The Endgame, episode 7: "Beauty and the Beast" (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, NBC-TV, aired April 25, 2022_

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

After that my husband Charles and I watched episode seven (of eight) of The Endgame, “Beauty and the Beast,” which continued this show’s tradition of picturesque improbability. In episode six, “All That Glotters,” we were supposed to believe that President Andrew Wright (Sasha Polz) has secretly stolen half a billion dollars in gold ingots from the U.S. Federal Reserve bank and done heaven knows what to them. In this episode it’s revealed that President Wright owes his election to Unrakian crime boss Natalya Belock (Melissa Farman) and there’s a secret flash drive somewhere recording Wright talking with Natalya and arranging for a “hit” on the husband of the woman who was his principal rival for his party’s nomination, which forces her to quit the presidential race and thereby ensures Wright’s nomination. Natalya’s motive in all this – at least as far as we can tell – is to steal the $500 million in U.S., gold for herself and the Belock crime family (like the Barkers, the Belocks are believers in the principle that “the family that slays together stays together”), though it’s unclear what she plans to do with it. Not only are gold ingots virtually impossible to use to buy anything in real-world economies. It would be difficult to turn them into negotiable currency – and with that much gold in (or out of) circulation, it’s hard to imagine what anyone or any family could do with it all. I’ve compared the premise of this series to the 1922 German classic film Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, directed by Fritz Lang and written by his then-wife Thea von Harbou from a French novel by Norbert Jacques, only in that story the super-villain at least had a motive that made sense: he was having his minions break into bank vaults all over Europe, steal real currency and substitute their own counterfeits, with the idea that once the counterfeits were discovered this would destabilize the entire European economy. (Lang made this film when the German currency was about to collapse for real, and given the times of impending hyper-inflation this was obviously quite a topical theme for the German film audience of 1922.)

The principal villains in this episode are President Wright and Max Gallo (Tarek Bishara), head of the President’s personal Secret Service detail, whose loyalty to the President at all costs lead him to murder. He and his squad kill tne “Serial Skeptic” blogger (Keith Nobbs) whose posts about the series’ villain-hero, Elena Fedorova (Morena Baccarin, top-billed and also an executive producer on the show), have led to her becoming a popular figure, with at least thousands of Americans demonstrating in the streets for her release. Gallo also kidnaps Fedorova from the FBI installation where she’s been held for the entire ron of the series and takes her to the same location but for a different sort of treatment. First President Wright shows her the instruments of torture – she can’t really see them because they’ve put a hood over her head like an Abu Ghraib prisoner, but he explains that he’s going to inject her with sodium pentothal (so-called “truth serum”) to get her to reveal the hidden location of the Matryoshka, the Russian nesting doll in which she’s hidden the incriminating flash drive that shows President Wright and Natalya Belock plotting the murder of the husband of Wright’s principal rival for his party’s nomination. The actual hit man was the family’s chauffeur, Eduardo Reyes, who at the moment is working above ground running an auto repair shop. Our heroes, African-American FBI agents Val Turner (Ryan Michelle Bathé) and Anthony Flowers (Jordan Johnson-Hinds), who’s her police partner and early on in the series it was established he had an unrequited crush on her as well, find Reyes surprisingly easily given that Reyes a) is in mortal danger and b) knows that. Reyes tells them he loved the people he worked for but he’s forced to kill one of them in a staged “auto accident” because the Belocks threatened to kill Reyes’ own family if he did not.

Turner and Flowers recover the flash drive after Elena sends the Secret Service agents who are torturing her to the wrong bank – it’s not clear how she’s been able to resist the “truth serum” effects of the pentothal and the other two drugs President Wright has injected her with – but the show ends with Gallo and his other Secret Service colleagues sealing Elena in a coffin and burying her alive, the cliffhanger at the end of this episode. There’s also a subplot (there is always a subplot in this show) set in New Jersey’s Peekskill Prison, in which Elena’s husband Sergei Vodianov (Costa Ronin) and Val Turner’s ex-husband Owen (Kamal Angelo Bolden) are about to stage their long-awaited and long-planned joint escape attempt, only the vehicle they’ve chosen to escape in is unloading a shipment of gold buttons that were actually made from the stolen gold ingots (I’m not making this up, you know!). Just how all this was accomplished – how the gold was melted down and made into buttons, as well as the sheer bulk of the things – is cheerily ignored by our writers, series creators Nicholas Wootton and Jake Coburn, and Cristina Bonda, the actual screenwriter. I wanted to like The Endgame better than I have, but to paraphrase Lewis Carroll in Alice Through the Looking Glass, the writers believed in writing at least six impossible things before breakfast, and it shows in the sheer weight of the improbabilities with which this show is being buried under its own weight as it drags itself to a long-awaited climax. It’s all supposed to end next week, and quite frankly I’ll be glad when it does!