Perfect from the first minute 'til the end.
"You're right. You're a good detective, and a damn good friend." I squealed, I tell 'ya. Fusco deserves that after 3 seasons of taking shit from Reese.
The call from "Shaw" that was so obviously a trap but was still, at the very least, a driving force that moved the story forward wayyy forward. And I'm glad they at least now have confirmation that Shaw's alive, but finding out that she fed Greer and co. information about Root (and the glimpse of her at the end implying that it's true)? Shiiiit, my heart is breaking.
And goddamn if a Machine made me cry. "I will not fail you now." WTF.
Bonus: Root playing chicken with the Machine — our psycho's back with a vengeance (and very intense feelings). Harper popping back up, Finch dressed up like a homeless hipster "dope fiend", Root vs Martine part 2 (and part 3, the bed scene threw me off guard, holy shit!), Reese goddamn smiling. The Samaritan agents' handler's ominous warning going with the montage of scenes at the end? Chills. (And Control killing her? Bonus bonus! I love how unapologetically ruthless this woman is... as long as it works for/isn't directed at the team.)
Wow, great show. It really tore me up at the end.
I kept wanting Finch to let Root help. Then I was hoping TM would break her out somehow. I really like the part where Root tells Finch that TM does not talk to him because it's respecting his wishes (the relationship he wants to have). TM is using him the way Finch is "programmed" to be used. TM has become more flexible than Finch.
It was always obvious that Reese had great respect for Carter but these romantic feelings seem pushed on us to quickly. They were just trying to up the emotional damage to were going to do. Besides we all know he likes Zoe.
Fusco come through again. He was not trained like Reese or Shaw to take torture, hell he wasn't even trained as much Carter. He sat there and took it and did not break until they were about to kill his kid. Then the tough, tubby guy broke his own thumb and choked the bitch out. I did wonder at the end why we didn't see splints on his fingers when he was in the car with Shaw.
Other than killing that dirty cop off screen Shaw didn't do much but she did have a few nice chats with Fusco.
I had not seen any promos for this episode and did not know someone was going to die. It all makes sense now though. Why Carter has had so much screen time. How they brought the father into play for the kid. The sudden romantic feelings. It all came crashing in on me when she told Finch she knew about TM. I knew Capt. Dick was still out there and just thought "They're going to kill her". It was still a rough watch. They killed the black person, again.
The ringing phone. It was annoying but I thought it was annoying in the right way. Reese was shot. Carter was dying. Finch was trying to cross the street and the phone kept ringing. The numbers keep coming. That's what I thought for the first few seconds. Then I wondered if TM had done it to save Finch "daddy" or if it was calling with Carter's number.
Finally, as the street gangs were chasing our friends, on the subway and through the streets, the phrase "Warriors, come out and play" kept running through my head.
WHEN SHE HUGGED BEN!!!! I think that was one of the most emotional scenes I’ve ever watched in any show! It truly made me cry!!! Last episode when Ben was watching that video about feeling lonely made me realize that’s why he was fine being Arabella’s roommate and fine with paying the rent, cause he felt lonely and that way he had some company but now it’s more like Arabella realizing he’s a friend so that was such a cute heartwarming moment because it also meant Arabella was ready to somehow move on with her life and her friends and the good things in her life!!! That scene is for the ages!!!
I was more than okay with the first outcome! I was super nervous for them because like trusting Leonora to be responsible for the main part of the plan? And then Arabella’s disguise was ridiculous! She looked amazing for like a regular night out but for being lowkey it didn’t work. And then I realized what was going on and it was just an emotional rollercoster cause like no matter the outcome it wouldn’t give back to Arabella what was taken from her. And then that scene when she says goodbye to her abuser (I don’t wanna name him cause he doesn’t deserve it), like she commands him to leave and at the same time drags him out, that scene was so powerful.
A great closure to the story, I’m glad Michaela is safe and in a better place and can express herself and be recognized as brilliant and talented and strong!! Thank you for making this show cause it gave so many people a voice and representation and a community!
