The Endgame – “Pilot” (2022)

The first episode of ‘The Endgame’ aired February 21, 2022, at 10:00pm Eastern on the NBC network.  It was developed by Jake Coburn and Nicholas Wootton, who also wrote the pilot, and was directed by Justin Lin.  It starred Morena Baccarin as Elena Fedorova and Ryan Michelle Bathe as Val Fitzgerald.  Its overnight ratings were around 3.3 million viewers with a .46 share in the 18-49 demographic.  It ranked fourth overall for broadcast television for the night.  It was a production of Universal Television LLC, a direct subsidiary of NBCUniversal, as well as My So-Called Company productions, know for ‘The Vampire Diaries’ and ‘Roswell,’ and Perfect Storm Entertainment, which is associated with Justin Lin.

Not gonna criticize a temp title for the pilot.

              The involvement of Julie Piec and Justin Lin as executive producers is interesting, but this entire show is the brainchild of Coburn and Wootton.  They both have pretty extensive television backgrounds.  Coburn seems to have gotten his start as a writer on the Lonelygirl15 quasi-hoax back in 2007 which he managed to convert into gigs on various CW shows such as ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘Arrow,’ mostly as a writer/producer.  Wootton goes all the way back to the mid-90’s, starting on ‘Brooklyn South’ before creating the one-season ‘City of Angels’ in 2000 and also working as a writer/producer on the later seasons of ‘NYPD Blue’ and ‘Law & Order,’ as well as more recently ‘Scorpion’ and ‘Stumptown.’ 

              Morena Baccarin has been kicking around television and movies for some time now.  Her big break came as Inara Serra on ‘Firefly’ and after that she popped up as the lead villain in the ‘V’ remake, appeared in several seasons of ‘Gotham,’ and I personally liked her recurring role in ‘The Mentalist.’  Ryan Michelle Bathe’s first big role was a recurring one in ‘Boston Legal’ and also appeared in ‘Army Wives,’ ‘This is Us,’ and ‘The First Wives Club.’ 

              Justin Lin directing this seems surprising at first, considering he’s mostly known for helping to turn “The Fast and the Furious” movies into the franchise it is today, helming movies three through six and returning for the ninth to start to wrap up the series, but he’s also directed pilots for shows such as ‘S.W.A.T.’ and ‘Scorpion’ as well as episodes of ‘True Detective’ and the ‘Magnum P.I.’ remake.

              All of which is a long way of saying that given the people involved this pilot should have been much, much better than it was.  To paraphrase myself, a tv pilot has roughly three things to accomplish during its run time: establish the premise, demonstrate how it’s going to function on an episode-to-episode basis, and make you care about the characters.  When I first started looking at pilots, I thought the first two were the most important goals, but the more episodes I saw the more emphasis I placed on the third.  Good characters can make up for a lot.  In this case it really doesn’t matter as this is an example of a nearly complete triple-failure.

Let’s lay it out in order and start with the premise: an international fugitive who runs a worldwide criminal empire including running a mercenary army and money laundering is captured by the US government, but it turns out it’s all part of her nefarious plan when her people take over seven banks in New York City in order to collect blackmail material on the Attorney General and the head of Homeland Security and makes it clear her schemes are just beginning.  And by the end that’s really it: there’s this criminal in ostensible US custody who has a mysterious ongoing plan involving holding banks hostage.  This is the setup for a Michael Mann movie, not the start of a supposed multi-season television show.

97% of her characterization right here.

              This leads directly into the second problem, because I have no idea how this show is going to function from week to week.  By the end of the episode, it becomes clear that the status quo for the season is going to be that Elena is in custody, the banks are still taken over by her mercenaries, and that nothing is going to be resolved any time soon.  It very much feels like the first half of a two-part pilot episode where in the second half we get the actual setup for the show but no, this seems to be it.  The synopsis of the yet-to-air second episode reads “A kidnapping orchestrated by Elena puts Val to the test as her past resurfaces and becomes a part of the bigger play.  The FBI Task Force contends with an unexpected turn of events in one of the banks.”  To the best of my knowledge this is going to be a series of episodes detailing the ongoing hostage situation as these seven banks are simply held hostage and Elena sits smugly in custody.  I’m sure other elements are going to be introduced but we have no hints in the pilot what they will be.  Nothing indicates this is a limited series, and I’ve looked.  I’ve written before about Season 3 problems, the notion that a premise will burn out before a show hits its third season, and I’m not entirely sure how this could make it to even thirteen episodes.  The show can really only go one of two ways: it either manages to be whip-smart and serve us bite-sized versions of the movie “Heat” for forty-two minutes every week with enough variations that it doesn’t get stale, or it focuses on other crimes outside of the banks and hopes we don’t notice that those hostages must be getting pretty hungry by now.

