Well, it looks like the influx of new characters isn’t over yet. In the middle of “Government Property,” the show plops us into a meeting between two people we’ve never seen before: Tomás Bala (Rob Heaps) and his old university friend Elliot Cooke, the latter of whom works for the foreign secretary. Tomás’s dictator father was convicted at the Hague for war crimes, and he seems keen to help him return to power using his connections. But Elliot is no help, and based on what we see later in the episode, Tomás may need to resort to messier, more complicated ways of getting stuff done.
Enter his cousin Markus (Michael Malarkey), a trained military man who oversees the theft of a truck one late night for its mysterious contents (quite possibly chemical weapons) — and kills the innocent drivers when one of his cronies makes the mistake of saying Markus’s name out loud. We don’t know the depth of these characters’ involvement in Project Foxglove yet or exactly how this heist ties into everything else going on, but Markus’s cold efficiency tells us everything we need to know about him.
I’m also starting to enjoy Noor and her tentative, badly timed romance with Javad. They go on their first date in this episode, a lovely walk where they discuss the pressures they’re under at home and at work. Sparks are flying between the two, but the show isn’t rushing their relationship. Noor has one reason to maintain some distance: She doesn’t want to involve him in her spying. Just earlier that day, she tagged Abbas’s coat and followed him and Javad to an off-the-books meeting with the man who killed Alice in Bangkok. She got photos of the man along with proof that Abbas left with his briefcase, but only narrowly escaped without being spotted. (And it seems like Javad sort of did spot her.) Noor’s handler has a very high bar for what constitutes valuable intelligence, though, and this doesn’t clear it. If she had photos of the actual contents of that handed-off briefcase, on the other hand …
Noor has been all alone in this mission to spy on the ambassador and save her family, without anyone she can speak to openly besides a handler who has no time or affection to spare. So it’s good news that Night Action is taking over her case and Peter and Rose will meet her next episode, bringing together the two halves of this season. It turns out Abbas’s meeting this afternoon is tied directly to Warren and the mission that went bad in Bangkok.
The first ten minutes of the episode resolve the cliffhanger from last time. When Peter answers the phone in Warren’s pocket, he’s greeted by the mysterious buyer he spotted in Bangkok — the same guy, it turns out, who originally called Rose in an effort to track Peter down. Now he’s insistent that Peter calmly open the door for his men and tell them exactly what information Warren told him. Either way, of course, Peter is doomed. He knows what the buyer looks like, which makes him a threat that must be neutralized. But does he want Rose to survive? The buyer’s men are tailing her, too.
From here, Peter and Rose separately manage to keep themselves alive, each running from gunmen. As self-sufficient as Rose is, it’s nice to see Peter coaching her over the phone again, a callback to the first episode of the show. Instead of guiding her to the best hiding place in an empty cabin, though, he’s guiding her through tourist shops and Chinese restaurant kitchens, helping her change her look and pick up a weapon along the way. When Alice’s killer finally catches up with Rose anyway, she manages to stick him in the shoulder with the knife she grabbed. But it takes a last-minute assist from a nearby Catherine to really lose the men.
Due to Diane Farr-related trauma, Peter has some trust issues, and he’s reluctant to open up to Catherine about the testimony from Warren that he taped before the man died. During their meeting at Brooklyn Bridge Park, she denies any knowledge of a conspiracy in the CIA. But it goes both ways; from the outside, Peter doesn’t look very trustworthy, either. They’ll need to trust each other at least a little bit if they want to make any progress.
Really, “Government Property” is about the good guys learning to establish a united front for the mission ahead. Peter and Rose don’t have the resources to work entirely on their own; they need someone like Noor inside the embassy and someone like Catherine to provide cash, transpo, and intel while they work on IDing the buyer.
The other variable here is Rose herself: She’s supposed to return to California, where she can better manage her post-traumatic stress and those recurring nightmares. As she reveals to Peter, she did try to start another company of her own, but blew her one shot by having a panic attack on the day of an investor meeting. Now, she’s doing better — is it worth risking that by plunging back into a life of danger? Of course, it’s a foregone conclusion that Rose will choose to stay by the end of the episode, so watching her waffle back and forth is pretty tedious. Her scary-advanced tech is reason enough to keep her around.
Thanks to that tech, Peter and Rose are finally able to ID the man who killed Alice and keeps showing up everywhere: Solomon Vega, a supposedly dead ex-Marine who goes by many names. He left behind a sister named Celeste and vanished without a trace, any mention of his life wiped by someone high up.
Our dynamic duo stops by Celeste’s home to snoop around using aliases and ask her some questions about her brother, who she says died of suicide following five tours in Afghanistan. He used to take care of her after she lost her legs in a hit-and-run, and his VA benefits have been a godsend. Now she can afford to run a small online homemade soap shop without doing much else. But some mild mail fraud exposes the truth: She gets large recurring payments from something called KinCare Trust, which could lead them to Solomon’s employer.
“Government Property” makes some real progress in sketching out the broader contours of this conspiracy, even if we can’t quite see how the different threads intertwine yet. Hopefully now that Rose and Catherine are in New York to stay, the plot can really get moving.
Classified Information
• The show keeps including these opening flashbacks, this time with Rose accepting her lead programmer job, but none of them really convey as much as they could.
• Will Rose be able to regain control of the algorithm despite her boss shutting her out? She’s not officially fired yet, but there is reason for concern.
• “I’ve felt safer in the past 12 hours than I have in the last nine months.” Sure about that, Rose? You were sobbing in your sleep last night.
• The trauma stuff isn’t quite landing for me when it comes to Peter. I buy that he’d be haunted by failing to save Alice, sure, but we haven’t seen much of her, so it’s hard for us to understand how close they were. Rose says that Peter didn’t get help after Camp David the way she did, but I’m not sure she’s so much better-adjusted than him. Either way, I’ll be curious to see if he and Catherine get realer with each other in the coming episodes.
• Apparently, Chelsea Arrington is on the campaign trail with one of the presidential candidates, so here’s our explanation for her absence (not that she’d be around anyway, considering Rose decided to stay). Appreciate a season one shout-out, I suppose.