The Endgame: Pilot Episode (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, NBC-TV, originally aired February 21, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. my husband Charles retreated to the bedroom to call his mother and I started flipping through the channels, where I found a surprise on NBC: a rerun of last Monday’s highly publicized new series The Endgame, directed by Justin Lin of the Fast and Furious series based on a script by Nicholas Wootton and Jake Coburn, who also get producer credit on the show. It’s all about the clash of wills between super-heroine and super-villainess: the super-villainess is Elena Fedorova (Morena Baccarin, who also got a co-producer credit), icy brunette with a flap-open top that looks like a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen and matching blue skirt. She plays the part so icily it looks like she could have sunk the Titanic and she supposedly heads a mercenary army of international fighters who can be identified only by the tattoos on their wrists. The super-heroine who takes her on is FBI agent Val Turner (Ryan Michelle Bathe), who alone of all her colleagues in the Bureau has an idea of what she’s up against in Elena, who somehow manages despite being in custody when the show opens (she was actually kidnapped by the U.S. government: none of that errant nonsense about due process here!), to activate an elaborate revenge plot involving the robbing of seven banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve. Where this scores is in the battle of wills between Fedorova and Turner, including Turner’s determination to get to the bottom of things and find out just what Fedorova’s ultimate motive is, and Fedorova’s striking appearance.

We get a lot of shots of Morena Baccarin’s chest, including those spill-over breast shots straight male viewers love, and though it’s unclear whether the Mata Hari gimmick of seducing men in order to win their cooperation is part of her arsenal, she does stick out her kneecap in a strikingly sexualized pose even though it’s not clear what she hopes to accomplish by looking this way. (Maybe it’s just par for the course for a female super-villain, or she’s keeping up her bad-girl “chops” up in case she needs to seduce someone in the future even though it’s hard to see which one of the male dramatis personae she would have any reason to get in her orbit.) Aside from that, The Endgame is a pretty standard cops-and-robbers tale updated for the modern age; early on we see FBI Special Agent Turner’s husband Oscar, also an FBI agent until he was caught taking bribes from a drug cartel. In the middle of the episode we learn he’s hired a high-priced divorce attorney to weasel out of his marriage with as much money as he can get out of her. Later she discovers that the divorce lawyer who’s taken her husband’s case is the law partner of Fedorova’s attorney, and if that isn’t enough twisting the knife in for you Fedorova tells Turner that she framed her husband in the first place so her bosses at the FBI would wonder if she were dirty. The Endgame also contains some big action set-pieces, including a couple of car chases just to remind viewers what Justin Lin is famous for, and as it stands it’s quality entertainment but little more than that – though the idea of a Russian super-villainess who learned her craft from her father, who until his own death trained her to be an assassin because he knew she would need those skills to survive in post-Soviet Russia seems awfully timely now in ways the makers of this show couldn’t have possibly guessed at, much less intended!