The Brave Season Finale – Close to Home: Part 2
Editor’s note: This is the second and final recap/review for The Brave done by a new writer and super fan of the show. While we’ve made some small edits, we left many of her thoughts and feelings “as is” so you’ll get the most from her review. Hope you enjoy Brynn’s review of The Brave.
Intense. Heart-pounding. Electrifying.
If someone asked me to sum up Monday night’s season finale of The Brave using just three words those would be my choice. “Close to Home: Part 2” delivered everything fans of the show were hoping for and then some. From the opening sequence, to the desperate attempt to save the USS Wyoming and her crew, to that really kick a** junk yard sequence, all wrapped up at the end with a bomb, a quote, and a turn down a dark path. It is everything that a season finale should be. Fast-paced, action packed, emotional and of course left us on a cliffhanger. To say this episode had me on the edge of my seat from the very beginning is an understatement. It started off with a bang, literally, as they opened the episode with a flashback to Vienna 9 years ago when Patricia turned on Hoffman and helped facilitate his supposed demise with a car bomb, and did not let up.
Flash forward to present day at the team’s base and we pick up exactly where we left off last week and you can just tell from the look on Patricia’s face and her demeanor that she is not happy to see Hoffman still breathing. A sentiment she expresses to Dalton later in the episode.
“Oh this guy, why couldn’t you just kill him the first time around?”
“Believe me, I tried.”
To Patricia’s credit she doesn’t let Hoffman bait her, she just jumps right in ready to do what she has to, to clean up the mess he has created. Time is not on their side when it comes to finding Verina and Patricia wastes none of it, telling Dalton to take their prisoner out of his cage so she can talk to him. Dalton is obviously hesitant to do so, but Hoffman pipes in reminding them all he’s tied to a chair on a military base surrounded by soldiers, and personally guarded by the team. Hardly a threat – so out he comes, chair and all, in the first move that sets up the shocking events to come. Once alone Hoffman immediately brings up Patricia’s betrayal of him, trying to justify his actions back then as necessary for the cause.
“Someone has to be willing to do what it takes to win.”
How tough is she?
We see Patricia crack, just a little bit when discussing his current activities, freelance high-level murders, corporate and government espionage; the murder of a father and kidnapping of his teenage daughter. You can see the barely contained rage slip through then, followed by the guilt she feels for not succeeding in taking him out in Vienna as she practically begs him to spare Verina. It’s a moment I can watch over and over again and still get chills. Just more evidence of Anne Heche’s brilliance as Deputy Director Patricia Campbell.
Cut to Verina and her captors for a quick moment. She’s putting on a brave and defiant face but underneath it all you can see the terrified kid she really is, especially in the moment when she asks for confirmation that they’ll let her go once she’s done. In a heartbreaking moment of realization a single tear falls when she understands that, despite the reassurances, they have no intention of letting her go even after the job is finished. It’s truly beautiful acting – Chiara Aurelia who impressed the hell out of me every time she was on screen. Seriously hope that if The Brave gets picked up for a second season we get to see more of her. Maybe working at the DIA?
It’s the little things…
Back to Turkey we go and we get to see what the team is doing while Patricia is working on Hoffman. In one of the softer scenes of the episode we see Preach, McG, and Amir doing the insanely normal activity of tossing a ball around. It’s the briefest of shots but serves as a stark reminder that under the blood, and the dirt, and the weight of the free world on their shoulders – these brave men and women are just normal people. It joins the shots of shakshuka breakfast and horseshoes as one of my favorites for this very reason. The extraordinary doing the ordinary.
Dalton does not join in on the ball tossing fun, he’s sitting off by himself clearly deep in troubled thoughts. Preach, being Preach, comes over to sit next to him and the ensuing conversation reveals just how worried Dalton is about what the fall out of all of this will be for Patricia and how he feels about a man like Hoffman and his impact on the job the team does.
“The guy wraps himself in a flag he walks out the door and he does things that jeopardize everything you and I fight for.”
