Spycraft requires attention to detail. So, in the spirt of The Old Man, let’s pay attention. Let’s do a close reading of Dan Chase’s conversation with the show’s eponymous character and éminence grise, Morgan Bote (Joel Grey, gnomic and fascinating), after Bote tells him no.
In a large and well-appointed room in Bote’s stately home, Chase and his friend turned enemy turned friend again, Harold Harper, have come to beg Bote to reverse the sanctions he has placed on Faraz Hamzad and his people, allowing them to buy off the Taliban and save not only their own lives, but that of Faraz’s daughter — raised by Chase, mentored by Harper — Emily Chase/Angela Adams/Parwana Hamazad.
Bote refuses.
There’s more at stake here than just Hamzad and Chase and Emily and their drama, he tells them. Hamzad, it turns out, is moving to transfer control of his lithium deposit to rich Russian asshole Suleyman Pavlovich (Rade Serbedzija). (He showed up in Season 1 as another of Belour Hamzad/Abbey Chase’s conquests in the spy game, a Soviet double agent who helped Hamzad win the war.) Bote can’t bear to let such a man have control of such a resource, so he’s willing to let Hamzad and Emily die; the latter, he says cattily, might have been avoided had he ever been told she was Hamzad’s biological daughter.
That makes Chase mad. “I was putting her life in your hands,” Dan Chase says to Morgan Bote, his mentor turned enemy. “Do you really think I would do that and leave something out that would put her in danger?” He’s speaking with such conviction that it’s hard not to take his word against Bote’s.
He elaborates. “I said she didn’t need to be your granddaughter for you to want to help her, any more than she needed to be my daughter for me to ask.” He’s saying…
Wait. “Granddaughter”? What is he saying?
A few seconds later, he says to Bote, “You can say whatever you want about me, but I always understood the important things — you know that. I fought for them when you told me to. But if your kid can’t count on you, what good is any of that?”
Uh…we’re still talking about you and Emily, right, Dan? Emily’s who needs to count on their father, right, Dan?
As the conversation goes on, Chase’s voice alternate becomes taut with anger or raspy with sadness. His eyes well with tears, then freeze over like ice. His hand flutters around his mouth, his beard, his hair. He’s nervous like we’ve never seen him be nervous before, and we’ve seen him in a lot of places where he should have been very nervous indeed.
“Don’t” — and here he stutters — “Don’t do this because you’re pissed at me. Don’t you do it.”
So. When you think hard about everything Dan does and says above, do you come to the conclusion that when he’s speaking to Morgan Bote, he’s speaking to a mere father figure?
And you know what else calling someone your “old man” can mean, right?
Fast forward a few minutes. Bote is talking to Zoe (Amy Brenneman, stunning and suddenly imposing), Chase’s erstwhile girlfriend, whom he swept out of a life of boredom and into one of intrigue to which she’s taking like a duck to water. Bote is using her as a go-between to deal with Hamzad’s attorney, even. They’ve become close. Close enough that when Bote drops a tough-guy spy one-liner on her, she says, “You sound just like him.” Bote’s reaction is inscrutable; my reaction was the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
The question of whether Morgan Bote is Dan Chase’s father is interesting primarily insofar as it is, still, a question. Leaving the matter so up in the air, so much a question of interpretation of word choice and facial expressions and tone of voice and body language, never giving us a definitive answer or even asking the question in an explicit way…We know the truth is in there somewhere, but at the moment we have no way to get at it based on what director Ute Briesewitz, writers Jonathan E. Steinberg and Craig Silverstein, and actors Jeff Bridges, Joel Grey, Amy Brenneman, and John Lithgow (who has a reaction to it all that could be one of realization or exasperation) have chosen to show us.
It’s like turning the Hellraiser puzzle box around in your hands, unable to figure out which panel to press to access the painful reality hidden within. It’s a lot more rewarding than the umpteenth “I am your father,” that’s for sure. The show has had two secret father reveals already; why not soft-pedal the third, if indeed it is the third at all?
The only reason Chase and Harper wind up at Bote’s at all — and, therefore, are present when assassins burst in and fucking kill him — is because Angela/Emily/Parwana asked them to go. She herself stayed “home” in Afghanistan, where her ties to the ailing Hamzad and the orphaned Farouk are keeping her, along with her conviction that she can somehow be more help there than in some other secret location.
So she’s there when Hamzad succumbs to his gunshot wound. His sister Khadija knows full well he incurred it from Parwana’s American protectors, but she’ll happily pin it on the Taliban to preserve Parwana’s place in the community. But that community only has days, even hours to go before government forces raze it to the ground now that Morgan Bote isn’t alive to lift the sanctions. This was Pavlovich’s goal — but only a secondary one. His dead hitmen’s primary objective was to take out Chase and Harper, and those loose ends remain untied.
From Hamzad’s death to Bote’s assassination to the return of Zoe (and Chase’s dogs!) in the middle of Morgan Bote’s mansion, this episode was full of genuine surprises. Strategically speaking, this was a wise choice — away to compensate for the comparative lack of emotional intensity versus the previous two episodes. (That this counts as less emotionally intense is telling.)
It also marks a series high point for Jeff Bridges as an actor. It’s to his great credit that Chase always seems warmer and livelier than the grizzled old gunslinger cliché he’d be in lesser hands. But in his teary, voice-cracking confrontation with Bote, he’s able to play notes of petulance, abandonment, and righteous oedipal fury we haven’t seen from him before. The results are written all over his face, which has rarely been more compelling to look at than it is in that scene. And those involuntary hand movements — more than anything else, that bit of body language is what had me believing we were witnessing something secret come to light. That’s the kind of storytelling power a good actor brings to the table simply by sitting at it.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
