Written by “Connect the Dots” Recap
The episode opens with an exchange between Will and Bancroft, but not in the familiar environs of Bancroft’s home. Bancroft is out and about, which clearly startles Will. Bancroft asks Will about the 7 names and Will tells him of Donald Bloom’s brief history. Bancroft then tells him to go after the White Papers regarding Houston because Bloom had frequented that area. Wikipedia tells me that White Papers are an “authoritative report or guide that often addresses issues and how to solve them.” Thanks to his lofty new position at API, Will has access to said White Papers and takes a look at them. He finds that David wrote the only paper that mentions Houston and that it’s missing with no trace of being checked out. After Bancroft does some leg work to find Bloom’s hotel, Will is hot on his trail. Bloom realizes he’s being tailed, but can’t shake Will and ends up in a restaurant meeting none other than Kale Ingram who spies Will before he can jet. More on Kale in a bit. Back at API, Will questions Maggie about Kale in a heated scene (part passion, part tension) then quickly asks for his computer pal to run a search of Bloom and Ingram, they return one classified CIA result, but can’t open it without being traced.
In the meantime, Kale questions Spangler about loose ends surrounding David’s death. Spangler assures him things are under control and sheds a White Paper entitled “The Houston Problem.” Will returns to Bancroft do deliver the news, but finds that Ed has gone off on a tangent, spinning a wild yarn about Bloom, the CIA, etc. Will lies to Ed telling him that the Donald Bloom he found is a kid, Ed breaks down over David’s death.
Connecting the Dots (Craig Blankenhorn/AMC)
Will attends Spangler’s wife’s charity bash. Here he has a chance meeting with Katherine Rhumor over vodka, only a fleeting encounter. Later at the party, Will overhears Spangler say “If we don’t do it, who will?” Spangler spies him spying and invites him in to meet James Wheeler and R.C. Gilbert. As Will leaves, another man enters and lets Spangler and co. know “The squalls have been shipped,” which Spangler celebrates with a cheers. Two enlightening encounters with Kale later, we see Will deep into the conspiracy at his house when he hears a noise, pops up from the floor, and we fade to black.
BOOZEHOUND (Craig Blankenhorn/AMC)
At API, Will and the gang are re-focused on George and Yuri, but they seem stuck…until Tanya makes the suggestion that they focus on George, instead of Yuri. Will agrees with her and wants her to present it to Spangler. She gives it a test-run against Grant and Miles who shred it to pieces. Tanya is incredulous about the attacking nature when she runs into Will later. Will gives her a speech about fear in order to get her PUMPED for her big Spangler showdown. Luckily, she kills it with Spangler and he greenlights her strategy. She then returns to her office and downs an airplane bottle in “celebration.” Despite Tanya’s performance, Will suggests to Kale that she be included in the next round of drug testing. We also find out that George has been meeting with some more unseemly characters and well, Tanya was RIGHT.
In Katherine’s world, we find her with a financial adviser who suggests she dump MRQ Alternatives because it was a losing investment. MRQ just happens to be the business Tom switched over to Katherine a few days before his death. She asks Wheeler what he knows and he suggests she just drop it like the adviser said. She decides to visit the company and finds a locked file cabinet which she opens by using their anniversary on the combo lock. In the files, she finds a newspaper clipping about a CCNY professor whose death was ruled a suicide. Incidentally, his death occurred the day before the Berlin Wall fell. Coincidence? Paranoid me thinks no!
Discussion
And so, finally, we have been given some answers–and some fairly definitive ones. Senator Clay Davis is reporting his surveillance of Will to Spangler. Very possibly, it was Spangler whom Davis spoke with at the end of the episode from a couple of weeks ago when saying that Will was in cahoots with Bancroft. A high-profile government assassination mission is almost surely afoot and picking up speed, and David may have had much more to do with it than we imagined earlier. And Kale…
Well, let’s stick with Kale. What, concretely, do we learn about him from this episode? A few crucially important expository biographical facts–ex-CIA, black ops, Recruited by Spangler sometime in the 80s to come to API, a longstanding professional relationship with Donald Bloom, fellow CIA killer and mystery man of last week’s episode. All of which is helpful, especially the CIA part, though it doesn’t explain why Kale dresses like he’s going off to teach an acting class at NYU. Knowing now what we do, though, more questions arise, and halfway through the season I’m as in the dark now as I was in the beginning as to his motives, as well as where he falls in the API pecking order. Knowing–as Bancroft figured out for us–that the previous appearances of mysteriously coordinated crossword clues in 1983 (authored by Bancroft) signaled the go-codes for a series of covert assassinations, and that it was the appearance of a similar series of codes that touched of the series with David’s (and very possibly Tom’s) death, how much Kale knows is a mystery. Consider:
- When David shows the crosswords Will has deciphered to Kale in the Pilot, he is alarmed enough by them to take them upstairs to Spangler. When Spangler asks him if there has been any movement on them later on , he remarks that it is “all quiet.” Does he think it is? Does he know it isn’t?
- From this episode, it is strongly hinted at that both Kale and Bloom were involved in the prior campaign, given that both were stationed in Beirut in the 1980s, around the time when America’s covert reprisal campaign against Hezbollah. Kale may have recognized the codes back then, especially if he was involved in the campaign, but it doesn’t seem like he would now. It is Bloom after all, not Kale, who has been hopping between Nigeria, Houston, and the Middle East. How much would Kale likely know about the current camaign? Spangler certainly is in the loop, which leads me to my next point.
