TV Review: Crisis "Designated Allies"
By: Brandon Wolfe
Francis Gibson contacts his wife Janice via a cell phone stashed in the cupboard in the kitchen and, using a distorted voice to retain anonymity, instructs her to invite CIA Director Widener to come to the house so that she can poison him. As has been the case with all the parents on this show thus far, she complies with very little hesitation. When Widener arrives, he expresses his condolences to Janice over the kidnapping of her daughter and husband, but is able to quickly figure out what is going on and refuses the tea she presents him. However, Gibson, in accordance with villain law, intended this to happen and it was all part of the plan. His real goal was to get Widener’s guard down, using the clear attraction the director has to Janice as bait to allow Gibson’s team the time to remotely hack Widener’s phone for security access.
Finley and Dunn learn that the soldiers recovered from the Pakistani embassy are starting to awake from their chemically induced comas and the duo is sent down to question them. One of the soldiers, Hawkins, admits that the footage recovered from the CIA archives, showing their murder of several civilians, was not a mission but a training exercise. But before he can elaborate on that, Finley and Dunn are told that the CIA has arrived with a court order and will be taking the soldiers into custody. The agents decide that they cannot allow this to happen and concoct a plan to sneak the soldiers out of the hospital, taking the somewhat suspicious doctor on hand with them. While they do successfully escape, the doctor, Jonas Clarenbach, turns out to be the man from Meg Fitch’s past and he injects the agents with a tranquilizer and alerts the CIA to their whereabouts. Though they are unable to stop Jonas, the agents do get one relevant piece of information from him before the extraction takes place: that Meg knows more than she’s letting on.
When the agents go to question Meg, they learn that she once had an affair with Jonas, and that he had a CIA contract through her company’s pharmaceutical division. While Meg claims to never being aware of the details of the CIA project due to a lack of clearance, she does say that whatever it was went bad and the relationship ended shortly after. Meg has done her own research on Jonas once she discovered his involvement in the conspiracy and tracked down his wife, whose home the agents then ransack for information. Finley and Dunn discover one interesting clue: a photo of Francis Gibson with the soldiers and a couple of men the agents had previously encountered and killed in D.C. This leads Dunn to wonder whether Gibson is a hostage or the ringleader. Gibson, in the meantime, manages to use the security clearance he stole from Widener to ambush the CIA van containing the soldiers and apprehend the men.
Meanwhile at the compound, Francis’ daughter, Beth Ann Gibson, concocts a plan to fight back against the masked men holding her and her friends hostage. The plan basically involves a smuggled razor blade that she intends to use as a weapon. Against several men armed with machine guns. So, not a great plan. Beth Ann’s friend, Ian, requests that she give him the razor blade, which he attempts to use on one of the guards for retaliation against some inappropriate and hurtful things he said about Amber Fitch, the object of Ian’s affections. However, Ian is stopped in the nick of time by Beth Ann and Mr. Nash, a teacher among the students whose affair with Amber is one of the things that has set Ian off. Kyle, the President’s son, is convinced that the captured Secret Service agent, Hurst, is the real mastermind behind all of this and uses the razor blade as a bargaining chip to stage a confrontation. Gibson orders Hurst, who is innocent and being held separately from the other hostages, to go out and claim responsibility for everything Kyle is accusing him of, which he does reluctantly. Kyle is devastated, having considered Hurst a father figure, but the experience seems to bring he and Beth Ann closer together.
Reading over what I’ve just written, breaking it down simply to plot points rendered in text, ‘Crisis’ sounds like a show where interesting things are taking place, so please take my assurances to heart that the act of watching it is mind-numbing. It’s an action show that continues to struggle for a pulse, that is executed in the most rote, pedestrian manner possible, and that doesn’t have a single interesting or compelling character. Dermot Mulroney’s Gibson is clearly intended to be a complex figure, capable of mwa-ha-ha villainy, but with nuance and complicated shades-of-grey motivations, but he’s a musty cliché. The spurned government employee who goes rogue and uses his brilliance against his former employers is a character type that has about an inch worth of dust on it at this point and the character doesn’t have anything to him beyond that description. In fact, singling him out seems unfair because everyone in ‘Crisis’ is an action-movie cipher. Gillian Anderson remains the only actor who is bothering to attempt to elevate this material, but her character does not yet have the prominence for her to really make any sort of substantial difference. And the drama with the hostages, their petty teenage issues given inappropriate heft given the circumstances, is torturous. At this point, I’m getting past the point of hoping ‘Crisis’ improves itself and am beginning to hope that its pitiful ratings will soon put it and myself out of our respective miseries.
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