The Endgame, episode 8: "Happily Ever After" (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, Jake Coburn Productions, NBC-TV, aired May 2, 2022)

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

After American Song Contest NBC aired what was billed as the final episode of The Endgame, the exciting (at times) but overwhelmingly improbable eight-episode miniseries starring Morena Baccarin as Elena Fedorova, Russian-born international criminal and head of a secret organization called “Snow White” that was essentially a mercenary army, and Ryan Michelle Bathé as African-American woman FBI agent Val Turner, who in the first seven episodes was locked in an underground room at Fort Totten in the Washington, D.C. area trying to interrogate her and getting back riddles. In the opening scene Fedoriva is literally buried alive on orders of the corruptrr U.S. President (more on hims later) but her Snow White henchmen are able to locate her cell phone signal and exhume her. Fedorova’s and Turner’s husbands, Sergey Vodianov (Costa Ronin) and Owen Turner (Kamal Angelo Bolden), are both serving time in Peekskill Prison in New Jersey, which unbeknownst to them is owned by corrupt U.S. President Andrew Wright (Sasha Roiz), who is using the prison metal-working shop to melt down the $5t00 million in gold ingots President Wright had stolen from the U.S. reserve bank in New York and had melted down into buttons for shipment to the Ukrainian crime boss Natalya Belock (Melissa Farman), who owns President Wright lock, stock and barrel.

Midway through the show we learn that Owen Turner was actually recruited by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to infiltrate the Belock operation, which included getting himself arrested by his FBI agent wife (which he did by deliberately taking money from a drug cartel) and thrown into a prison owned by the President. There’s also a video of the President accepting a bribe from Natalya Belock which is copied onto a flash drive, and FBI agent Jonathan Doak (Noah Bean), who’s either part of the President’s corrupt cabal or thinks he’s on the side of good because the freaking President of the United States has ordered him to do this, tries to destroy the only known copy of the flash drive – though Elena Fedorova has dropped hints that there are between two and 10 other copies of the video extant. Natalya made copies to make sure that her bought-and-paid-for U.S. President stayed bought and paid for by being able to hold the threat of releasing it over his head. Midway through the show we learn that Natalya was the sister of the young girl whom Fedorova killed in a flashback sequence in the very first episode – and at the end Fedorova’s husband Sergey (ya remember Sergey?) is shot and killed and Natalya kidnaps his and Elena’s daughter, but we never learn whether the video on the flash drive ever becomes public or President Wright succeeds in destroying all known copies of it. Either of those would at least have been a satisfying ending instead of this odd lack of resolution, which makes it seem like they’re setting us up for yet another cliffhanger even though this show was supposed to offer us closure.

The Endgame has been a fascinating show in terms of reflecting the social and political Zeitgeist of our time, and depending on how you read the show you can think of President Wright as either a Trumpian scumbag who’s willing to sell out the country to a foreign leader or a Trumpian good guy who’s smashing the Left-wing “deep state” with the help of a bunch of Ukrainian gangsters. And as I noted in my earlier comments in the show, the use of Ukrainians as the principal villains is out of step with the current party line of the U.S. media, which is that Ukrainians are heroic freedom fighters resisting Russian and Belarussian evil. The whole concept that a President of the United States could be literally under the thumb of one foreign leader would have seemed ridiculous before the (first) Trump presidency; now it just seems routine.