Countdown to Thirteen: The Assets: Episode 7 – “The Straw Poll” (2014)

Historically, a penultimate episode can be among the best in a run.  It’s often where the stakes run as high as they can go – there may be a big twist or a hard emotional punch, but it doesn’t have the finale’s tricky job of making everything wrap up in a satisfactory manner.  The penultimate episode is where everything can blow up, and you’re left on the edge of your seating waiting to see how it’s all going to shake out.  In my opinion, this is not that type of penultimate episode.

Team Sandy is working hard to identify the mole.  Sandy has a particular suspect in her sights, and she’s convinced they’re the one, but the others aren’t so sure.  As she sinks deeper and deeper into the investigation, those around her begin to think it’s less about a determined pursuit of the truth and more about a largely-groundless fixation on one person that may not be the one they’re looking for.

Remember my previous comments about how shifty the mole acts all the time?  Sandy’s suspicion of them adds up to little more than that.  Granted, it kind of vindicates my previous complaints about it, but it doesn’t feel right to have her zero in on them basically because of her insistence that it has to be them.  It definitely comes across the way her team sees it, like she’s decided and desperately wants it to be this person but can’t point to any compelling proof, just her conviction that they must be the traitor. 

That bugs me for several reasons.  First, we never see the point at which she comes to this conclusion (more on that in a minute.)  There are maybe a couple moments in the earlier episodes where she maybe twigs something a bit off about the mole, but there’s no logical joining of the dots to get to “It’s obviously X!  It all fits – why won’t you people open your eyes?”  Additionally, I feel it does a disservice to Sandy’s character.  While it’s true that she’s always relied at least in part on her admittedly-good instincts about people, it’s ridiculous that she thinks she can get the ball rolling on more intense scrutiny into this person without having any kind of tangible probable cause; we know she’s smarter than that.  And even when she does go looking for evidence, she doesn’t really get a chance to be impressive with her intelligence or dedication as she has in past episodes.  It really isn’t a very good episode for her in general.

The episode itself feels a little out of place due to a significant time jump.  Now, the show in general has a bit of a problem with time – it covers a pretty decent stretch, but while the flashbacks are well-marked, I’m a lot hazier about how much time is going by in the present day.  The characters will make an offhand reference to something from the previous episode as having happened months ago, and I go, “Wait – what now?”  A lot of time is passing between each episode, but it never really feels like that.  And here, where we have a really concrete jump of multiple years, there are some places where you can tell we’re in a different time – with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the end of the war puts a different complexion on things – but the characters are where it really counts, and neither they nor the interactions between them seem to reflect much change or growth.  It’s a little like when Downton Abbey would suddenly leap forward a year or two, and yet everyone’s plotline would’ve had virtually no forward momentum in the interim.  I’d say this works better than that, but the overall effect just doesn’t come through.