The Endgame, episode 2: "Fairytale Wedding" (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, NBC-TV, aired February 28, 2022)

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

At 10 p.m. my husband Charles was pretty dumbfounded as I changed the channel from MS-NBC to the regular NBC station for the second episode of The Endgame, featuring Morena Baccarin as Elena Fedorova and Ryan Michelle Bathe (a girl named Ryan?) as FBI agent Valerie “Val” Turner, who’s pursuing her with the same steely implacability with which Sherlock Holmes pursued Professor Moriarty. I’ve already commented on the similarity between the antagonism of Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) and Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott) in Law and Order: Organized Crime and the Holmes-Moriarty clash of wills – though Charles has compared it even more to Batman vs. the Joker, especially since both obsessions have a personal motivation (Batman, t/n Bruce Wayne, got into the superhero biz when his parents were murdered by a criminal, and Stabler’s current revenge motive – which quite frankly has made him a less complex and noble character than he was on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit – has been the murder of his wife in the opening sequence of the Organized Crime pilot).

NBC’s executives also probably can’t believe their sheer luck in getting this program on air just as Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, since Elena Fedorova is essentially Putin gender-reassigned, 35 years younger and in a much hotter bod. (I wasn’t surprised at the imdb.com reviews of the first episode, which noted that Morena Baccarin has worn similarly skimpy outfits that show off her breasts in previous shows she’s done.) In this episode she orders the kidnapping of the son of the Homeland Security secretary, a woman who unbeknownst to anyone in the federal government has sold out to the leader of the world’s biggest drug cartel because she needed his help ini keeping her son out of jail when he was busted for coke possession. Elena Fedorova actually has a photo of her receiving the bribe money and handing over the information the cartel owner requested; it’s not clear how she got it but it’s enough for the FBI to arrest the Homeland Security secretary.

Meanwhile, Agent Turner (who’s actually listed in the cast under the name “Fitzgerald” on imdb.com, which I’m guessing is a plot hint that she’s going to resume her pre-marital name once she gets rid of the no-good husband whose divorce suit against her is part of Fedorova’s plot … or one of them) agrees the whereabouts of the secretary’s kidnapped son and even guesses out how to turn off the bomb that’s been strapped around him: Fedorova’s people stashed him inside a vault in the cemetery where Val’s mother is buried, and the password to defuse the bomb is the name of the man who killed Val’s mom. There are also flashes back to the wedding of Elena Fedorova and her boyfriend Sergei in Belarus in 2012 – though someone planted a bomb at the church and it’s not clear whether the wedding actually happened (we do know that Elena and Sergei were late to their wedding because they were fucking in the hills overlooking the church) and whether Sergei was killed that day or later.

The entire suspense of this show is what Elena’s long-term plan really is – that’s the significance of the title The Endgame – and what she hopes to gain by it. Given how often most commentators on MS-NBC and the other all-news cable channels have said that about Putin – specifically what his goal is in attacking Ukraine, what has to happen before he decides he’s done enough, and what his endgame is – it’s almost uncanny how well the series is timed and how much it’s playing into current real-life anxieties about the world and its future. (Putin’s putting Russia’s nuclear weapons force on high alert suggest at least the possibility that his endgame is World War III – and so did the campaign a detachment of Russian troops staged to conquer Chernobyl, or “Chornobyl” as the Ukrainians spell it now, as if there’s something valuable about that pile of nuclear waste that Putin wants for whatever he’s trying to do in Ukraine.) The inevitable comparison between the fictional Elena Fedorova and the real Vladimir Putin – both of whom have launched major operations with catastrophic consequences and are being deliberately ambiguous about just what they’re trying to achieve – give this show a chilling reality it probably didn’t have when series creators Nicholas Wootton and Jake Coburn pitched it to NBC!