I think this one was even better than the pilot, which was amazing. They are actually the Magneto arc from the comics and, by the looks of it, Madelyne Prior as well! Honestly I didn't see that coming at all and it puts a wide grim on my face. I am full on board now and seriously hope they don`t drop the ball after this astonishing beginning (pun intended). If they keep following the 90s comics this close this is gonna be the best X-Men project on screen ever, the likes of which I have been expecting and being constantly disappointed since the first movie from 2000.
Oh, and the fact the freaking Storm loses his power and ditches the X-Men was the perfect icing on the cake. I know it was supposed to be a tragic, emotional moment but I hate that character thanks to the way the voice actor chews the scenery harder than anyone on every single line she delivers! If she stays out for long, or maybe the whole season, this is gonna be perfection. I know it is too much to ask, but the hope on this show has allowed me to dream again.
Six claws up, bub.
Great return! Loved seeing the glimpses of their new lives, and Reese now a legit cop? This is gonna be a sight to see. And no joke, but I'm looking forward to him actually working side-by-side with Fusco. Him getting Carter's desk... damn, can't believe Carter just died a few episodes ago (for binge-watcher me), it feels like it's been forever after everything they've been through at this point.
Poor Shaw and her mismatched job, but looks like she'll fit right in with her new one (which I still don't quite know what it'll be, but I'm guessing this will play a role for the Machine's plans later on?).
Also, can't help but see the irony in Reese (and Carter previously) working with Elias now, realizing he's the "necessary/better evil"... after working so hard to send him to jail in Season 1 and seeing his absence land them several of their numbers. I know he kind of seemed like he liked Carter and even got revenge for her death, or maybe that was just him making 100% sure that HR has no more chance to return. I wonder if working with him will at one point in the series blow up in Reese and the team's faces.
Side-note: cute that they were upgraded from the burner flip phones to iPhones. XD
Another utterly fantastic episode. From the opening minutes with haunting Johnny Cash and Hurt to the great writing, great directing, great acting, and to Elias coming out of the shadows again.
Harold, Shaw, Reese, and Lionel with an unseen psychiatrist/therapist, shot facing our familiar characters; puts the focus on their reactions, their facial expressions, their individual situations which brought them all together in the present day. It's worth noting Damian Young, Jessica Hecht, and Kevin O'Rourke in these roles.
Digitalism Miami Showdown! Reese kicks arse. Jim Caviezel portraying such raw emotion; his grief, his pain, our grief, our pain. Does grief have an evolutionary value or purpose? Perhaps it does.
If you don't tell me I'll make the last three minutes of your life last forever.
Root & The Machine! Shooting kneecaps!
And Fusco finally getting to beat the shit out of Simmons.
Carter got you good, yeah‽
I'm not gonna let you undo all the good she did. Carter saved my life. She saved me from myself. Because she believed in me. I'm not gonna throw it away on a piece of crap like you.
That final scene with Elias. Absolute chefs kiss of writing and very well executed as always by Enrico Colatoni.
I offered to kill you for detective Carter many times and she always said no. She was civilised to the very end. I don't think she liked me, but I liked her, very much. You killed her. So now I consider it my responsibility to fix the particular problem that is you, Officer Simmons.
You really think you're going to be the one to kill me?
No, my friend is going to kill you, I'm just going to watch.
11/10.
Edit 26/05/2024: typo correction.
Fantastic episode!! From start to finish. From Johnny Cash in the beginning to Elias in the end. Reese's terminator like hunt through the city was something I had be wanting to see. Unlike the rest of the group Reese would have ended both Quinn and Simmons if he could have.
Root with her two fisted gun fighting caused me to have Matrix flashbacks. Harold shut the door again because he knows that she may have helped them but if she thought she needed to kill them for the machine she would. She doesn't shoot at kneecaps.
Again they give Fusco some choice bits. His flashback and his fight were both good scenes for him. Normally I might be bothered by Fusco taking Simmons in a fight but Simmons had been shot (and we give him a little extra for righteous indignation).
