The Endgame, Episode 4: "#1 with a Bullet" (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, NBC-TV, aired March 14, 2022)

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

After Mi Vida Loca I watched episode four of The Endgame, “#1 with a Bullet,” in which Elena Fedorova (Morena Baccarin), she of the outfit whose décolletage looks like a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen, has her minions at the first bank she took over (out of seven, all in New York City) knock down a wall to reveal a secret passage leading to a hidden safe. When three FBI agents are inside the bank Elena booby-traps them with laser beams that slowly get closer to them. It reminded my husband Charles of the lectures we heard from science professor Jim Doty at the ConDor science-fiction convention of how big a laser weapon would have to be. It reminded me of at least two of Boris Karloff’s 1930’s films, The Man They Could Not Hang and The Raven – in The Man They Could Not Hang Karloff played a mad scientist who was unjustly executed, brought back to life with his own invention of an “artificial heart,” and used his new-found life extension to lock his real or perceived enemies behind lethal electric-eye beams; and in The Raven Bela Lugosi played an even crazier scientist who had a morbid fascination with Edgar Allan Poe that led him to construct working models of Poe’s torture devices, including a room in his basement whose walls came together and crushed anyone inside.

The good girl, FBI agent Val Turner (Ryan Michelle Bathé), corners one of Fedorova’s men at a marina where he had gone to take his yacht and flee the country, and after talking him out of blowing up everyone in the vicinity with a hand grenade he happens to have on hand (actually she gets Fedorova on the line and she tells the man to stand down), she asks him how to disarm the laser beams and he tells her the beams are harmless and will turn themselves off automatically – which they do. Before that, nowever, Turner’s nemesis, fellow FBI agent Jonathan Doak (Noah Bean), one of the three men trapped behind Fedorova’s supposedly lethal but actually harmless laser beams, confesses that as a young agent, on the order of his immediate supervisor, he was part of a drug bust but let a young dealer go because it was his first time and he didn’t think the dealer would remain in the drug trade. In fact the dealer did remain in the drug trade and ultimately killed 30 people by dealing them fentanyl (which reminded me of a similar story from Florida in which six college students, including at least two members of the West Point Army football team were hospitalized with cardiac arrest after renting a party house at which they took cocaine laced with fentanyl, and the drug dealer has been arrested for attemoted murder: see https://www.newsweek.com/fentanyl-laced-cocaine-cited-overdose-6-west-point-cadets-police-say-1687392 and https://www.wsbtv.com/news/trending/6-spring-break-overdose-victims-florida-includes-army-football-player/ROYLVRU3MREP3IG2D2OEWJ3TT4/).

There are also confusing flashbacks to incidents that took place in Gambia in 2017 in which a warlord captured and held hostage at least three U.S. schoolteachers volunteering there for a non-governmental organization, and Turner was there to rescue them but walked into an ambush from which Fedorova, there on the scene, rescued her by firing a bullet at the warlord. Fedorova claims to have killed him but we got to see her shot last night and it actually missed, and replaying the recording of the incident Turner realizes that the warlord’s army was armed not with Russian Kalashnikov guns but with U.S. M-16’s. Where did they get them? It turns out the owner of the bank that was initially robbed by Fedorova’s soldiers was running guns all over the world, as well as engaging in money laundering and other even less savory pursuits. All his records from the secret, illegal operations were kept in that safe and at the end of the show the FBI arrests him. This was an O.K. episode that at least didn’t sink to the level of absurdity some of the other shows have reached, though the guiding philosophy of series creators Nicholas Wootton and Jake Coburn seems to be to expose anybody with a seemingly spotless reputation as a crook, and thereby send a message to an increasingly desperate world that we don’t have any heroes, just people who are in it for themselves and do corrupt things simply because they can: a very cynical and depressing way to look at the world!