Photo: Christopher Saunders/Netflix
Well, it looks like the influx of new characters isn’t over yet. In the middle of “government property,” the show introduces us to an encounter between two people we’ve never seen before: Thomas Balla (Rob Hibbs) and his old college friend Elliot Cook, the latter of whom works for the Foreign Office. Thomas’s dictator father has been convicted in The Hague for war crimes, and seems keen to help him return to power using his connections. But Elliot isn’t any help, and based on what we see later in the episode, Thomas may need to resort to more messy and complicated ways to get things done.
Enter his cousin Marcus (Michael Malarkey), a trained military man who oversees a late-night truck theft due to its mysterious contents (possibly chemical weapons) — and kills innocent drivers when one of his comrades mistakes Marcus’s words. Name out loud. We don’t know the depth of these characters’ involvement in Project Foxglove yet or how this heist connects to everything else going on, but Marcus’ cold competence tells us everything we need to know about him.
I also started to enjoy Nour and her ill-timed temporary romance with Jawad. They go on their first date in this episode, a wonderful walk during which they discuss the pressures they face at home and work. Sparks fly between the two, but the series doesn’t accelerate their relationship. Nour has one reason to keep some distance: she doesn’t want to involve him in her spying. Earlier that day, she tagged Abbas’s coat and followed him and Jawad to an informal meeting with the man who killed Alice in Bangkok. I obtained photos of the man with evidence that Abbas left with his bag, but narrowly escaped without being spotted. (And he seems kind of a horse an act Find out.) Noor Wizard has very high standards for what constitutes valuable intelligence, and this doesn’t show that. If it had pictures of the actual contents of that delivered bag, on the other hand…
Nour was alone on this mission to spy on the ambassador and save her family, without anyone she could speak to in public besides a wizard who didn’t have the time or affection. So it’s good news that Night Action is taking up her case and Peter and Rose will meet up in the next episode that brings together the two halves of this season. It turns out that Abbas’s meeting this afternoon is directly related to Warren and the mission that went wrong in Bangkok.
The first ten minutes of the episode resolve the suspense issue from last time. When Peter answers the phone in Warren’s pocket, he’s greeted by the mysterious buyer he’s discovered in Bangkok — the same man, it turns out, who originally contacted Rose in an attempt to track down Peter. Now he insists that Peter quietly open the door to his men and tell them exactly the information Warren told him. Either way, of course, Peter is doomed to fail. He knows what Jupiter looks like, making him a threat that must be neutralized. But does Rose want to survive? Jupiter’s men are also tracking her.
From here, Peter and Rose separately manage to maintain their lives, each escaping from the gunmen. As self-sufficient as Rose is, it’s nice to see Peter coaching her over the phone again, a callback to the first episode of the show. Instead of guiding her to the best place to hide in an empty cabin, he guides her through tourist shops and Chinese restaurant kitchens, helping her change her appearance and pick up a weapon along the way. When Alice’s killer finally catches up to Rose anyway, she manages to stick him in the shoulder with the knife she grabbed. But it takes last-minute help from nearby Katherine to really lose the men.
Due to the trauma associated with Diane Farr, Peter has some trust issues and is reluctant to open up to Katherine about Warren’s testimony he took before the man’s death. During their meeting in Brooklyn Bridge Park, she denied any knowledge of a CIA conspiracy. But it goes both ways. From the outside, Peter doesn’t seem trustworthy either. They will need to at least trust each other if they want to make any progress.
Really, Government Property is about the good guys learning to put up a united front for the mission ahead. Peter and Rose do not have the resources to work alone; They need someone like Nour inside the embassy and someone like Katherine to provide cash, transportation, and information while they work to identify the buyer.
The other variable here is Rose herself: she’s supposed to return to California, where she can better manage her post-traumatic stress and recurring nightmares. As she reveals to Peter, she actually tried to start another company of her own, but blew her one shot when she had a panic attack on the day of an investor meeting. Now, she’s doing better – is it worth risking that by returning to a life of danger? Of course, Rose will almost certainly choose to stay by the end of the episode, so watching her go back and forth is pretty boring. Her terrifying and advanced technology is reason enough to keep her around.
Thanks to this technique, Peter and Rose are finally able to identify the man who killed Alice and keeps showing up everywhere: Solomon Vega, a presumed-dead former Marine who goes by many names. He left behind a sister named Celeste and disappeared without a trace, any mention of his life erased by someone high up.
The dynamic duo stops by Celeste’s house to spy on them using aliases and ask her some questions about her brother, who she says died by suicide after five tours in Afghanistan. He used to take care of her after she lost her legs in a hit-and-run accident, and his VA benefits were a godsend. She is now able to run a small homemade soap shop online without having to do anything else. But some simple mail fraud reveals the truth: They’re getting large recurring payments from something called KinCare Trust, which could lead them to Solomon’s employer.
“Government Ownership” makes some real progress in outlining this conspiracy, even if we can’t see how the various threads intertwine yet. Hopefully now that Rose and Catherine are in New York to stay, the plot will actually move along.
• The show continues to include these opening flashbacks, this time with Rose accepting the job of lead programmer, but none of them are conveyed as well as they could.
• Will Rose be able to regain control of the algorithm despite her boss’s refusal to do so? She hasn’t been officially fired yet, but there’s reason for concern.
• “I have felt safer in the past 12 hours than I have in the past nine months.” Are you sure about that, Rose? You were crying in your sleep last night.
• The trauma stuff just doesn’t sit right with me when it comes to Peter. I think he’ll be haunted by the failure to save Alice, sure, but we haven’t seen much of her, so it’s hard for us to understand how close they were. Rose says Peter didn’t get help after Camp David the way she did, but I’m not sure she did So Much better than him. Either way, I’ll be curious to see if he and Katherine get more real with each other in the coming episodes.
• Apparently, Chelsea Arrington is on the campaign trail with one of the presidential candidates, so that’s our explanation for her absence (not that she would be there anyway, considering Rose decided to stay). I appreciate the Season 1 trend, I think.