The conversation is interrupted by Hannah back in D.C. and she does not have good news, another sub has been hacked and it’s on course for Fiery Cross Reef, a man made Chinese island. With that single phone call the stakes have just been raised from saving a single 16-year old girl to saving her, the crew of the hacked sub USS Wyoming, and making sure the vessel and its weapons don’t fall into enemy hands all within 3 hours. If they are going to succeed they are unfortunately going to need Hoffman’s help, which he volunteers to give. Using his phone he has Dalton make a call to set up a meeting with Verina’s captors; the second move Hoffman’s made to his end goal. I actually liked Hoffman’s character last week, he was intriguing and charismatic and left me with a lot of questions; my favorite type of characters. By the end of this episode I was ready to shoot him myself.
Incredibly tough choices
At this point we are taken back to D.C. where Noah is on the line with Captain Halsey of the USS Wyoming who informs Noah in no uncertain terms that he has no intentions of letting his ship fall into the hands of the Chinese. In 88 minutes, if they haven’t been able to re-establish control of the vessel he will scuttle her. And up go the stakes again. That phone call was one of the more emotional moments of the episode for me. There is a crew of 151 people on that sub and all are about to die in order to protect their country from its enemies. These are real choices that real people have to make. It’s not something you stop to really think about but when you do their willingness and bravery to lay down their lives for another will take your breath away. When it comes to honoring the servicemen and women they portray, The Brave never fails at knocking it out of the park.
With their time window dwindling the team needs to figure out how to draw out Verina’s captor enough to place a tracker on him so he’ll lead them back to her. Hoffman provides the name he uses, Victor, and two of his weaknesses – old scotch and beautiful women. They formulate a plan to send Jaz in to catch his attention then send McG in after her to play her douchebag boyfriend with the hope that Victor’s ego drives him to play the hero. The plan goes off without a hitch, and Jaz plants the tracker in the form of a slip of paper with her phone number on it. All while Hoffman continues to toy with Patricia back at base.
A little levity
Just one of the many things The Brave does so well is balance the dark and dangerous with humor, and damn if “douchebag” McG with a backwards baseball cap getting his a** kicked hilarious. The reactions of the team listening in and Jaz standing there watching with a smirk make the scene even more golden, but what really sets it over the top is McG on the way out making sure everyone knows that he could have taken Victor. His pride more wounded during the altercation than his body.
“Put a bandaid on it sugar.”
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Will they run out of time?
Thanks to the tracker placed on Victor the team now knows where Verina is being held and are one step closer to saving her, which is good news because back in D.C. they aren’t having any luck with getting Captain Halsey control of his ship back. The bad news, because there is always bad news, is that the junkyard where they have Verina is a fortress of security. The options to get inside are few and each worse than the last. Patricia and Dalton head towards Hoffman with Patricia asking if everything’s going according to his plan to which he quips he never planned on getting caught.
I don’t believe that for a second. I said it last week and I stood by it during this scene, men like Hoffman don’t get caught. He survived an assassination attempt and went 9 years under the radar only to be found in an apartment by the man working with the woman who betrayed him? Nope, sorry wasn’t buying it. Hoffman is exactly where he wants to be doing exactly what he wants to be doing. Which is why he’s the one who gives the team the idea to initiate online contact with Verina and have her knock out the junkyards power and back up generators.
As the team is getting ready to go in, Noah contacts Captain Halsey again. The Wyoming is 10 miles from Chinese waters but he asks the Captain to wait until the last possible second before scuttling because the ground team is minutes away from getting control of the ship back.
Go-Time
Verina kills the power and the team takes out the perimeter guards. In a comedic moment Dalton takes a shot that Jaz has lined up and when she calls him on it we get a throwback to the pilot episode with Dalton’s “whoops”. Just another example of that balancing act I mentioned earlier.
With the perimeter open the team moves in to begin the assault in what is, in my opinion, the best action sequence of the season with the best music choice – “Might As Well Get Juiced” by The Rolling Stones. There’s a tense moment where you think that Victor has taken out Verina (there may have been some colourful language coming out of my mouth at that point, but I watched the episode alone, so you’ll never be able to prove it) but when Dalton breaks down the door you discover Victor surrendering and Verina safe. The shots were Victor destroying the computers, a moments relief until you realize that those computers were the only way to save the Wyoming who is inching ever closer to enemy territory.
