Countdown to Thirteen: The Assets: Episode 8 – “Avenger” (2014)

Last episode of The Assets.  A mixed bag overall, I’d say – some really excellent scenes, and some that are just kind of there.  On the whole, it’s not too much of a “wow” of a finale, but although the nuts-and-bolts plot stuff falls down a little, the emotional impact is still strong.

Eight-episode miniseries about hunting a mole within the CIA; guess what episode 8 is about?  The investigation is closing in, but the team’s evidence is never quite enough.  Sandy fears that, after everything they’ve done, the mole will slip through their fingers.

As I said, the plot/spy stuff is a bit so-so.  There’s one knockout scene of Sandy in the field (sort of – she’s in the next room with a microphone talking a case officer through a debrief with a potential new asset,) and after having seen her spend so much time handling data in office rooms, it’s a treat to watch her in action.  A lot of the rest, though?  Kinda meh.  It’s perhaps a by-product of the show being based on a true story, since history doesn’t always play out in the most dramatically-compelling way, but the whole cat-and-mouse routine between the CIA and the mole isn’t terribly exciting.  There’s no huge smoking gun or brilliant insight to bring the mole down – it just sort of happens in a comparatively undramatic way.

Where the finale succeeds, though, is in the emotion.  Sandy has a few great moments coming to terms with the assets lost through the mole’s actions, and the lowkey subplot of Sandy and her husband struggling with the strain her job places on their relationship is resolved really beautifully (shoutout to Julian Ovenden as Sandy’s husband Gary, because he rocks in this episode.)

Accent Watch

Generic American – tiny bit flat at times, but quite good.

Recommend?

In General – I think so.  While it has its clunky moments, I think it’s ultimately worth it.  It deserves a lot of credit for how the assets themselves and their stories are portrayed.

Jodie Whittaker – I would.  Whittaker’s work as Sandy is often subtle but effective, and when she’s asked to step up, she really nails it.

Warnings

Violence, thematic elements, mild sexual content, and smoking/drinking.

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.

Countdown to Thirteen: The Assets: Episode 6 – “A Small Useless Truth” (2014)

Big goings-on in this episode.  It’s pivotal for both Sandy and the mole, and it seems apparent that it’ll be full steam ahead for final two episodes – it’s only a matter of time before the major paths cross (a bit of spoilerish-ness.)

The investigation into the mole has suffered a major setback, and Sandy is hit even harder by another threat to one of her assets.  It has her questioning a lot of things and wondering whether it’s worth it to keep fighting (since she’s the main character and there’s still two episodes left, you can probably imagine what she decides on that front.)  The mole also faces a reckoning, with a major hurdle coming their way that could expose them.

As usual, the scenes that follow the mole themselves don’t interest me as much as the rest of what’s going on, although there is other stuff happening in their plot to make it worthwhile.  And look – I know that the way a show portrays a traitor/double agent always tips its hand a little once it reveals to the audience who the traitor is, but the mole is so blame twitchy, I don’t get how the entire building doesn’t immediately realize it’s them.  Yeesh.

But then we have Sandy, who rocks.  Only a little bit of her and Jean this week, but I like what we get.  The two women recognize how different they are but appreciate that about each other, knowing they’ll need both their strengths to see this thing through.  Most of the episode, though, Sandy is on her own dealing with some heavy stuff.  A long stretch of this plotline very effectively intercuts between Sandy listening to a tape of an interrogation and the interrogation itself.  In my opinion, it’s a strong piece of storytelling, really well-done.  On both sides of the story, the emotion is deservedly earned.

Jodie Whittaker has a chance to display some really fine acting here, fairly subtle but heartfelt.  As she listens to the tape, she only hears the scenes that we the audience are witnessing through the intercut, but you can watch the story playing out on her face.  I also really love a scene where she’s reeling with what’s happening at the agency but is desperately trying to hold it together in front of her family.  Great, great work there.

Countdown to Thirteen: The Assets: Episode 5 – “Check Mate” (2014)

Since I missed yesterday's News Satire Roundup (which I posted earlier today,) I'm throwing in this weeks Countdown to Thirteen post as well.

 

Sure, it feels a little premature to name the fifth episode of an eight-episode miniseries “Check Mate,” but it’s pretty well earned.  This is a good one that plays to what I think are the show’s main strengths:  the investigation into the mole and the shading in the drama playing out among the minor characters.

With Jean now officially leading the investigation, she has the team probe possible sources of the breach.  But while they work, the KGB is hard at it as well, doing everything they can to overwhelm/confuse the CIA as a means of protecting their own asset (the mole) after having acted too quickly and noticeably on their information.  Sandy and Jean, although initially at odds with one another, begin to find common ground.

So, looks like we’re getting option 3:  Jean and Sandy team-up!  That was the one I was pulling for, and I’m glad; I was a little disappointed to see Sandy and Jean butting heads so much in the previous episode.  And generally, I like how Jean is shaping up here.  The “Sister Ursula as an American CIA officer in the ‘80s” thing isn’t her – rather, that’s merely Sandy’s initial assessment of her.  She’s still kind of prickly and non-ingratiating, but there’s a more interesting story going on.

