The Endgame, episode 6: "Judge, Jury and Executioner" (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, NBC-TV, aired March 28, 2022)

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

After the American Song Contest my husband Charles came home and joined me for an episode of The Endgame, that curious crime show which is a vehicle for Morena Baccarin and Ryan Michelle Bathé. Baccarin plays Elena Fedorova, Russian-born international criminal mastermind and commander of “Snow White,” a mercenary army which has captured seven banks in New York City and is holding the people in them hostage even though Fedorova herself is in a basement prison run by the FBI. Bathé plays Val Turner, an African-American FBI agent whose husband was set up for taking money from a drug gang – in a previous episode Val was told by Fedorova that she framed Val’s husband, but that plot point has been pretty well dropped by now. The show’s main gimmick has been to expose a character who has previously seemed beyond reproach as corrupt; it’s as if series creators Nicholas Wootton and Jake Coburn have taken to heart Robert Penn Warren’s famous quote from All the King’s Men. When powerful Governor Willie Stark (read: Huey Long) announces to his guilt-ridden aide Carter Burden to find up dirt on one of his political enemies, and Carter protests that the man is squeaky-clean, Stark insists, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption, and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”

In this case the seemingly above-board figure who’s revealed as having the stink of corruption about her is Judge Caroline Walsh (Gameeta Wright), who is kidnapped by an escaped convict she found guilty of murder at a bench trial even though he was innocent, and it turns out she sent up 24 other innocent people at the behest of the same Ukrainian crime family that featured prominently in a previous episode. (Apparently Wootton and Coburn didn’t get the memo that the line has changed and now Russian villains are O.K. but we’re supposed to like Ukraine.) Turner discovers the 25 witnesses who falsely testified in these cases are all listed as being on the payroll of a phony “business” operated by the bad Ukrainians. At the end of this episode – which for some reason I was thinking would be the last one even though this show has paid obeisance to the Great God SERIAL – the electrical power in the basement compound where Elena is being held suddenly goes out. Naturally the FBI personnel on hand assume that she figured out a way to cut power to the building – but she denies it and we’re clearly supposed to think that for once she’s telling the truth. Then comes a title card reading, “To Be Continued” – an advisement we haven’t seen on this show before even though it’s been presented as a continuous story arc – and then the frustrating news that we’re going to have to wait two weeks instead of the usual one to find out how it comes out.