When I saw the shadow in Simmons room at the end, I knew it would be Elias. Carter saved him and treated his with some respect. Hell, the whole group treats him with respect but I knew he had grown fond of Carter. He gave a great little speech and had done what needed to be done. Sometimes it better to watch.
i think some people might be missing the point. yeah they they didn't end up flying off together happily ever after, but they did both get what they both needed.
Dom is last seen sitting in the plane, passed out. this is important because earlier it stresses the point that she has basically not had any kind of meaningful sleep or rest in like 5 years. this is her finally feeling some level of peace, and being in a place where she is not afraid of the worst and able to fall asleep peacefully.
Darlene has been so co-dependent it is crippling to her when she is forced to be alone. she runs off and has a panic attack in the bathroom, but wills herself to accept that she can be ok on her own and this serves as a turning point in her growth and ability to move on and be ok whether she is alone or not. she needs to be able to be alone before she can be with someone.
edit 12/11:
also forgot to point out what i believe to be an intentional play against the stereotypical scene in which the two would have united at the last moment, with a catchy pop song to go along with it by an artist who has been arguably borrowing from the 80s in a large portion of her catalog. and from what i can recall, but i could be wrong, the fact that you hear little to no current pop music as a part of the soundtrack in any way remotely similar to how it is used in this scene, serves to support the intended play against such cliches in other films/shows.
[8.3/10] I’ve played a couple of Star Wars games recently where high ranking Imperials defect to join the good guys. And to be honest, it feels cheap. There’s a real opportunity when exploring a villain’s perspective. Why someone chooses to do evil, or at least do harm, is a rich vein to examine. These games squander that opportunity, with the (theoretically) bad guys simply seeing the Empire do one more bad thing and declaring, as Britta from Community once put it, “I don’t know why, but this is the last straw.”
But that’s why I love what The Bad Batch does with Crosshair here. He’s not just a generic amoral villain who fights for his love of evil. He has complex, believable motivations behind the choices that he makes, choices he hashes out with Hunter. I’ll cop to being a sucker for those kinds of philosophical conversations between old friends (hello fellow Star Trek crossover fans!), but they give depth to the major antagonist of this show’s stellar first season.
The rest of the Bad Batch is grappling with what to do now that there’s no more missions. Crosshair has found his, or at least, a new institution that gives him the clarity that comes with orders. The rest of the Bad Batch struggled with the fact that one of their own turned on them, trying to take their lives. But Crosshair is the one who feels abandoned and betrayed, as though his brothers turned their back not only on what they fought and stood for, but on him. And while the Bad Batch had loyalty to the Republic and remains wary of what the Empire is up to, Crosshair sees the power and potential in this new galactic force that could allow him and his brothers to do more in this new age.
In short, he has comprehensible reasons for how he feels about the Empire, his former comrades, and most importantly himself. He’s granted a believable inner life in all of this. More than anything, The Bad Batch makes him into a tragic figure, one who still has loyalty to his brothers, who wants to fight alongside them, but who’s been too enmeshed in all of this for too long to see things with the moral lens Hunter and the rest of the team do.
And then “Return to Kamino” drops the bomb. Crosshair had his inhibitor chip removed. Questions of how and when abound. But regardless, it makes his position and his thoughts that much stronger and more complicated, because they’re his own. Most of Crosshair’s actions to this point could be written off as a product of a control mechanism cranked up to eleven. But now he’s ostensibly free, and still wants to fight for the bad guys, albeit with his brothers at his side rather than at the other end of his blaster.
Oh yeah, and they also have to stave off a base full of stormtroopers, survive an assault from a bunch of battle droids, and find shelter as Admiral Rampart destroys the Kaminoan cloning facility. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, right?
There’s a sense of things coming fully circle to all of this. Not only is it a reunion for the Bad Batch as originally constituted (or at least after Echo joined the team), but it takes place in the same battle arena where Admiral Rampart tested their abilities in the first episode. The danger is enough for Crosshair and Hunter to stop targeting one another and take on the common threat, a sign that their camaraderie isn’t dead.