After a couple of lighter episodes, Sandy is back with a vengeance.  She’s great here – she works hard in the investigation (even if, at first, it’s only to prove Jean wrong,) and she again uses her savviness to find a window into what the KGB is doing.  She’s a smart woman all around, but she’s particularly smart about people, and that’s where she always shines the most.  She also goes to bat for her theories and, probably most significantly, she recognizes that she and Jean need to get past their differences for the good of the investigation.  It’s true that a lot of the outright testiness is actually on Sandy’s side – Jean is more socially-awkward than imperious, and her unfiltered criticism is really her attempt to help Sandy reach her full potential – but in a way, that makes it an even bigger move on her part.  Sandy’s been the one fueling the issues between them, but she realizes that it’s doing the investigation a disservice and it can’t go on.  Nice bit of character growth there.

I also like the other side of things, from the KGB end.  This episode has a lot of cool, sneaky spy stuff, and I love that sort of thing.  I also continue to appreciate the way the show spends time with minor characters, like the assets (the CIA folks are the main movers of the plot, but it’s the assets whose lives are hanging in the balance,) fleshing them out in small but effective ways and making us care about what happens to them.

Countdown to Thirteen: The Assets: Episode 4 – “What’s Done is Done” (2014)

My interest waned a little on this one, if only because I’d rather hear about the investigation into the mole than the mole themselves, and they’re heavily featured here (also, given all the generally-tense behavior and their shifty facial expressions in reaction shots, I find it difficult to believe they could convince anyone they’re not hiding something major.)  The other plot threads are the main draw for me here.

With the arrival of Jean, a topnotch CIA officer brought in to head the investigation into the mole, said mole is thrown into a panic.  As the noose seems to start tightening, they look for an exit strategy.  Sandy clashes with Jean, and the defector is forced to deal with the fallout of a decision he made at the end of the last episode.

Like I said, the mole themselves don’t do much for me.  I’m all about watching smart agents try to root them out and a lot less so about watching them sweat.  But that’s a lot of what we get in this episode, both in the present-day and in the flashbacks (which breaks the pattern of the flashbacks exploring minor characters instead of those in the main cast.)

So far, Harriet Walter’s Jean basically feels like who Sister Ursula (her character from Call the Midwife) would be if she were an American CIA officer in the ‘80s:  a hard-edged stickler who feels she’s there to save the poor fools (i.e. the CIA) from themselves.  It’s clear that Sandy is no fan of hers, if only because she tends to bulldoze over everyone else’s hard work.  It remains to be seen whether the story will be about Sandy proving herself at Jean’s expense, proving herself and winning Jean’s approval, or learning to get past her differences with Jean and teaming up to find the mole together.  I feel like it’s gotta be one of the three, but I’m not sure which yet (although, given that the series was inspired by a book written by the real Sandy and Jean, I’m leaning towards a resolution in which they work together.)

Overall, though, not a lot for Sandy to do, which is disappointing.  After starting strong on her character, I feel like she’s getting a little lost in the shuffle.  Here, she mainly trades veiled barbs with Jean and has some ancillary involvement in the subplot about the defector (my favorite plot this episode, but that’s more about how it shakes out in general and less about Sandy’s involvement specifically.)

Countdown to Thirteen: The Assets: Episode 3 – “Trip to Vienna” (2014)

This was a slightly odd episode – in some ways, it feels like a bit of a tangent, but it others, it most definitely feels like it’s setting the major wheels into motion.  I’m curious to see where we go from here.

Debriefing with the CIA’s new defector has stalled, as he’s making demands that are hard to fulfill.  However, intel he revealed in the previous episode has led the agency to put a pair of fresh eyes on Edward, a disgruntled ex-agent who may have given away state secrets.  Sandy looks for signs that an asset is reaching out, and another agent, Art, wants to hit the problem harder.  The episode ends on the introduction of what promises to be a new key player.

I don’t know why the flashback structure of this series feels so novel to me – plenty of shows use regular flashbacks.  I suppose the difference is that, while shows like Lost and Once Upon a Time use flashbacks to poke around in the backstories of their major characters, all of The Assets’s flashbacks, so far, have been story-driven, focus on less prominent characters, and feature only fleeting appearances from the main cast.  Here, for instance, we look at Edward and the circumstances that led to his dismissal from the agency.  It’s immediately relevant to the plot at hand, and what happened then has bearing on what happens now.  At any rate, I’m liking how the show is employing the technique.

After two episodes that had a pretty strong forward momentum, this one feels more like it’s spreading outward.  The different parts of the plot don’t all fit together quite as well, and even though there’s some interesting stuff happening, elements of it do feel like a detour.  This episode also has the smallest role so far for Jodie Whittaker, with Sandy occupying what’s probably the C-plot.  What she does is still pretty cool – using her instincts, knowhow, and tenacity to sniff out a potential distress call – but there isn’t much of it.  Since I’m already a definite fan of Sandy, that’s a little disappointing.

The ending, though, is solid, and it feels like a decisive action on the chess board, like things are coming together.  Plus, the final shot gives us a glimpse at another talented British performer gracing the scene:  Harriet Walter.  I’ve seen her in all kinds of stuff, from Downton Abbey to Call the Midwife to Little Dorrit, but I know her best as a pitch-perfect Fanny Dashwood in the Emma Thompson/Kate Winslet Sense and Sensibility.