We learn more…
Much of the episode is interlaced with flashbacks into Patricia’s past and how Hoffman factors into her life while helping to answer that question I asked earlier about learning more about our characters. The flashbacks take us back to when Alex and Patricia meet in Vienna, Austria 12 years earlier as she becomes his handler in the field, reporting on his assignments back to our government and okaying his missions. We see them grow over intermittent flashbacks throughout the episode from 12 to 9 years earlier in which they end up crossing the professional line and sleeping together.
Hoffman’s nickname for Patricia is P and is what he calls her throughout the episode so this also brings to mind that with the professional line crossed is this part of a love that he truly felt for her as he also wants to get to know her son or are we seeing something on a larger scale here? He also goes on to talk about some of the people he has to kill in his line of work and how they’ve talked about being together in the future. Seeing this side of Patricia in earlier years was interesting, we get to see a bit of a softer, less jaded Patricia. She still shows a calculated tough as nails side but you can see how her experiences throughout life haven’t fully led her to be as cold inside and the Patricia we see today. I couldn’t help but laugh when she told Alex that he was just being sentimental after they just had sex and he needed to basically get himself together. There’s that Patricia we know and love!!! Again we get to visit the thought of being close to home as talk of her son is mentioned and how he wants to join the ROTC, in which she’s willing to sacrifice her life and the lives of others but wants to keep her son away from anything she does. Unfortunately, one day as Patricia shows up at the apartment they always meet at, she enters to find the President’s Chief of Staff and Security Advisors and her director where she is informed that Hoffman has killed many innocent people, made the wrong deals with drug cartels and dictators and has set the intelligence community back years so they have all tasked Patricia with being the one to execute him.
Back to the mission
In between the flashbacks we still see the team trying to find Verina who has found her way to a café where she has accessed the apartment’s security CCTV footage and has seen her father being killed. Now that she has no one to turn to, she tries to contact her friend Esmah to help her. The team also has to deal with keeping an eye on Hoffman until Patricia lands in Incirlik while she has given word to not engage him as they don’t need him playing head games with them. Hoffman starts to spout that the team needs to be looking for the code that Verina used to hack the submarine, that was what he was looking for, which is usually backed up in a flash drive.
So as the team goes off to make a sweep of the apartment, Preach is left to search through some background information on Hoffman while keeping an eye on him only to have Alex pick at his buttons. Alex prods at Preach’s -short time left in the military, his suspicions and goading him – just working for that rise out of Preach. Well this was definitely a moment where I have to give it to James Tupper because he was doing his job and got the elicited rise out of me. However, in true Preach fashion, he handled it well when he said “there’s a superstition for just about everything under the sun.”

As the rest of the team sends Amir in to the apartment searching for some type of flash drive with a hand held x-ray device, he can now search for it as a member of the Army CID team since the dad was an IT Contractor from the air base. This is another moment of the episode that was fun to see as Dalton remarks how good Amir is after he gets by the local detectives downstairs and Jaz agrees with him. It wasn’t too long ago in many earlier episodes that she did not like Amir and wasn’t afraid to say or show it. It’s especially poignant now as things have become more, since they saved her so I enjoyed this scene immensely. While Amir just begins his search he’s alerted that the real Army CID will be onsite in about 3 minutes and although he’s being ordered out he takes an extra moment as he feels he has found what they were there to get.
Amir is able to smash a small box, grab the drive, and head out downstairs but one of the neighbors from the first night is telling the detective a team was there and points Amir out. He stops and acts like he doesn’t know what she’s talking about and goes on his way as the woman tells the detective you let him get away. Noah and Hannah have bad news to share with the team: the only thing on the drive was a diary but all is not lost as they are able to find her girlfriend Esmah and then trace her whereabouts. Dalton, Jaz and McGuire head off to intercept Verina and Esmah while Amir is left with Hoffman. Yet again we see Hoffman go after playing with a member of our team, so by now is this just all part of the storyline? This is what Hoffman does, he plays mind games but when this scene plays out and Amir tells him you don’t know me or what I’ve done – Hoffman says it’s in the details. It’s basically not what he says but what he doesn’t and while the others still try to zero in on the girls, Amir let’s Dalton know that he doesn’t feel good about this situation with Hoffman at all.
This is also the point in the show where when he says this that it really makes me wary as to just how close to home we getting with all this, what are Hoffman’s ulterior motives? Is Hoffman really there by coincidence or as I say there are no coincidences? We know that collectively the team’s cover was blown in Tehran in episode 9 and 10 so you know in some way that is going to come back and haunt them… plus we, as fans, have that as confirmation from show creator Dean Georgaris, just no how or timelines as to how this will all play out in the series. So is the start of the how? The now?
Leave a Reply