‘The Looming Tower’ on Hulu Episode 2 Recap: Now War Is Declared and Battle Come Down

“We’re at war.”
“Only if we want to be.”

Welp, there you have it. That’s the game right there. That’s the whole megillah. “Losing My Religion”, Episode 2 of The Looming Tower, may have a too-cute-by-half title. (It’s a reference to our lapsed Catholic and observant Muslim FBI heroes dealing with his own sins in the former case and those of his correligionists in the other — relatively minor issues in the scheme of things). But that nine-word exchange between the CIA’s Strangelovean, bearded boffin Martin Schmidt and the FBI’s hard-drinkin’, hard-lovin’, law’n’order straight-shooter John O’Neill encapsulates the great debate that would shape the next 20 years of American history because of who winds up winning.

Presented with evidence that al-Qaeda was behind the U.S. Embassy bombings during the premiere, Schmidt wants to use the CIA’s relatively meager intelligence (they’ve got no spies in al-Qaeda’s ranks, or even near them) to saturation-bomb ten suspected sites where Osama bin Laden might be staying; Schmidt says they’ve got a 75% chance of killing him, and he can “confidently guarantee less than a thousand” civilian corpses as collateral damage. O’Neill wants to “treat him like a criminal” — bin Laden, not Schmidt, though probably Schmidt, too — by arresting him and putting him on trial rather than martyring him. As for the collateral-damage euphemism, “This is exactly what al-Qaeda wants us to do,” he says. “Overreact and slaughter innocent Muslims.” I mean, you tell me whose approach looks better in hindsight.

Oh, did we mention that the CIA had been tipped off about the embassy bombings a year in advance and dismissed the report, like so many others, as non-credible?

So it turns out that The Looming Tower has plenty to say not just about the failures of intelligence and cooperation that helped lead to 9/11, but much more importantly the failure of imagination — or perhaps overabundance of imagination — that crafted its disastrous response by the United States, unleashing a tide of blood we’re still swimming around in today all over the world. At least we get to swim. The people from the countries on which we unleashed that tide — mostly brown, like the Kenyans who made up the vast majority of the victims in the embassy bombing — drown.

Thus, for the second episode in a row, I’m a bit perplexed by complaints that the show is a sentimental look back at 9/11 with little to tell us about what happened afterwards. In the pilot, all the sniping and name-calling and backstabbing between agencies made me think it possible, even likely, that by showing us FBI, CIA, and DoD morons staging a pissing contest while people die, The Looming Tower would be more useful to us today than a deep dive into Islamist extremism would be. Now I see that while that element continues, so too does a blunt, bare-essentials critique of the War on Terror. Put it all together, and you’ve got a portrayal of an intelligence community that’s overworked, underinformed, and lacking in basic human empathy, helping to usher in America’s dying-empire phase. Again, look at today’s headlines and tell me this isn’t a valuable perspective.

Putting the Big Picture aside for a moment, this episode impressed me with how expertly writer Dan Futterman and director John Dahl balance the cop/spy archetypes who comprise the cast. We’ve already discussed O’Neill’s righteous fury/Jesuit educated/feet of clay/can’t keep it in his pants schtick — he’s the FBI’s answer to Matt “Daredevil” Murdock — and Schmidt’s sneering all-in-the-game arrogance. (There’s a great bit at the end of the episode where his second-in-command, Diane Marsh, reacts in embarrassed horror at the news President Bill Clinton is headed to a grand jury over his workplace power-trip relationship with Monica Lewinsky; Schmidt, predicting the soon-to-be ubiquitous wag-the-dog narrative, just smiles and says “This is the best thing that could have happened to this country…We’re gonna finally get Clinton to pull the fuckin’ trigger on bin Laden.”)

But in addition to the two opposite poles played by Jeff Daniels and Peter Sarsgaard, you’ve got the rumpled Good Police gumshoe type in the form of Bill Camp’s composite character Robert Chesney, who spends the episode on the ground in Nairobi, running the complex bi-national search for clues and witnesses and suspects while simultaneously holding out hope that his crush, CIA chief of station Deb Foster, survived the blast. (She did not.)

You’ve got a tough-talking Irish Scotland Yard agent named Barry James, played by Tony Curran, who’s the bad cop to Ali Soufan’s good cop when the latter is called to London, al-Qaeda’s base of operations in the West. Soufan’s a Dudley Do-Right compared to the rest of these guys, but actor Tahar Rahim gives him a sort of knight-errant/ronin charisma. “When people use my religion to justify this shit? It affects me,” he growls after James accuses him of playacting to telegraph the fact that he’s not one of those Arabs. “Now I assure you that nothing I do is for your benefit. I work for the United States government, and I live by my own conscience.” Damn, son, where’d you find that?

Rounding out this crew is Michael Stuhlbarg. So brilliant in, well, everything (A Serious Man, Boardwalk Empire, Call Me By Your Name, Fargo Season 3, etc.), he’s present here under heavy makeup and wig as Richard Clarke, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism honcho. Watch his eyes as he watches O’Neill explode or Schmidt grandstand — he’s so alert, so alive, so full of silent split-second judgments. The bemused benevolent mastermind type is a welcome break from what you might expect in a regular cop or spy show, where you’d have an angry captain getting mad at loose cannons or whatever. Stuhlbarg is too intelligent and sensitive an actor to shape his character with that mold.

Shit, even when the show does a musical montage to tie together the movements of disparate characters (a terrorist escaping, an FBI agent infiltrating) or juxtapose the Sunni Muslim and Catholic Christian faiths (they both use prayer beads!), it does it with a fucking amazing found-music cue in the form of “Wahhabi Baghdad” by Trap City ME. It’s a show about settled history that can still unsettle and surprise.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.