Courtesy of TNTDrama
Warning: Spoiler Alert
Last we spoke, Hani Jibril was being escorted away following the attempt on Prince Abboud’s life. Immediately following the chaos therein, Aaron Rawley races back to his apartment. He frantically starts to gather his essential belongings when he gets a call from the Arcadia Chairman. The Chairman is cool, calm and collected. He informs Rawley that the money has been wired. Just before Rawley can hang up the phone Hassan just happens to be there to put Rawley to sleep. Just long enough to inject something between his toes that stops his heart. Then Hassan picks up the phone and says, “it’s done”.
The immediate problem is on DCO’s plate. The director informs Gates that they will not take the fall for this. DCO knew of a credible threat and failed to prevent the death of the Prince. Aaron Rawley was a state department employee. That seems to be DCO’s sticking point. How can DCO be blamed when the state department had one of theirs as a significant player. I sense all the wrong buttons being pushed in the name of “National Security”.
Meanwhile, Crystal alongside some tool whose childhood dream must have been to play ‘bad cop’, questions Hani Jibril. She clearly is outside the loop on this. Crystal asks questions while Colombo over there just tries to sell the hard-line. Crystal eventually gets him to leave long enough to get a legitimate read on Jibril.
Gates escorts Jibril in handcuffs to a black SUV, presumably to get her to a holding area before her arraignment. Just as Gates tells her that they are trying to help her, she looks up to see Odum in FBI gear including the badge. She does not take it well. “You lied to me”. Some people are incredible. Yes. He lied. The moment you realized he’s a FBI agent, the fact he lied should carry with it zero shock. And now that you know he’s an agent, the next logical deduction is that Sebastian Egan was there for the right reasons. Eventually the SUV pulls away and Odum looks at Gates with real intensity behind his eyes.
Odum and Rice follow-up on a lead to find Rawley. Which they do, rather easily. Hassan killed him with that injection and then hung him with a typed and printed (unsigned) suicide note. They both look at this knowing something is off. Odum points out that the victim (Rawley) went through the trouble to hang himself with his jacket on but his socks off. In short order, Rice finds the injection point.
Rice: Looks like an injection point.
Odum: With the right drug you can stop the heart. No one’s the wiser. Staged suicide, case closed. Most autopsies will miss it.
Rice: You mind if I ask how you know that?
Odum: I just do.
Rice: You’re what my wife calls a ‘poor communicator’.
There are reasons that I would never make it working for an agency like the FBI. This scene is one of them. The state department basically tells Crystal and Gates that they are going to eat this. Rawley will not be mentioned and Hani Jibril is going down for this crime. And why? Because “this is the kind of spark that can ignite a war”. The only thing worse than letting an innocent person burn at the stake (so to speak), is looking at a man in a suit saying quite indignantly, “are we clear”? Really does make me want to shout profanities at my television.
Milloy: We don’t need you to be ok with this.
Crystal: Good. Because I’m not.
Maggie does some digging and is able to connect some dots. Bear with me on this. Rawley worked for an oil company->a few months ago Arcadia bought that company->after the sale, Prince Abboud gave the oil rights to a Saudi company instead->for Arcadia to get the oil rights, Abboud had to be removed. So there’s the rub. Maggie hit a snag with Arcadia’s firewall and needs to get around it. She is instructed to not get caught. When her little program doesn’t work, she is compelled to get from inside the building. Which she’s able to do, but the legality is a grey area.
The documents she was able to pull links the Chairman not only to Prince Fayeen (next in line) but also Rawley and Hassan. Since the documentation was secured illegally, all of it is inadmissible. So, the next step is to catch Prince Fayeen doing something illegal. Then see where it goes. The plan is for Sebastian Egan to write a series of articles divulging intimate details of this to draw them out. Or as Odum puts it, “we just need Fayeen to attempt to kill me.”
Now Odum has to sell it to Julian Drake at Joust. Who is a willing participant in this ‘Legend’. Initially he resists, but eventually is entirely too intrigued by publishing a series of articles that “ends governments”.
Drake and Odum meet a Feris Nadir. Nadir has covered the Saudi royal family for some time. He is there as an intermediary. He explains that Fayeen actually believes has been chosen by Allah to rule his people, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s the tenth richest man in the world. Also that there is a credible source inside Saudi Intelligence that claims there will be an attempt on Egan’s life.
Back at DCO HQ, Milloy is back again to throw her little hissy fit. The state department wants desperately to let Jibril take the fall because it makes their lives easier. They would be able to maintain a strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia. An article in a magazine outlining how and why Jibril is being framed, doesn’t exactly fit into their plans.
Milloy: Undercover or not, you leaked classified information. There will be criminal charges filed. That I can promise you.
Gates: Need I remind you agent Milloy, the Sebastian Egan Legend is covered under the Intelligence Identity Protection Act.
Crystal: Which means you can’t reveal that Sebastian Egan is Martin Odum. And then there’s that pesky First Amendment.
Egan sets up a meeting with Feris. Meeting is a stretch. More like a Deep Throat like Watergate meeting in a parking garage. Egan sells it wonderfully. Feris falls for it hook, line and sinker. Egan passes him a flash drive with the evidence (that would otherwise be inadmissible), which they anticipate will make its way back to Fayeen. He also drops a lovely nugget that he has passed the same sensitive information to a number of other journalists in case something were to happen to him.
As this story line ramps up, Maggie drops a bit of a bomb shell on Crystal and the viewers. She’s been digging on Martin Odum’s life. As she has put it before, if she can’t find someone, they don’t exist. Now brilliantly, TNT did not allow her to divulge anything the viewer doesn’t already know. However, this short scene allows her to inform Crystal of what she knows or more importantly what she doesn’t know. This is important because it begins to narrow the gap between what we the viewers know and what Crystal, Maggie or anyone else not in cahoots knows.
The plan is simple, in theory. Egan travels to LA under an alias they are aware of. They pick him up and kidnap him. With the tracker injected under his skin, he should be easy to track. Seems simple enough. Even before Egan gets in the car, they send him a text message confirming that his driver is a wanted man on the terrorism watch list. After a stretch, the driver keeps taking aggressive sudden turns. Crystal recognizes it as a tactic to spot a tail. If only it were that simple. Just when they get back around to where Rice and Crystal are, he waits, then guns it through a red light. Thus buying them just enough time to drive the limo into a long semi trailer and thus cutting off any signal from Odum’s tracker.
The interrogation to ascertain the names of all of the people Egan passed the evidence to, goes about as expected. Egan gets slapped around and plays his part. However, there were two details I did not see coming. And if I may, is there anything better than being completely invested in a television show and feeling you have a slight grip on what is happening just to find out how wrong you are? Right about the time they reveal that they know Sebastian Egan is a cover and that his real name is Martin Odum (or so they think), another group of men show up at Sonya Odum’s house. Both things happening simultaneously. Sonya, whether it’s because Martin trained her for what to look for or she has training of her own, she immediately recognizes a problem and tries to elude them inside her house while protecting Aiden in the process.
While Sonya locks both of them in the bathroom, the men pursue. Sonya frantically attempts to contact someone. Who the someone is, could be telling. And the last thing we see before the credits is Sonya knocked down on all fours in her bathroom looking up a gun pointed in her direction.
Stay tuned to NJATVS as next week’s Legend will be a two-hour season finale. You won’t want to miss out.