A little retribution
The only way unless you are a 16-year old genius hacker that is. Verina gets put on the phone with Noah and after a lot of computer coding jargon that I’ll admit I didn’t understand in the slightest, they are able to save the Wyoming and her crew. Captain Halsey turns his ship around and the Chinese are left disappointed. The look on Victor’s face when he recognized Jaz and realized he’d been played was priceless, but not quite as priceless as McG getting one punch in to heal his wounded pride.
“Cheers mate!”
It’s not over…
We took out the bad guys, we saved the girl, and we saved the Wyoming! You’d think this would be a time for celebration, until you look at the time and realize THERE ARE STILL 11 MINUTES LEFT OF THE EPISODE. So much for my happy ending.
Remember how I said that I didn’t believe that Hoffman was caught by accident? Remember how I said that he was exactly where he wanted to be? He proved me right when he tried to blow up Patricia and Preach with an impact bomb in his cell phone. The numbers he had Dalton punch in earlier in the episode weren’t an unlock code, there were an arming code.
My take is that Hoffman has wanted revenge for a long time and when the opportunity arose for him to take a job in Dalton’s backyard he took it knowing full well it would draw Patricia out and to him. Every move he made, every word he spoke was to get to that moment where he would have the chance for payback. Thankfully he didn’t quite get it. Patricia survived the blast thanks to Preach throwing himself on her to take majority of the impact, leaving him in a coma and his ultimate fate unknown. (Just another reason we need NBC to renew The Brave)
End game
That’s still not the end of this rollercoaster ride. You know that there is no way that Dalton is going to let this go unanswered, especially after his conversation with Preach earlier. So in response to the attempted murder of his friends Dalton goes off comms and ditches his phone. He goes dark; in more ways than one. Knowing Hoffman would go after Verina’s laptop because of its value, Dalton heads to her apartment to wait for him. What follows is the best scene of the season with both Mike Vogel and James Tupper giving performances worthy of awards.
Two quiet professionals facing off, each knowing full well that only one of them will be walking out of there alive. The dialogue draws parallels between the two men and allows Hoffman to bring up Dalton’s painful family history but it all comes to head with THE quote. You know which one I’m talking about, creator Dean Georgaris has mentioned it a few times and Mike Vogel considers it a personal favourite, much like Dalton.
“People sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
Violence on their behalf. Hoffman calls it a spin on what it really is; murder. Dalton promises not to say anything if Hoffman doesn’t. Then he fires.
Preach
The episode closes on easily the most emotional note of the season, I know I was in tears. The team is gathered around Preach’s hospital bed everyone is dressed in black and it’s a very somber atmosphere. So quiet all you hear is the beeping of hospital machines. Too quiet. Then each team member takes a turn in sharing Preach-like words of wisdom as a single tear rolls down Preach’s face.
This episode brings the whole season full circle in many ways from the “whoops” with Dalton and Jaz, to Noah and Hannah leaving the DIA together, but the biggest parallel between “Close to Home: Part 2” and the beginning of the season, in my opinion, comes from a conversation between Amir and Dalton in Moscow Rules. The pair is discussing the beach bombing and Amir admits how difficult it is for him to sit and do nothing about it. Dalton responds by making the comment that the dream is to go rogue and track down the people responsible while the reality is to follow orders. Going rogue is exactly what I would say Dalton did after Hoffman tried to kill Patricia and Preach.
Hoffman was a dangerous man, there is no argument to be made against that. He killed who knows how many people and would have killed who knows how many more. He nearly killed two people that Dalton cares deeply about. Bringing him in would have destroyed not only Patricia’s career but her life. Dalton said it earlier to Preach, like a rabid dog men like Hoffman need to be put down. In his own mind Adam Dalton did what he had to do. The only thing that could be done.
Violence on their behalf or murder? That’s a question I’ll leave to you.
Article written by Brynn Willard, a guest writer for So Many Shows