The Endgame: "Sleepover" (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, NBC-TV, aired April 11, 2022)

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

After American Song Contest came a predictable and rather dull episode of The Endgame, “Sleepover,” whose name comes from the taunting villainess Elena Fedorova (Morena Baccarin) gives Our Heroine, FBI agent Val Turner (Ryan Michelle Bathé), when the compound in which the FBI has been holding Elena throughout the show suddenly is plunged into darkness. Elena protests that this was nohe of her doing, and of course she’s right: the real killer who shorted out the installation's power supply (and rendered virtually all the weapons kept there inaccessiuble because they are contained behind electronic doors that don't work without power) was someone called “The Ghost” (though his true name is Lucas Crowe and he’s played by Quincy Dunn-Baker), a former CIA agent who turns rogue and tries to tell Val Turner that she should want Elena dead as much as he wants both her and her husband and partner-in-crime, Sergei Vodianov (Castro Rogen), dead for his own powerful and carefully unexplained reasons. There are a series of flashbacks to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2018 in which Elena befriends a local girl who turns out to be yet another hired assassin, though not before the woman, in her guise as a fellow mother, teaches Elena to hold her daughter without making the girl nervous. Elena tells her story to Agent Turner in the course of a conversation during the blackout in which they realize they have no way to defend themselves from “The Ghost,” who is taking advantage of the secret passageways left over from the fort’s construction during the U.S. Civil War to move about secretly from one part of the building to another and make it seem like he can literally walk through walls.

Elena and Agent Turner form an uneasy alliance and use an old land mine to booby-trap the room and hopefully kill “The Ghost” – only instead of “The Ghost” the person they nearly off with the mine is Agent Turner’s partner, Anthony Flowers (Jordan Johnson-Hinds), who in the early episodes was depicted as having an unrequited crush on Agent Turner but of late that plot point has been pretty much ignored and dropped. They manage eventually to get Flowers off the land mine and blow up “The Ghost” with it, creating a surprisingly satisfying ending for a show that has usually stopped its episodes with cliffhangers indicating the creators’ worship at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL. Along the way there’s also a fire at Peekskill Prison in New Jersey, where Agent Turner’s husband Owen Turner (Kamal Bolden), a former FBI agent, was framed by Fedorova’s organization to make it look like he’d taken payoff money from a drug cartel. At first the prisoners can’t find an unlocked door to leave the room and are about to be asphyxiated by smoke inhalation, but eventually the doors open and most of them get out in time. The Endgame had some interesting plot points early on in the series but now it’s become victim of the writers’ ability and willingness to write, in the words of Lewis Carroll’s old joke, at least six impossible things before breakfast.