Contributor: John Keegan
Written by Stephen Hootstein
Directed by Stephen Kay
I’ve said it many time before: the presence of Eyal tends to coincide with the worst writing for Annie, because the writers feel the need to make Eyal seem ultra-competent by depicting Annie as a complete idiot. They avoided the problem fairly well in Eyal’s first appearance of the season, so the question is: will they dodge the pitfall a second time in a row?
The answer is definitely, and that makes this another winner for the third season. Annie’s questionable choices (and there is a rather large one in the episode) have less to do with lack of spycraft than her personal sense of honor, and this is hardly the first time that the latter has challenged the former. Moral spies can make for relatively short-lived spies, but that doesn’t make them incompetent.
If one doesn’t pay attention, it would be easy to miss that Annie spends weeks in that interrogation cell. That she manages to resist the various techniques employed against her is a credit to her fortitude. Because Eyal’s relatively easy extraction is counter-balanced by her long effort to resist her captors, Eyal’s super-competency does nothing to diminish Annie.
Annie’s big mistake, at least in terms of seriously compromising their ability to escape Russia, is handing over the go-pack to Simon’s sister. But it is something that Annie would do, consistent with her character, and similarly, she would trust in her abilities (and support system) to find another way to survive. It may not be the smartest play, in terms of self-interest, but it would have been more inconsistent if she had left Simon’s sister in the cold.
The train sequence was one of the best moments for the series yet, if only because the outcome was always in doubt, and the writers did an excellent job of subverting expectation by having them get captured on the plane. This is where Annie’s competence is given a huge boost. Annie manages to thread together small details from her experience with her interrogator to determine that he’s on the take, and that gives her the opening she needs to save them both. Instead of giving Eyal the big save, the writers put it in Annie’s hands, where it belongs.
With only five episodes left for the season, I’m curious to see how they start pulling the various lingering threads together. Annie came back to applause and praise, but there are still issues from Lena’s operation with Simon to be resolved. Since the writers have been doing fairly well this season, even accounting for the poor reveal of Lena’s true purpose, there’s reason to hope the season will end well.
Writing: 2/2
Acting: 2/2
Direction: 2/2
Style: 2/4
Final Score: 8/10