‘The Looming Tower’ on Hulu Episode 4 Recap: Dueling Honchos

I come not to bury Jeff Daniels, but to praise him. Okay, technically I come to both bury and praise him. The fourth episode of Hulu’s terrorism-as-true-crime drama The Looming Tower, “Mercury,” makes some of the same mistakes its predecessors did in attempting to utilize this affable but decidedly un-alpha actor as a gravitas-rich authority figure. But it also plays to his strengths — some of which I didn’t realize were his strengths until seeing them now — in a way that’s worth examining.

Written by playwright Adam Rapp, the episode employs a subtle but sophisticated structure. On the surface, it’s a rare moment of triumph for the side of Daniels’s whitebread rogue John O’Neill and his FBI anti-terror unit against their rivals in the CIA’s Alec Station, run by the supervillainously arrogant and petulant Martin Schmidt.

The Agency’s retaliation plan against al-Qaeda was a colossal failure: Bin Laden and his top lieutenants escaped, and all the American missiles managed to destroy is a training camp full of children and a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory. Undaunted, and completely unapologetic about the cost in foreign lives and American security, Schmidt goes over the head of his supervisors to pitch another high risk, high reward attack directly to CIA Director George Tenet. He gets a straight-up “get the hell out of my office” and is sent packing from Alec Station for his troubles. As a side note, Peter Sarsgaard makes this potentially cartoonish character lively and vivid every time. I don’t think it’s a performance a lot of people would pay attention to, but he’s doing some hard, good work.

But despite earning the respect of his bosses for his correct call against making the attacks, and lining up much-needed help cracking the CIA’s vault of secrecy from the Justice Department, O’Neill’s a fuckin’ mess. Belying his on-top-of-the-world swagger, his lavish lifestyle of fine dining and $400 shoes (in 1998 money!) combined with the need to travel between three different romantic partners has buried him in debt. His credit cards get declined. He’s out of town for so long all the time that his wife and children barely tolerate him when he returns. Catholic cardinals fail to give him a reprieve to divorce his religiously devout missus and marry his equally devout (and deceived) girlfriend Liz, no matter how many Cohibas he smokes with them. Just to top it all off, his other other woman is planning a move to New York to be near him. He’s, uh, not thrilled.

And even when he’s right in this installment, he’s right about stuff that makes him seem prurient, rather than prophetic. In place of his many killer one-liners about how bin Laden wants us to go to war, maaaan, he’s pontificating about the “72 virgins” issue with his star agent Ali Soufan, who tells him it’s all bullshit. “Blow yourself up and win the pussy sweepstakes—it’s like consumer fraud,” O’Neill concludes. “And ironically, so fuckin’ American.” He’d know!

This is how Daniels can work: as a guy who seems to have all the advantages a wealthy white straight cis Christian man who’s got a high-ranking job in a law-enforcement agency in America’s cultural and political capitals can get, yet seems incapable of not pissing those privileges away. People keep trying to cast him as Wyatt Earp or Walter Cronkite, while his potential to portray a reasonably popular governor forced to leave office after getting caught using the state education fund to pay his mistress’s son’s orthodontist bill was right there all along.

All of this makes the show’s attempt to once again depict him as a terrifying lord regent even more ridiculous. It’s so unnecessary! Yet there he is, growling at a young agent who’s been auditing his debts to “Nod your head and walk away.” We’re supposed to treat this guy like he’s terrifying, when all we’ve seen from him indicates that he’s better seen as a guy who’s good at his job but bad at everything else? Come on.

If you cut that one exchange, this episode is sharp from end to end where character is concerned. The strengths of how it handles Schmidt and (for the most part) O’Neill extend to their underlings as well. Soufan, for example, has great people skills and is handsome as hell, but he’s also shown to be a delightfully square nerd. When he’s using the liquid-metal T-1000 from Terminator 2 as an illustration of al-Qaeda’s protean nature, he includes wikipedia-level verbiage like “…which is an android assassin played by Robert Patrick.” (In an illuminating parallel, Schmidt uses a far fancier physics metaphor when talking to his boss, and it’s irritating rather than endearing.) Soufan is similarly, sweetly stiff when he finally makes a real move on Heather, the woman he’s been dating: “I want to do things with you — to you — with fervor, intensity, and great care.” He’s trying to talk dirty but sounds like he’s delivering a keynote address at a Kiwanis luncheon.

Soufan’s opposite number over in Alec Station is the highly skilled, very weird Diane Marsh. Like Ali, she’s lovely to look at, courtesy of actors Tahar Rahim and Wrenn Schmidt respectively. Like him, she’s one of her group’s best assets, as you can see when she goes full-on Minority Report while figuring out the connections between al-Qaeda members on their big conspiracy board.

But while O’Neill and Soufan have a comfortable teacher-student relationship, Marsh and Schmidt are more like an acolyte and a sex-cult leader. There’s a deeply strange scene when Marsh comes to visit Schmidt in his exile to a CIA library, bearing an orange as a gift from “the ladies,” as she consistently calls her colleagues. (She says the orange is a Chinese symbol of life; those of us who’ve seen The Godfather know better.) Her attitude toward him here borders on worship: “You are the prophet,” she says, referring to his perspicacity regarding the al-Qaeda threat. She promises to keep him informed of what’s going on in what she still considers to be his unit. Then she literally bows her head and says “You have my undivided devotion, Martin. You have to believe me.” Without looking at him, she takes his hand, drawing our attention for the first time to the fact that he wears a wedding ring. Undivided devotion, huh? Maybe Schmidt and O’Neill are more alike than they appear at first glance.

Echoes like those seem to be a running theme in The Looming Tower — maybe the running theme. The central conflict is America vs. al-Qaeda, with the FBI and CIA waging an internal civil war within Team USA. (Last episode, Schmidt literally called the FBI “the other side” to Bureau agent Vince Stuart’s face.) But John O’Neill’s conflicted feelings about faith and fidelity aren’t a world apart from the future suicide bomber in al-Qaeda’s new camp, tapped by al-Qaeda machers Ayman al-Zawahiri and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed with infiltrating the United States itself but worried because his wife’s having a baby soon. O’Neill’s relationships with the women in his life aren’t as peculiar as Schmidt’s is with Marsh, but they’re not a world apart either. When left to their own devices, The Ladies work as hard at ferreting out threats as O’Neill, Soufan, Stuart (who sees his partner Toni-Ann Marino palling around with Marsh in the parking garage), the ailing Robert Chesney, and so on do in the ostensibly nobler Bureau. Al-Qaeda, too, is run by idiosyncratic bigwigs whose approval their underlings both seek and resent. And as the pair of bin Laden–emblazoned shirts in Nairobi and New York that bookend the episode indicate, the whole world is watching all of them, no matter how hard they all work not to be seen.

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.

Watch The Looming Tower Episode 4 ("Mercury") on Hulu