TV Review: Crisis “If You Are Reading This I am Dead”
By: Brandon Wolfe
In its premiere episode, ‘Crisis’ worked up quite a sweat in kicking off its convoluted premise, and if anything, the series gets even sweatier in its second outing. This is a show that is positively breaking its neck in about ten different places to take us on a ride that isn’t anywhere near as exciting or interesting as it thinks it is.
We resume with Gillian Anderson’s Meg Fitch, who has been blackmailed by kidnapping ringmaster Francis Gibson to produce $20 million in exchange for the release of Amber, her daughter (who is secretly her niece, because this show is enamored with twists destined to be met with a shrug). Meg takes the money to a designated location, but instead of being presented with Amber, she instead receives a proof-of-life photo of Amber.
FBI agent Susie Dunn is interrogating Secret Service agent Marcus Finley over his potential involvement in the kidnapping, since his survival is deemed suspicious regardless of his accompanying heroics. Dunn becomes convinced that Finley was not involved, but also declares him off the case. However, Finley goes above Dunn’s head and convinces her superior, Director Olsen, to put him back in the game. Olsen agrees and partners Finley with Dunn, giving us that odd-couple partnership we didn’t know we wanted. The duo hits the streets and tracks down the partner of Hearst, the Secret Service agent known to have been involved with the kidnapping (albeit reluctantly). Said partner is found bound in a motel room and discloses that Hearst took some personal time shortly before the attack, which Finley and Dunn discover included a trip to the Pakistani Embassy.
This is significant because Gibson is also blackmailing the Pakistani Ambassador, whose son is among the hostages. Finley and Dunn meet with him and quickly ascertain that he has been compromised. It seems he has been tasked with guarding a mysterious door on the embassy premises, but he agrees to assist the agents in obtaining the key card that will allow them access to the door, which we find contains a group of unconscious American soldiers in medical beds. It turns out that Gibson’s plan was to get these soldiers, who were placed in the embassy under CIA orders, out in the open, but when Finley recognizes the ambulance driver from the hijacking, the man is gunned down in a firefight and killed.
Gibson’s reasons for wanting the soldiers exposed has to do with something called the Lennox Program, a CIA operation that Gibson once worked on as an analyst, but somehow also led to him being betrayed, necessitating all of this nonsense as a means of vengeance. Though the first leg of his plan doesn’t quite work out as planned, he still has Meg Fitch on the hook and intends to use her as a means of achieving his goals.
Once again, ‘Crisis’ is throwing convolutions at us by the bucketful, but there is simply not enough reason to care about any of this. Gibson’s plan is so ludicrously intricate, and involves so many different government agencies, that rather than complex and captivating, it just seems silly and overstuffed. There might be a way to make this scenario play out in a more effective way, but it would almost certainly involve the series slowing down, which it clearly has no intention of doing.
And not only is it difficult to care about what is happening, but also who it’s happening to. We don’t know any of these characters because the show started pushing the panic button before the opening credits on the pilot had barely finished, and we aren’t learning anything intriguing about them in the thick of everything. It’s essentially a bunch of stock types doing and saying all the things people always do in thrillers like this. None of the actors have begun rising above the material, and some of them are spotty at best (Rachael Taylor as Agent Dunn, in particular, is simply not cut out for the tough-as-nails persona she’s been handed).
It’s only been two episodes, but it’s already starting to feel like this is the show ‘Crisis’ is going to be. Fast, dumb and generic. The only hope on the horizon seems to be that it has a premise that it’s going to burn through very quickly at this pace, meaning maybe it will evolve into something else, and maybe that something else will be somehow better?
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