The Endgame: "All That Glitters" (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, NBC-TV, aired April 18, 2022)

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

After the American Song Contest I watched the latest episode of The Endgame, “All That Glitters,” and it was by far the most preposterous one yet. We’re expected to believe that the President of the United States, Andrew Wright (Sasha Roiz), has somehow managed to steal literally half a billion dollars in gold bars and substitute ordinary clay bricks painted to look like gold. Somehow the series’ principal villainess, Elena Fedorova (Morena Baccarin, of the gravity-defying bra – I suspect that evcery straight guy in the country who’s watching this has the hots for her, just as when Christopher Meloni was still on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit I joked that the show’s fan base consisted of two groups: Gay guys who thought Meloni was hot – me definitely included – and straight guys who thought Mariska Hargitay was hot), has got wind of this. She figured out a way to expose the President as a crook by planting a bomb made to look like a gold ingot in the vault in New York where the fake “gold” is stored. Instead of an explosive, the bomb contains water, which releases as a mist and causes the fake ingots literally to melt away. She also has her minions kidnap three people in the Wright administration, including chief of staff Julia Swanstrom (Genevieve Ellis) and FBI official Johnathan Doak (Noah Bean), who’s been lobbying Swanstrom to get the President to fire FBI director Rogelio Reál (Mark Damon Espinoza) and appoint Doak in his place so he can in turn fire the show’s principal heroine, FBI agent Val Turner (Ryan Michelle Bathé – a Black woman, by the way).

Fedorova's agents wrap Swanstrom in cellophane wrap (I’ve known people who have that done to them on purpose as an act of submissive S/M) and locks her in a tank, where she intends to drown her by pumping in gold paint. The idea is that Swanstrom is the legal owner of the plant where the clay ingot replicas were made – and where nobody bothered to fire them, which would have made them impervious to water/ She bought the plant through a shell corporation set up by President Wright, who was using her as an innocent front (telling her he was helping her buy the plant to use the clay to make filters for water in developing oountries) to steal the government’s gold reserves. This begs an interesting question which writer Margarita Matthews never bothered to answer: what on earth would he do with all that gold? The expansiveness of the plot reminds me of Fritz Lang’s and Thea von Harbou’s 1922 film Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, in which the titular super-villain, was trying to destabilize the European economy by, among other things, having his minions steal real currency from bank vaults and substitute counterfeit bills of their own manufacture – but at least Lang and von Harbou knew when to stop, so their plot actually made sense. I’m sure writer Matthews and director Omar Madha never stopped to think of how President Wright and his gang would move that much gold, where they would store it, and above all what they could do with it, since it’s not exactly easy to show up at a grocery store and pay fpr something with a gold ingot.

Along the way there are the usual subplots, including one in which Elena and her husband Sergei Vodianov (Costa Ronin) hide their five-year-old daughter with a foster mother (a flashback sequence) and another in which Sergei, in a federal prison in the show’s present, gets screwed up when his confederate, Val Turner’s ex-husband Owen (Kamal Andelo Bolden), who was a fellow FBI agent and ended up in prison when Elena Fedorova got him framed for allegedly taking bribes from a drug gang, ends up in solitary confinement, though he’s released from solitary and put back in the general population at the end of the program. There’s also a blogger called “The Serial Skeptic” (Keith Nobbs), who takes up Elena’s side and organizes giant demonstratioms outside Fort Totten, the Civil War-era installation where she’s being held, demanding her freedom. If nothing else, The Endgame is a great vehicle for the Donald Trum[ years; “The Serial Skeptic” is obviously inspired by the real-life “Q,” whose QAnon Web site has, according to polls, convinced a full one-fourth of the American population that the Democratic Party is run by a cabal of pedophile cannibals and Donald Trump has been anointed by God to hold them to account and order summary mass executions as soon as he regains the presidency, either in 2024 or sooner than that because they also believe the “fraudulent” results of the 2020 election will be overturned and Trump restored to office any day now. The whole thesis of this show that everyone – or almost everyone – in the U.S. government is corrupt and we need Elena Fedorova (or Donald Trump) on our side to reveal their secrets is also very Trumpian; this show – probably unwittingly on the part of its makers – reveals the sicknesses that has led many Americans to a state of cynical disbelief in authorities and a conviction that what is needed is an autocratic revolution to cleanse America of the evils of the “Deep State.”