Truxton invites Will on a business trip to DC, leaving the team to make a very important governmental decision on their own. Katherine's attempt to move on is derailed when she finds a suspi... Read allTruxton invites Will on a business trip to DC, leaving the team to make a very important governmental decision on their own. Katherine's attempt to move on is derailed when she finds a suspicious voicemail on Tom's cell phone from the day before he died.Truxton invites Will on a business trip to DC, leaving the team to make a very important governmental decision on their own. Katherine's attempt to move on is derailed when she finds a suspicious voicemail on Tom's cell phone from the day before he died.
- Maggie Young
- (as Jessica Collins)
- Daniel Burns
- (as Joe Sikora)
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Truxton Spangler: When you left the house this morning wearing that tie, perhaps your wife stopped you in the doorway. Perhaps she told you how good you looked... in that tie. How handsome it was. Now, I'm sure you love your wife; might I suggest you have many reasons to distrust her judgment about that tie? Maybe she has a fond memory of another time you wore it, a sentimental attachment? Or perhaps she knows your tie collection, and she's simply glad you didn't choose one of the ties she dislikes. Perhaps she just sensed you were feeling a little fragile; she felt like bucking you up a little bit.
[PAUSE]
Truxton Spangler: Now imagine for a minute that you sit down here with us, and I say to you how much I admire that tie. Instantly you have another opinion, but... you don't know me. There's nothing personal between us, we have no sartorial history, no emotional attachment. Who's judgment are you going to trust? Mine? Or your wife's?
[PAUSE]
Truxton Spangler: The gentleman to my right is a remarkable intelligence analyst. He is skilled in pattern recognition, systems analysis, emergence theories... but - but, in truth, his greatest asset, for you, is that you don't know him, and he doesn't know you. He doesn't care about you. Or your feelings.
[PAUSE]
Truxton Spangler: He just knows what your tie looks like. You can trust him.
- SoundtracksMain Titles
Written by Peter Nashel
Some fantastic character work here from Michael Cristofer, who plays Spangler. The character is such a bizarre, lonely, cigarette-addicted kook, with a very distinct speech pattern that often makes him come across as aloof and a little spaced-out. But he's also unsettling and intelligent. In an early scene he stresses how he wants API to be independent from the intelligence community:
"Make sure they remember the information they gather is useless unless they have us to make sense of it," he tells Will.
The rest of the episode involves Will and Spangler making their case on behalf of API to unnamed men in blue suits and a variety of military and political higher-ups. Great dialogue abounds as Will is stuck with Spangler's eccentricities in halls of great power and influence, trying to assume his dead mentor's position the best he can.
Meanwhile, the three members of Will's team are given a separate case: a bevy of fresh intel from the CIA on a member of Jemaah Islamiyah; the NSC wants to know whether or not initiate a missile strike on a building the target may or may not be arriving at soon. While the analysts can't tie him directly to any imminent threats against the U.S. and they question the accuracy of the intel, they have to grapple with the fact that he is a known terrorist, an "Al-Qaeda rockstar." But another complication comes when drone images show 10-100 civilians in the target zone, including many children. When it comes to analyzing data, do ethics come into play? And is it worth taking out some civilians just to get at a terrorist?
The beauty of this episode is that the analysts are a world away, unconnected to the events on the ground where the strike may take place... isolated and apart, exactly as Spangler said API should always be. It makes for a riveting episode filled with first-class writing. The screenplay for this one is floating around the net, and aspiring writers would be wise to read it. My favorite episode so far.
- Better_TV
- Apr 9, 2018
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- Runtime45 minutes
- Color