration.

Carla’s team, Nicholas and Serena, the married partners at Taylor & Byrne, want to argue that Carla sacrificed her career for the marriage. She turned down big roles to be a wife! Except the record shows she didn’t turn down any big roles, because nobody was offering her any. Carla was never getting the Marvel call.

So they pivot, and the pivot is slyly underhanded. Carla has a 16-year-old son, Gabriel (Aran Murphy, who happens to be Cillian’s kid, and it is immediately obvious). Morgan isn’t his legal father, but if Carla can prove Morgan acted as one, her lawyers can argue the circumstances of the marriage have changed enough to blow up the prenup. English family law has a term for this, a “child of the family,” and it’s a perfectly reasonable legal argument.

The catch is that to make it, Carla has to argue that she was the bad parent. It’s like suing someone for custody of your own failures.

Gabriel, meanwhile, is furious with both of them, and one night he goes out with a friend and gets into trouble. Carla, panicking, calls Morgan and begs him to help find her son. Morgan stares at his buzzing phone and doesn’t pick up, because picking up is what a dad would do, and a dad is the one thing he legally cannot afford to be. It’s monstrous. It’s also, from an arbitration standpoint, very sound.

Carla finds Gabriel on her own. The next day, when she argues in arbitration that Morgan was a father to her son, Morgan’s team plays her voicemail from the night before. It’s Carla screaming at Morgan that he’s a selfish narcissist who doesn’t give a damn about anyone but himself. Case closed! That’s not a dad. That’s a guy who let a teenager wander London in the middle of the night because he had a meeting with his lawyers in the morning.

And then Gabriel walks in.

He’s there to “support” his mother, and within minutes he’s crashing out over the divorce. Morgan is livid. He accuses Carla of weaponizing her own kid against him. He’s probably right! But he holds it together for about as long as Dominic West characters ever hold anything together, and then he snaps. He upbraids Gabriel, telling him to get his behind back to school, and he’ll be calling the headmaster every single day to make sure he’s there.

That’s not a stepfather. That’s a dad basically yelling at his son: “Don’t make me turn this car around.”

The arbitrator sees it too. Her ruling, more or less: You may not be his father, but you’re sure as hell acting like one. Boom. The prenup is out.

So Carla wins by proving her soon-to-be ex-husband is a better parent to her child than she is. In other words, the one decent thing about Morgan Henderson, the thing that survived the cheating and the lawyers and the red-carpet ambush, is the thing that sinks him. He couldn’t help himself. He loves his step-kid.

It’s dirty pool. It’s also brilliant.

What makes War work is that it refuses to give you anyone to root for. Carla rejected £17 million like it was nothing. Morgan let a kid go missing to protect his money. The lawyers on both sides would sell their own mothers for a favorable ruling. The only person in this whole mess who seems to want what any normal person would want is a 16-year-old who just wants his parents to stop doing this. His step-father is sympathetic, and that is his ultimate undoing.

It’s only episode 3, so somehow this is nowhere near rock bottom. I love this show.