Which brings us to the third goal of a pilot and the biggest problem with this show, which is that the characters aren’t so much people as they’re small bags filled with crumpled scraps of papers with tropes written on them.  There are only two actual characters in this series surrounded by plot devices and exposition dumping machines, which is acceptable for a pilot, generally the supporting cast gets fleshed out as the series progresses, the problem is that both of the main characters suck.  Elena herself is yet another stupid person’s idea of a smart person.  She’s this criminal mastermind genius that’s managed to rise to the top of the world of crime and in the language of this show being smart involves magical predictive powers.  It’s one thing to be prepared and have some plans in place, quite another to be capable of what this show portrays.  To break down the first example the show gives of her abilities: sometime before the start of the episode she has one of her people deep enough inside the FBI that he’s personal security to the Attorney General of the United States.  He plants an envelope on said AG which says, “I’m the Queen.”  After she’s been delivered to her holding area she’s given a pen and a piece of paper to write down some information.  At the same time her people take the first bank hostage, then one of them holds up a message to a camera reading “Director Real: Bow to the Queen.”  As the director of the FBI is getting a phone call about this Elena hands the piece of paper to the AG, on which she’s written “check your coat pocket.”   He finds the envelope but doesn’t open it until the FBI director comes over and asks her if she sent the message and who the queen is, at which point the AG opens the envelope and reads it.

I don’t really feel the need to point out all of the ways that this is stupid.  It’s impressive if you don’t think about it for more than a few seconds, which the show is really hoping you don’t.  Enough things beyond Elena’s direct control had to happen in exactly the right order with exactly the right timing for that moment to land and while the moment itself is decent enough as dramatic beat before a commercial break in the end it doesn’t have any real effect on the plot.  In fact, it ends up as a net-negative for Elena as her deeply embedded agent in the FBI is quickly identified and taken into custody.  The fact that the agent had Eastern-European style gang tattoos all over his arms yet somehow was personal security to the US AG is in its own category of stupid.

Becuase of all the planning, y'see,

Her characterization just continues on like that.  Characters will make several sets of decisions and actions and end up at a place and time where magically Elena predicted they would be presumably weeks before.  Things keep happening that she apparently planned for with such magical timing and foresight that it’s never impressive, it’s just implausible and annoying and robs every scene of tension, and eventually it occurs to the audience that while she’s a main character Elena never actually does anything over the course of the episode.  She stays in one room saying various mysterious things hinting at bigger plans and smiling smugly.  Everything she’s done that’s supposedly amazing happened offscreen before the episode even started.  Because of her magical planning powers she’s never in danger, never threatened, never thrown off.  She has just one note to play.  The meandering accent that Morena Baccarin strains her mediocre lines through doesn’t do her any favors.

The character Elena is facing off against doesn’t fare any better.  Her antagonist is a mid-ranking FBI agent with whom she has a sketched-in history, involving some vague happenings in Gambia as well as both their husbands in what’s hinted at being the real ongoing mystery that’s going to be running in the background of all the bank shenanigans.  Val Fitzgerald is, as a supporting character helpfully states, the “first Black supervisor in the criminal branch of the New York office” of the FBI.  She’s so honest she got her husband thrown in prison for taking drug money, although she still loves him.  This causes her problems within the FBI as they suspect she’s dirty too, which establishes one of her two entire traits (one more than Elena, to be fair), which is to be angry all the time.  She drives angry, she talks angry, she invades personal spaces and doesn’t take guff from anyone.  She’s in a room with the Attorney General of the United States, the Director of the FBI, and the Director of Homeland Security and she’s the one telling them they’re wrong and what they need to do while verbally banging her fist on the table. 

The other note she gets to play is basically magical realization powers.  She figures out Elena is involved in taking the banks hostages through leaps of logic that are only impressive because the writers decided she’s right.  I counted six distinct moments in the forty-two minutes of the pilot where Val pauses in mid-sentence, the camera pushes in on her face, and she Figures Something Out.  If we’re lucky we’ll get a thrown-away line of dialogue to kind of explain how she came to her realization but mostly she just spits out the next plot point and we’re off.  From what I can work out this is essentially to balance out Elena’s magical planning powers.  This also allows her to angrily insist she was right to her previous doubters and be angry again when they insist on not taking her advice the next time.

She was right.

What this turns into in the finished product is Elena being smug about something, Val figuring out what she’s smug about, but just slightly too late so Elena’s plan still works, then Elena hints she’s smug about something again, and repeat until the episode is over.  They ping pong back and forth and nothing Val does interferes with Elena’s plans, and in fact her presence is factored into those plans in such a way that if she stopped to think about it she’d figure out that in a way she’s actually helping her.  They’re basically operating in a closed system that was apparently all mapped out before the season started so there’s a distinct feeling that nothing they’re doing matters. 