It’s strangely heartening (albeit a little puzzling) when Crosshair chooses to kill his stormtrooper team in order to give the rest of the Bad Batch a second chance to join him. It’s rousing when the group sets aside their differences to show a united front in this battle, much as they did in the series’s first episode. And its bittersweet when Hunter and Crosshair have a post-skirmish showdown, and Hunter shoots his friend, but on stun rather than kill.
Omega is sidelined for most of this. I imagine she’ll get more focus in the season finale. She proves useful not only in navigating the cloning facility, but in creating distractions and teaming up with good old AZI-3 to neutralize some stormtroopers on her own. In particular, we get another hint at her suffering some trauma in a cloning lab (much like the one in “Battle Scars”). She’s clearly upset when having to go back to Nala Se’s lab, even as she pushes through for the good of her team. The episode sets up things for her here, even if she isn’t as big a presence as in other installments.
But her influence is still felt, particularly in how she’s moved Hunter over the course of the season. Despite the better part of valor being to just run, despite the safest thing to do being to eliminate Crosshair after all the trouble he’s caused them, Hunter decides to save his villainous brother-in-arms instead. It’s a choice of understanding. Hunter plainly disagrees with Crosshair’s ideas, but he thinks the fellow clone can be saved, and deserves to be given the chance that he tried to give them. It’s a sense of altruism and understanding toward those who need help, even when it creates more danger, that Omega’s represented from the beginning, when she told Crosshair it wasn’t his fault.
Much of The Bad Batch has felt like a postscript to Star Wars: The Clone Wars so far. The show’s examined what someone bred for war does when the war is over. What side do you choose, what orders do you follow, when the body giving those orders has dramatically changed? There’s a desire among some of our heroes to go back to the way things were, or at least a wistfulness about the certainty of their role in the war ending.
The destruction of the Kamino cloning facility is a dramatic ending, creating a series of explosions and mortal threats for our heroes to survive. (Which they will -- my bet is on Omega leading them to safety via more tubes.) It’s a practical ending, as the industrial clone production has ended in favor of stormtroopers, and the Empire is holding the cloning technology. (Pickled Snokes, anyone?) But it’s also a symbolic ending, for the legions of clones birthed there, a last bastion of how things used to be rended to rubble. From here, there is no going back.
We’ve seen Hunter, Omega, and the rest decide that the way forward means helping people, even when it’s not easy. We’ve seen other clones like Rex, Cut, and Gregor struggle to make their way in the new world. And now we’ve seen Crosshair, fully liberated, choosing to side with the Empire. Showing that spectrum, making each clones choice understandable, makes for a deeper conflict, and a sort of evil more tragic and insidious than any run of the mill Imperial bad guy can muster.
[8.0/10] Separation isn’t easy. When something is close and consistent, it’s easy to take the good things for granted, acclimate to the little pieces of someone that make you smile or make things easier for you. It can highlight the places where you don’t align, where things are hard. And when you’re apart, when the status quo changes, the absence can cast into relief those little things that you missed, and it can show you the effect it has on the other people in your orbit.
There’s two separations in “Safe House”: one permanent, and one that may or may not be. One of them begins when Chris Amador -- who is both Martha’s ex and Stan Beeman’s partner -- gets into a scrap with Philip (in his guise as Clark the Internal Affairs agent). Chris, it turns out, has no apparent suspicions of shady dealings; he seems to just be protecting his turf. But he identifies himself as an FBI agent and, when things get physical between him and Philip, and Chris takes a knife to the gut, Philip takes him to a safe house, to get information out of him.
Let’s not hide the ball here. Chris dies. The show spends some time showing the Jennings trying to keep him alive long enough to give them some information about whom the FBI is targeting as retaliation for the KGB killings from the last episode, and Stan goes on a one-man crusade to find his partner. But it would have been a cheat for Amador to survive this. He’s seen Philip’s face; he knows too much; would be too disruptive to the status quo for him to walk away from this.
So the show has the guts to kill him off. It’s hard not to admire that -- the show playing out what it sets up without trying to find some creative way to back out of it. We get just enough little details about Chris to make him deeper than the semi-charming asshole we’d known up until this point, and make his death more tragic and meaningful.
