Episode Title: "Red Team III"
Episode Grade: A-
It is striking that "Red Team III", the most important episode of this season and one of the series' best, spends precious little time on the actual event that has defined the entire season. Indeed, the airing of News Night's report on Operation Genoa is dispatched over a couple minutes, with some overly portentous music and quick camera cuts among stern, worried people.
"Red Team III," instead, is concerned primarily with the aftermath of the Genoa disaster and how the staff reacts when the story starts to fall apart. It is a flashback episode, told in the waning moments of the final depositions conducted by the attorney played by Marcia Gay Harden. As a result, there's some story furniture that has be arranged before we can move through the episode, some reminders the audience has to be provided with so that we remember what has gone into Genoa so far.
Don reminds us of the evidence. Then Neal. Then Sloan. Then Don again. This is tedious at first, but then it becomes clear what the show is doing: reminding us of how damn solid the entire story seems to be. We have two eyewitnesses from the operation. We have Marine General Stephen Root. We have the budget document Charlie's source provided.
Stacked one on top of the other, the entire structure of Genoa seems sound, and it's easy for the audience to see how the newsroom staff (including Will, brought in for the first time) believes the same thing. And that makes the revelation that the structure is a house of cards all the more devastating, even if, technically, this isn't a revelation at all; we've known it since the beginning.
So they run the story, and General Root immediately calls to complain that he never said what he was shown on the show to have said. The staff can shrug this off, but then the Pentagon issues a belated response, threatening legal action and absolutely denying the story.
Things only truly start to disintegrate when Sweeney, the first to come forward with confirmation of the use of sarin gas, does another interview on the network and reveals (for the first time) that he had suffered a traumatic brain injury in a previous fire fight. The primary symptom of a TBI, it turns out, is memory loss.
And this is where the episode, more workmanlike than inspired to this point, kicks into gear. Emily Mortimer does what is undoubtedly her best work in this episode, especially in a scene where she essentially cross-examines herself and finds all the flaws of her interview with Private Valenzuela, the other participant in Genoa who came forward to confirm the story.
Then the capper: Charlie meets with his source, a man named Shepherd, to get confirmation that the story is still sound. Instead, "Shep" puts a dagger in it. His son was an intern at ACN, and he was fired for posting critical things about Will's show on the internet. Things Charlie agreed with, no doubt, but interns get fired for criticizing their networks online.
Charlie didn't fire the kid, but Shepherd holds him responsible for the fact that his son died of a heroin overdose after being fired. And so he did the one thing he knew would hurt Charlie the most: he forged the mission document.
And then MacKenzie discovers what Jerry Dantana did to the footage of his interview with General Root, thanks to the shot clock at the bottom of the basketball game that was going on in the background. Her tearful reaction, and the look on her face when she tells Will, is heartbreaking, and makes up for a lot of fairly pedestrian work Mortimer had turned in prior to this episode.
The episode ends on what is theoretically a stirring note; Jane Fonda, playing the head of the network, storms in and refuses to accept resignations from Will, Charlie and MacKenzie. She refuses to settle with Dantana, who has filed a wrongful termination suit alleging he was scapegoated for the institutional failure that caused the Genoa debacle. And in response to Charlie pointing out that they no longer have the trust of the public, Fonda ends the episode with, "So, get it back!"
But however that's supposed to resonate with the audience, the feel and smell of failure is too heavy on this episode to be dismissed by one amusing scene with Jane Fonda playing a drunken businesswoman. "Red Team III" is an episode about the aftermath of a career-shattering mistake, and it is striking and compelling as a result.
Notes
- Turns out Will heard similar rumors about Genoa from a source of his own. Who turns out to be Shepherd. Whoops.
- I really like Thomas Sadoski's incredulity in the opening deposition, when he's trying to convey just how insane it is that Dantana is suing.
- More solid work from Hamish Linklater, who does a great job in the early scenes with Red Team III playing a character who is genuinely aggrieved at his colleagues' skepticism while knowing what he did.
- What doesn't work here: Jim is right from the beginning and suspects the story is wrong, all without giving any reasonable basis for his conviction. Jim's the most troublesome character on the show, and he's worth a longer discussion at some point.
- Not a lot of laugh out loud comedy in this one, but I did enjoy Sloan pointing out to Don that she would survive in prison just fine by pulling a Shawshank Redemption and doing the warden's taxes. "What are you gonna do, produce their nightly news show?"
- So, that game in the background? Definitely Florida-Kentucky. Once again, Gator basketball saves the day.
No comments:
Post a Comment