The Endgame, episode 5: "Gold Rush" (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, NBC-TV, aired March 21, 2022)

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

After the first episode of American Song Contest I watched the next-to-last episode (at least I think it’s the next-to-last episode) of The Endgame, all about a Russian woman named Elena Fedorova (Morena Baccarin, whose fashion designer could have given Kelly Clarkson’s lessons on how much breast you can reveal while still remaining within the puritanical standards of American TV) and her gang of thugs named “Snow White.” In the opening episode they took over seven New York banks and held the people in them hostage, and there seems to be a group photo of people connected to the administration of former President Cutler (his first name, if we were ever told it, remained a mystery but I was wondering if he’s supposed to be based on Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton or both) which Elena has targeted because she blames them for the bomb that was planted at the wedding of herself and her partner Sergei. They actually both survived the assault but both their families were assassinated en masse, and the order for the bombing was actually given by an official in the Cutler administration – but who?

The good guy, FBI agent Val Turner (Ryan Michelle Bathé), figures out that Elena is getting real-time information about what’s going on and how the government is responding to her activities (even though Elena herself is in federal custody in a secret location, in defiance of those procedural niceties like the U.S. Constitution) from her ex-husband Owen (Kamal Angelo Bolden), who’s serving a sentence in Peekskill Prison in New Jersey for allegedly having taken money from a drug cartel. He was actually framed for this crime by Elena, though that’s been a plot point that’s been pretty much ignored in the later episodes. Instead writer Moira Kirland gives us so many jaw-dropping reversals towards the end of this episode one wonders if “Kirland” is a pseudonym for Tony Gilroy – either that or the producers bring in Gilroy for a last-minute uncredited rewrite. First Agent Turner, who has been told that the only person who knows how to sneak into the Federal Reserve vault was the man who designed it in the first place, Khaled Abdel (Amir Malaklou). So Agent Turner goes to Abdel’s place and finds three other people, all wearing the black-and-white masks emblematic of Elena’s “Snow White” killers, carrying machine guns (Agent Turner has only a semi-automatic pistol) and bent on assassinating Abdel. Only Agent Turner is somehow able to take them out instead, killing the first two and taking the third one prisoner – but in the first big reversal the guy she’s taken alive tells her they’re not part of Elena’s operation. They bought the masks from a street vendor – and Val realizes that they’re hired killers from the Ukrainian crime family that had already bribed one of the members of the Cutler administration in Elena’s photo.

Val suddenly deduces that Abdel himself is on Elena’s payroll, and she’s just walked her into the super-secret vault Elena was going to crash so she can vaporize the $20 million in gold ingots held therein and destabilize the U.S. economy enough to create a worldwide depression. (This plot point reminded both Charles and I of the ending of the James Bond story Goldfinger, in which Goldfinger’s plan is to sneak into Fort Knox, not to steal the gold but to turn it radioactive so it will be at least presumably useless as a reserve for backing currency.) Agent Turner and a colleague disarm Elena’s bomb just in time to avert the catastrophe – only it turns out the Black guy who was leading Elena’s commando team has another bomb, made to look like an ingot, and he sets that one to go off as the episode reaches its cliff-hanger ending. Charles pointed out that a bomb powerful enough to actually vaporize gold – not just melt it, in which case it could easily be reconstituted into solid blocks as soon as it cooled – the bomb would have to be so powerful it would take out all of Manhattan and create a catastrophe dwarfing the one at Hiroshima in August 1945.; But then again you don’t watch a show like The Endgame for scientific accuracy or plot credibility: you watch it for the cat-and-mouse game the writers have constructed between heroine and villainess, and on that show the producers have delivered well even though the neck-breaking reversals at the end of this episode got to me after a while.