When we flash back to a chat between Chris and Stan, Chris claims to be a lone wolf, to a man without attachments, but when Stan goes to check on his partner after he doesn't show up for work, he sees pictures of family and friends, and surprisingly enough, of himself, with his arm around Chris. Amador likes to play it cool, to put himself up as the skirt-chasing solo-flyer, but as that picture, and the very fact that he’s still pining for Martha despite the voices on his answering machine show, he has more attachments than he lets on.
That lets Stan see him in a different a light. When his partner isn’t there, he realizes how much he took their connection -- one that annoyed him to the point of calling Chris a Putz early in the episode -- for granted. The prospect of losing Amador, of the KGB killing him or taking him, stirs something in Stan, something that makes him break rules, violate protocol, and act with a viciousness and determination we haven’t really seen in him before.
That’s contrasted with an almost casualness from the Jennings by comparison. We’ve seen Stan and the Jennings work both sides of a case before, but typically the contrast the show draws is a methodological one, not an emotional one. It’s the difference between how the Russians do things and how the Americans do things. But here the difference is one of care.
To Philip and Elizabeth, Chris is just another enemy agent, another guy to work for information and do what needs doing. For Stan, Chris is a partner, one he didn’t realize was that important to him until the other side took him.
(As a side note, it is again interesting to see a random development that both sides of the Cold War start chasing their own tails over. Each side has conspiracy theories about why and how their low-level guys were taken, and it all starts with a fight over a girl. There’s irony there.)
But maybe that casualness is also a side of professionalism, something that Philip and Elizabeth are leaning into now that they’re “pushing the pause button” on their marriage. There’s is a much more quotidian separation, the kind that families in America deal with every day.
That’s what’s really remarkable about this episode and to a larger extent this show. Despite the outsized spy theatrics, and despite the unusual situation between Philip and Elizabeth, it manages to deliver an emotionally involving, very real-seeming spate of fallout from the two of them breaking the news of their separation to Paige and Henry, and to the both of them starting to live separate lives.
That’s the sharpest for Elizabeth. She doesn't have help when she’s bringing in the groceries. She’s struggling to get the kids out and to school. She’s uncomfortable with something so personal and, where she’s from, shameful, being made public. It is hard on her to try this step that she nevertheless believes is for the best. She has to deal with this strange new world, with her daughter “hating her guts and making no secret of it,” and most of all with the way it hurts her son.
That becomes the hardest thing about it, the hardest thing about those sorts of splits, when innocent third parties get hurt, not because they’ve done anything wrong, not because they did anything to deserve it, but because they are not a part of those decisions, the blameless victims who just feel the hardship of the change. That is Henry, retreating inside himself when the news comes and not knowing how to deal with it.
And that’s also Vladimir, the low-level first tour kid from the Rezidentura, who Stan kidnaps in retaliation for his missing partner and then, when the dust settles and Chris shows up dead, he shoots without remorse. One of theirs for one of it’s ours. It’s not his fault. It’s nobody’s fault, in the sense that it’s a strange confluence of events that spin out from this whole multi-headed conflict, but he takes the fall for it.
It’s the scariest Stan has ever seemed. His speech about hunting, about the birds going limp, about the “soft mouth,” is unnerving in a way easy-going, soft-spoken Stan has never been before. This triggered something in him, something that made him go against his boss, intimidate Nina, and cross a line we’ve yet to see him cross until now.
That’s all because of Chris, because of the man who realized in Vietnam that he could die at any minute, who wanted to live life to the fullest in the meantime, and who had more going on under the surface than Stan, or the audience, knew until he met his end.
The Jennings can return to one another. And let’s be honest here -- there’s five more seasons of the show, so chances are they will. But Stan and Chris won’t ever be partners again. All Stan has left is the absence, the painful impression of the deeper parts of his friend he didn’t realize were there until he had cause to reflect on them. Some separations are temporary. Some are permanent. But the longer they last, the more you cannot come back from them, the more they expose and the more they can change you in ways that are just as irrevocable.