- Just when we think from this episode that Kale really has one up on everybody at API, we see that Spangler and Bloom have one up on him, meeting in a derelict high school gym, discussing the status of their surveillance of Will, in which they shift their attention to Katherine.
More like Star Spangler Killer. AMIRIGHT? (Craig Blankenhorn/AMC)
Most fascinating is his cat-and-mouse game with Will, after Will has seen him with Bloom. At the charity event he tells Will that he doesn’t want to see him get involved in any “mayhem” (Will has already gotten the picture here, and has gone to Bancroft to try on throw him off the trail–more on that in a bit). This I read less as a threat than as a warning, and a specific one. Remember, as soon as Will spots him with Bloom, he goes to Spangler and asks point blank, flustered for the first time, if he is sure that David’s loose ends have been tied up. These “loose ends,” of course, are whatever has been left behind after David’s discovery of the go-codes got him killed. Is Kale protecting Will? Does he suspect that he is onto the scheme as well? And, in warning Will to stay away, is he more drawn into the scheme itself? Again, very possible. That glimpse of Kale we get as the rest are coming out of the meeting, on the outside looking in, unfamiliar, to say the least.
Kale says MEOW to Will (David M. Russell/AMC)
Before leaving off with my questions to chew on for next week, a few stray comments:
- Boy, Tanya is turning into a complicated character, isn’t she? The last couple episodes have given her special focus, which makes me wonder if the show has bigger things in store for her, or if it is just doing its due diligence making sure each of team members gets their moments in the sun (if so, Grant is up next). Even so, Maggie (and by association Kale) take great interest in how she’s doing–though perhaps it’s because she’s new to the squad. (It also makes me wonder how seriously they vetted her as a poorly concealed substance abuse problem would be pretty apparent. Substance issues aside, I cheered for her when she convinced Spangler to throw the weight of their investigation to Beck, and Will’s good fear/bad fear speech was the best writing of the week. Speaking of–
- I said last week that I didn’t think the Beck investigation was central to the season’s plot. With the way things came together this week, I’m willing to rethink that. The revelation at the end that Beck has been meeting with Iranian intelligence could wrap up very easily into the rest of the plot.
- Another of my questions from last week was answered–When will Katherine take a look at MRQ Alternatives? All we learn, however, is that MRQ used to make clothes, and wasn’t very successful at it. I had great fun pausing the episode to see what I could glean from the clipping she pulls out of Tom’s locked file.
Questions of the Week:
Why did Will purposely throw Bancroft off of Bloom’s trail?
Pete: To me the answer seems clear–Will new he was being followed, assumed he was being bugged, and needed to disabuse, even temporarily, the notion that he was honing in on the thing Spangler & Co. don’t want him finding out. It seems to have worked for now–Spangler tells Senator Clay Davis to concentrate on Katherine Rhumor. We’ll see how long this ruse holds up.
Seth: I have to ardently disagree. I think Will saw that Bancroft was falling off the deep end again, as he was earlier in his life and wanted to stop production on A Beautiful Mind 2: Bancroft’s Batty Brain. It was more related to personal feelings about wanting to protect Bancroft from himself than from anyone else.
Who wrote the go-code?
Pete: Perhaps surprisingly, I’ve only starting thinking about this now. When Ed Bancroft wrote the last one, he was (I believe) at API in his pre-psycho Jon Nash days. Is the new one from within API also? If so, from whom? Kale seems unlikely, unless he’s pulling one hell of a long con on us all by drawing everyone else out into the open so he can see who his potential enemies/obstacles are. Spangler is a possibility. A sexy possibility is David himself, though I really haven’t thought this through too much–and David may not have been quite high enough at API for have this kind of clout. Spangler, to me, seems the most likely culprit–or someone we have yet to meet.
Seth: Good question and I honestly have no good answer. Of the folks we’ve met at API, right now, Kale seems most likely to me. He is a smart guy with high clearance who knew what he saw immediately, but we found out this week, he’s still under Spangler’s thumb a bit. I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out especially considering Kale’s “threat” toward Will this week. He clearly knows Will is no commoner.
Did David knowingly–or unknowingly–play a role in his own death?
Pete: I’m fascinated by this–though a little too tired at this late hour to really dive more deeply into it. It was clear from the first episode, though, that David knew his time was up. I said in an earlier post that David left a series of seemingly frivolous messages for Will in an effort to weed out anyone besides Will that might try to decipher them. I still stand by this. Knowing now about David’s white paper and its disappearance convinces me more–I think David knew his work connected with this “Houston Problem” was going to be destroyed, and he must communicate its essential points to Will in other ways. WE will see if future weeks vindicate me on this count.
Seth: I think he certainly unwittingly did and he knew about it ahead of time. He had to have had some idea that he was going down to set up all of this clues and games for Will. David’s inclusion of Will in the conspiracy makes sense, but also confuses me. I thought he wanted to protect Will by showing Kale the crossword and claiming the work himself, but all of that is undone by all of the puzzles, clues, and games David left behind to then wrap Will up in it. David knew the proverbial poo was hitting the fan, but I don’t think he pushed himself into it voluntarily.
I think our stride is appearing here at The 5th Leaf! Tune in next week for some more heady discussion following Rubicon.