So using my usual rubric those are the ways this fails as a pilot, but it also fails pretty badly as a basic piece of filmed entertainment.  Before we get into specifics and the inevitable comparisons to ‘The Blacklist’ we need to examine its use of linear time as a storytelling device.  This isn’t anything special to ‘The Endgame,’ nor is it something I think the makers intentionally exploited, but it’s something I noticed from the manner in which I watched this episode.  The first time through I watched it while I took notes, which involved frequently pausing it while I typed out my thoughts, noting all the inconsistencies and leaps of logic.  The second time through I just let it play and while all the same problems were there without the ability to sit and consider and work out the implications of events the whole thing flowed a bit better because there wasn’t enough time to think.

To give a single example: there’s a throwaway line from Val relatively early on that they need to order protection to all of New York City’s banks.  Her boss, already established as an asshole antagonist, mocks her by stating that putting a “91 prevent defense” around all 765 banks in the city would be madness.  Several scenes later, after a bomb has gone off in response to a SWAT team trying to infiltrate a bank currently held hostage, he decides to call for exactly that, despite the fact that several other banks had previously also been taken over and the detonation of some bombs doesn’t actually change the situation or in any way make it more likely that other banks are also in danger.  But in a nifty narrative example of The Kuleshov Effect because the idea was planted earlier and something dramatic has just happened, we buy into the idea that this is an appropriate response.  It also reinforces our respect for the protagonist since it was her idea and (clumsily) sets up a plot point for later.  If we were given time to think about this, like I was when taking notes, this would instantly ring false but because we’re on to the next scene and dealing with new information it’s just enough to fade into background events.  This is the pattern throughout, and presumably why Justin Lin was brought in.  A key skill in enjoying ‘The Fast and the Furious’ movies is to not care in the least how dumb they are.

Boo!

              That’s why whole sections of my notes railing against the nonsense plot and implausibility of events weren’t exactly wasted but don’t matter that much in the end.  This show moves fast enough and throws enough at you that on a moment-to-moment basis that it hangs together just enough so that it doesn’t fall completely apart.  Nonsense plots aren’t enough in and of themselves to make something bad as long as the action is fun and the characters are engaging.  When those things also fail logic gaps are just another thing to add to the list of disappointments.

What’s presented in the opening of the show as a framing device nicely demonstrates the fundamental problem the episode has which is, in essence, that absolutely nothing gets resolved by the time it’s over.  Text appears on the screen establishing that we’re in Belarus, ‘six months after the collapse of the Soviet Union.’  What’s interesting here is that it doesn’t give a date.  I’ve done the math and the ages do work out but there’s no reason given in the episode itself that it can’t just say something like ‘May 1992.’  If you’re feeling generous the writers are planting seeds about the geo-political fallout of the collapse of the USSR which will matter to the plot later on but if so that doesn’t pay off in this episode and as is demonstrated throughout the writers have a fairly low opinion of the intelligence of their audience, so I think this is just an effort to not confuse people with specifics.

              Over the text we have Elena saying in a voiceover (later this is revealed to be a story being told to Val) that she has a little story to tell us, a fairytale.  It’s about a daughter who loved her dad, who brought her up in a harsh world and taught her how to fight to survive.  We’re shown a father and a daughter overlooking a road.  An SUV comes along, and the daughter is given a rocket launcher she shoots at the car, causing it to crash.  Interspersed throughout the rest of the episode we see scenes of the father and daughter approaching the car then following the trail of a survivor to a little wounded girl in the woods, who the daughter stabs.  The stabbed girl is then revealed to be a young Elena, and the voiceover starts again except this time it follows Elena in the car which gets shot by the rocket and then shows her being attacked in the woods.  She fights back and kills the father and daughter.  The episode ends with Elena saying she has another story to tell Val.

              The problems start with how the story is presented.  All of the stuff with the original father and daughter, their lines of dialogue, them approaching the car and following the trail, all of that was made up, Elena didn’t see any of it, so it doesn’t matter.  It’s presented to the audience as a clever twist: you think the voiceover is talking about this little girl but actually it’s this other little girl, fooled you.  But remember this is a story being told to another character, and when we cut back to Elena and Val when the little girl is stabbed Val is reacting as if the story she was told is the one we were shown, which doesn’t make any sense.  Having the visuals diverge from the voiceover works just fine, it’s a very common storytelling technique in film, but it doesn’t work when it’s one person telling another person a story.  It basically means that Elena told most of a story, stopped, then said “Oh, I was lying, let me start over.”  Making it be an actual story told in the actual episode just underlines how artificial the entire conceit is.  The story is: the car I was riding in got blown up, I ran into the woods, got stabbed but fought back and I lived.  That’s a pretty traumatic event for a little girl and it’s fine as a backstory, but it’s not enough to be the dramatic reveal for an entire episode of television.  She also finishes the story while Val isn’t in the scene, which the show is just hoping you don’t notice.  In fitting with the rest of the episode it’s left completely unresolved by the time we hit the credits.

