Written by OK, No Pete this week, so bear with me. It took me a bit longer to put everything together writing solo and the pictures offered by AMC were all of Will looking paranoid, so I skipped it.
Recap of “Look at the Ant”
We open on a gloved hand picking a lock. It turns out to belong to Kale Ingram and the lock he picks leads him to one Will Travers’ home. WHO IS THIS GUY!? Things get more twisty later as we see Maggie in Will’s office snooping around as well. When he interrupts her, she says she was there to invite him to a dinner at Kale’s. Weird dinner parties commence! As Will attends Kale’s house for a little white bean salad, things are by turns awkward and confusing. First we meet Kale’s life partner who is NOT what I expected, then Kale does his intimidation move while asking if Will enjoys white bean salad. Then Will uses a slime mold as an analogy to a terrorist organization (You can’t ever kill the slime mold by killing individual parties to the mold, you have to attack the organism as a whole, etc.)
THEN Kale breaks it down, his partner leaves the table and Kale basically lays it out for Will. Bloom was in a car accident with a man named Edward Roy (the unnamed man in the laundromat, gym from the last few episodes, aka Clay Davis). Kale offers his assistance and tells Will to track down Roy and find out who he was working for. He also mentions Will should not work at home because he is under surveillance (CAUSE HE BROKE IN AND KNOWS!). Will starts to get a bit freaked out and spends the next act of the show checking his house for bugs, freaking out, and researching Edward Roy in a gamer lounge. His paranoia is PALPABLE. And with good reason as we see when he leaves he is being followed. He confronts the tail, snaps his picture, and takes off, holding him at bay with David’s gun. When Will returns to API, Kale and he discuss his findings on the rooftop: Roy is ex-CIA and runs a security group called Garson which was purchased by Atlas McDowell.
Love is in the air for Maggie as she gets bored with her life once her ex has Sophie, her daughter, for a night. She calls Will and asks him for a drink, but he’s knee deep in BUGGING out (get it!?) at that point and declines. So she goes with option number two: some dude from her class. Things get saucy thanks to some wine and Scrabble (most erotic board game). They end up sleeping together just in time for Will’s freak out to ratchet up to the point that he seeks her out. He visits, hears another man’s voice and looks 31 flavors of disappointed. He leaves and she boots no-name classmate out on his hide. Maggie and Will share an awkward exchange at work the next day and things between them see stalled for the time being.
The API Crew (Miles, Tanya, Grant) are gathered at work today to prepare for the marriage of George Beck’s son. Miles decides to stay late in order to finish preparation and witness the ceremony firsthand while Grant and Tanya ship off to less boring pastures. Miles’ late night fun at API takes a turn when he realizes the wedding guests are speaking Urdu, a language which he does not. He rushes through API and finds a lone other soul, who luckily does speak the language in question. They spend the evening together, she translating his Urdu, he quietly falling for her. Which we see in the moment when George Beck is giving a speech about love and his son and Miles just glosses over as she translates the speech for (to) him. Also of note from their translation: a discussion of “The Foundation” seemed to be of importance/intrigue to Miles and his new friend.
Katherine continues her search for clues into her husband’s suicide. She takes the lead from the newspaper clipping found in at MRQ Alternatives and seeks out the suicidal professor’s wife. She finds Mrs. Alex Bradley and asks her whether she knew of any connection between their deceased spouses. She did not. Unwilling to let sleeping dogs lie, Katherine returned home and re-read the news clipping. She noticed that Mr. Bradley was on the board of something called Atlas McDowell (coming up a lot tonight!), which by gum, her husband had a trinket from. She returned to discuss this with Alex who commenced rambling about how their husbands were cowards. She apologizes before showing Katherine some of Mr. Bradley’s things, including a four-leaf clover which sets Katherine off. She leaves immediately. Too quick, in fact, as we see Mrs. Bradley pull out the now familiar photo of boys ready to swim.
Discussion
Another deep episode to dig into. I’m not even sure what to focus on, but I think what I’d like to look at is the continuing examination of fractured relationships or even fragments of fractured relationships. I’ll just pick at some interesting notions we saw here and try to keep it short then head to the questions this episode raised for me.
Will-Maggie: This relationship was budding until Will shunned her in his paranoid state following dinner at Kale’s. Then she called the “sure thing” and made an apparent mistake with him. Will shows up and things get awkward in a HURRY. It looks like this once-potential romance has hit a snag. What I wonder about here is how this plays with Maggie’s job. I’m still not convinced her motives are purely personal after that sit-down she had with Kale.
Kale-Donald Bloom: Well this one is fishing a bit, but it certainly appeared that Bloom and Kale had an extracurricular rapport when they met for dinner. It also seemed like he felt a twinge of jealousy following the Spangler-Roy- Bloom tete-a-tete-a-tete from last week’s episode. That jealousy may have played out this week in Kale’s not-so-selfless act of volunteerism to Will’s cause. I just know Kale isn’t all he’s cracked up to be, SOMETHING is going on with that guy.
Katherine-Tom: Well, I gain a little more faith in this relationship every week. And that faith was all set in motion by the moves Tom made to give Katherine the clues she needed to follow his trail. Notwithstanding the fact that he had a completely secret life in which he may have secretly controlled governmental rises and falls, she seems committed to him. I am afraid for her in what she might uncover, not only for her safety (these folks tend to NOT mess around) but in what she may find about her husband. She may be romanticizing his memory, but it seems to me this thing was real.
Questions
- Just what ARE Kale’s motives?
I have no idea. I cannot put a pin in this guy. He is shifty. He makes backhanded plays, he surprises me at every turn, and frankly I think he might be a little confused. Perhaps Kale really is the new Ed Bancroft and I’ve got to learn to trust him, but that seems nearly impossible. There’s a lot to Kale and we’ve already seen a bunch of it, but I’m having trouble connecting the dots! - Are “The Foundation” and Atlas McDowell one and the same?
This wasn’t my first thought, but it was pretty close. And now I can’t shake the thought that the two are related. I don’t know how yet, but I know that Atlas is involved in some weird/shady stuff and that it sounds like the name of a foundation from everything we know about it (ALMOST NOTHING). It also sounds like an awesome superhero secret identity. - Is Will sane enough to keep going?
I think this was the first episode to reallllly tap into the idea of a collective paranoia when Will was freaking out. I loved how the scenes were shot hastily and James Badge Dale did a great job of being harried and overly watchful. Will he keep it together? Yeah I think he will, despite his new-found anxiety, he was able to keep it together enough to shake the tail in an aggressive manner, he just needs to keep a cooler head and realize that he’s in a big boiler pot now.
