‘The Looming Tower’ Episode 5 Recap: Millennium Approaches

The Looming Tower is a cop show set in a world very much like our own: a world full of scumbags, banding together in little clandestine groups with a self-awarded licensed to kill on behalf of their scummy ideologies. Unlike the real world, however, the world of The Looming Tower has a magic-realist tinge to it. In Towerworld, there exist Cassandra-like oracles capable of seeing the future and its ocean of blood but utterly incapable of doing anything about it. In fact, to the characters, these unheeded, impotent prophets of doom are completely invisible. After all, they’re not characters themselves. They’re the audience.

“Y2K” is the first episode of this show where the premise really started getting to me. Written by Shannon Houston and directed by Ali Selim, it takes place in the immediate run-up to New Year’s Eve 1999, a time when the world’s attention was split between marveling at the dawn of a new millennium and worrying about a technological glitch-pocalypse that never came. It was also a time when a murderous dipshit with a trunk full of bomb-making materials and the spine of a jellyfish got himself caught at a completely predictable border inspection stop and promptly spilled the beans on an al-Qaeda plot to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Day. A money-smuggling operation based in Brooklyn and connected to the Millennium bombing plot got shut down by the FBI in the aftermath. Finally, for the sake of dramatic expediency, The Looming Tower also presents this as the time the CIA officially learned that a young al-Qaeda operative and family man named Khalid al-Mihdhar, who’d recently hung out with the organization’s top echelon and was on his way to a major group summit in Malaysia, had a U.S. visa, though these events actually took place several day after New Year’s, not before. In any case, all the police work and espionage in the episode revolves around tracking down, spying on, and figuring out each of these al-Qaeda shitheads by our crew of CIA shitheads and (less shitty as far as the show is concerned) FBI shitheads.

It’s not the good guys/bad guys battle you might expect, either. Except perhaps for the Agency, whose officers are depicted as cold and bookish sociopaths to a man and woman, the members of these groups are handled with surprising care, even in al-Qaeda’s case. The episode spends nearly as much time fleshing out al-Mihdhar’s relationship with his pregnant wife, already busy caring for their first child, as it spends following FBI Agent Ali Soufan’s burgeoning relationship with his girlfriend. It allots more time for the al-Qaeda member’s personal life than for John O’Neill’s, despite the Bureau honcho having a far more complicated one. A scene set in a Brooklyn mosque depicts the faith of Soufan and his correligionists on the other side of the battle with as much empathy and beauty as I’ve ever seen on a show like this. It’s practically rapturous. Meanwhile, a throwaway line from Soufan highlights the fact that the FBI of the day is a sort of co-ed Catholic military order, paralleling the Salafist boys’ club that is al-Qaeda.

Yet despite all this admirable, empathetic even-handedness, of course we’re still rooting for our good ol’ deep state to root out and roll up the whole goddamn terrorist conspiracy. And they come pretty close, too! The LAX guy sings like a canary. The Brooklyn moneyman gets pinched. And again, the CIA discovers the U.S. visa of a al-Mihdhar as he jetsets between Afghanistan, Dubai, and Malaysia, with major players and major plans involved on each end of the trip.

Which brings us to the real Y2K catastrophe. The CIA sat on this information, forbidding the FBI agents embedded in their anti-terror unit, Alec Station, from running the report up the flagpole to their boss. Years later, a wizened-looking Richard Clarke testifies that not even he ever got a look at that particular tidbit, and asserts that for such a thing to have occurred, the decision to keep him and John O’Neill out of the loop would have to have been made at the top.

The reason this is important is because Khalid al-Mihdhar was one of the 9/11 hijackers.

The episode’s climactic sequence takes place on New Year’s Eve 1999. From their rooftop and highrise perches, John O’Neill and his crew nervously watch the millions gathered in Times Square as the countdown starts and the ball drops. When nothing happens except celebration, they breathe a collective sigh of relief. The worst didn’t happen, right?

O’Neill is not convinced. “Vince,” he says to his colleague, “tell me honestly what it is we did here.” Vince assures him that “we won,” but this exchange takes place seconds after Vince decides not to break protocol and tell O’Neill what he knows about the al-Mihdhar cable. (He’s discouraged from doing so by his partner Toni Ann, who Alec Station’s weird new commander Diane Marsh has gotten curiously chummy with.) O’Neill’s not buying what Vince is selling anyway. So he returns to the home of one of his several love interests, Liz, and listens to Peter Jennings, who is dead now, talk about the future on the news. The anchorman promotes a broadcast called Dawn of a New Era. Reciting a quote, he says “When you put the known and the unknown into a computer, the unpredictable always outweighs the predictable. So the future is exciting, and uncertain.”

Not for us it’s not. No, it’s not uncertain for us at all. We, the invisible oracles in the audience, know exactly when the ball will drop for good.

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 5 ("Y2K") on Hulu