              It’s also described to us as a fairytale, which it is not.  Considering that Elena’s criminal codename is Snow White and that the FBI director drops the line, “Snow White and the seven banks,” along with episode two of the show being titled ‘Fairytale Wedding,’ it’s hard not to come the conclusion that the writers have a burning desire to seem very clever without the ability to actually be clever.  I have a very firm suspicion that if this show miraculously makes it to the end of the season it’s going to end on a cliffhanger with no answers supplied to the audience because I don’t believe the writers actually have any.

About as satisfying an ending as the show has.

              So let’s address ‘The Blacklist’ in the room.  That show is currently in its ninth season and has just been renewed for a tenth so however you feel about its quality (general consensus is that its best days are well behind it) the engine it’s built on is still working just fine.  In addition to watching this pilot twice I also watched the pilot to ‘The Blacklist’ and this entire thing could have just been a list of ways that show did it better. 

              Let’s run down my pilot requirements again.  The premise starts off the same: an international fugitive is in US custody but has a master plan.  In this instance, however, we’re given specifics: he has a list of international fugitives he intends to bring down and is willing to help the government do it.  He very openly has his own agenda but the government is willing to put up with it if it helps them catch these criminals.

              This leads directly to how the shows will functions from week to week, which is basically as a procedural with a twist.  This is demonstrated in the pilot: the FBI is given the name and background of a bad guy and with the mastermind’s assistance they kill him and foil his plan.  The authorities spar with the criminal, there’s tension over his methods, but at the end of the episode the bad guy is dealt with, and the overarching plot moves forward.  Repeat as needed and you’ve got yourself a show.

Again we have basically only two characters, the criminal mastermind and the FBI agent counterpart.  However this mastermind turned himself in, volunteers information on another criminal, actively takes part in both tracking down the criminal and foiling his plan, then announces he’s willing to work with the authorities to capture other criminals.  So rather than just being in one room saying vague things he’s shown taking actions, figuring things out, is in more than one location, and at one point has a pen stabbed in his neck so he’s shown to be fallible.  The show also frankly cheats by having him played by James Spader, as with all due respect to Ms. Baccarin she’s no James Spader.

The FBI counterpart is the exact opposite of Val Fitzgerald.  Instead of already being a fairly senior FBI agent who has a history with the mastermind she’s a new recruit who has no idea who he is.  This allows her to be an audience stand in for exposition dumps and we identify with her when she feels overwhelmed and feel good for her when she triumphs.  She’s also allowed to have more than one emotion: she’s alternately excited, scared, sad, angry, relieved, annoyed, she gets to react to what happens to her with human emotions.  The episode also ends with a mystery involving her husband, so I can’t stress enough how much ‘The Endgame’ just rips off ‘The Blacklist’ wholesale.

A titanic struggle of wills.

‘The Endgame’ did not get good reviews.  It’s currently sitting at a 44 on Metacritic.  Its ratings were all right but it followed a reality show premiere and I will be shocked if they keep even two-thirds of their premiere audience for the second episode.  As if everything listed above wasn’t enough there’s a whole boatload of things I didn’t manage to work into the above paragraphs: the AG of the US, the Director of the FBI, and the Director of Homeland Security not only all being in the same undisclosed location at the same time but also being portrayed as tough guy veteran agents when in reality they’re political appointees, the fact that after accomplishing literally nothing our hero bursts into the holding area to confront Elena and says “The worst day of my life and I still almost got you.  What do you think I’ll do tomorrow?” when Elena has no idea what Val supposedly just did, the dramatic reveal at the end that Elena’s supposedly dead husband is actually still alive in an American prison as if we’re supposed to care, I could keep going for a very long time.  This failed as a pilot and as a simple episode of television.  When I’ve previously reviewed pilots I’ve had the foresight to know how they ended up doing and while I suppose there’s always the chance that history will prove me wrong as the network television landscape isn’t what it was even ten years ago I will be absolutely shocked if this show manages to make it all the way to thirteen episodes.  I had this vague idea that the Golden Age of Television had this whole tv thing figured out but this just goes to show you what gets on the air is just as random as ever.