The Endgame, episode 3: "Bury the Lede" [sic] (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, NBC-TV, aired March 7, 2022)

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

I watched last night’s episode of The Endgame, “Bury the Lede,” on NBC as part of their ongoing tribute to the Great God SERIAL and also a title that irritates me because of the spelling of the word “lead,” When I was in junior college formally studying journalism the first paragraph of a news story was known as “the lead,” in normal spelling, and where or when this horrible perversion of the word into “lede,” whatever that means, got started I have no idea. In any case, this is the second episode in a row in which Elena Fedorova (Morena Baccarin) has exposed a once-respected authority figure as a crook, if not worse. This time the authority figure is a news anchor who when the episode opens is called “the most trusted man in America” (a throwback to the days of Walter Cronkite and the other media stars in the days before polarization affected – or afflicted – U.S. media the way they have U.S. politics and whichever news source you watch tells a lot about your overall political orientation). Only in the end, thanks to Elena’s machinations and in particular her picking him as the one person she’ll allow to negotiate the release of a female hostage she has locked into a bank vault with only four hours’ worth of air before she asphyxiates, he’s been exposed as having been in the pocket of a Ukrainian crime family in his previous gig as a White House advisor.

Up until now I’ve been giving this series major points for having been ahead of the political curve in that the principal villainess is Russian and her origin story is she had to become a crook to survive because the Russian Federation is an incredibly corrupt government entity and she had to becoma a criminal in order to survive. Now they’re giving us a show in which Ukrainians are the villains – haven’t they got the memo that the U.S. party line has changed and we’re now supposed to show all Ukrainians as heroic freedom fighters risking their lives to stand up to the evil Russians? A story line featuring Ukrainians as bad guys feels at the very least horribly dated, and at the most positively counter-revolutionary. There are also confusing flashbacks to a previous case Fedorova’s nemesis, renegade FBI agent Val Turner (Ryan Michelle Bathé), worked in Argentina in 2016, in which her estranged husband Owen (Kamal Angelo Bolden) got a bullet in his chest, which sparied the chain of events that led to him being cashiered from the FBI and arrested for taking a bribe from a drug ring (a charge Fedorova actually set up and framed him for). It’s not clear just how this plot line fits into the overall story arc of this show (the fact that I’m forced to write words like “story arc” itself says volumes about the decline and fall of series television, to the point where even shows from the Dick Wolf stable, which heroically resisted the call of the Great God SERIAL, succumbed to it on the current Law and Order: Orgahized Crime). At this point it’s sort of there, adding to the overall texture but at the risk of unnecessary plot confusion and viewer (this viewer, anyway) aggravation.