‘The Looming Tower’ on Hulu Episode 7 Recap: Cole World

“And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?” —Country Joe and the Fish, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag”

If there’s one thing that struck me about “The General,” the seventh episode of The Looming Tower, it’s that the answer to Country Joe MacDonald’s musical question is, as it always was, “not much.” Not much of value, anyway. Ostensibly depicting the investigation into the bombing of the USS Cole off the Yemeni coast, the episode is in fact about how interagency and international strife made a halfway decent investigation impossible. Most of the fighting that gets done here is between people who are supposed to be on the same side. Why are they doing it? As Country Joe put it, “Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn.”

Written by Ali Selim and directed by Michael Slovis, “The General” takes its title from the rank that FBI agent Ali Soufan spontaneously assigns his boss, John O’Neill, to get the Yemeni military and police authorities to take him more seriously when they arrive in-country to investigate the Cole bombing. About the only person this actually works on is General Qamish, their army liaison — a decent dude who smokes cigars, reads voraciously, and is more moved to cooperate by the pleasure of O’Neill’s company than by his imaginary rank. The two are kindred spirits, guys who see the limits of both their countries and their jobs serving them, not to mention themselves, but who do their best anyway. Any progress O’Neill and Soufan are able to make in Yemen comes down to Qamish caping for them behind the scenes.

Everybody else is a huge asshole. The episode generates its drama by contrasting O’Neill and Soufan with a series of insufferable people who should be trying to help them but sabotage them at every turn. Captain Amin, their contact in the local police, condescends to Soufan by refusing to speak to him in Arabic, declines every request they make until word comes down from above for him to comply, and cuts their interrogations of suspects as short as he can; it’s implied that he tips their highest-ranking al-Qaeda target off so he can flee the country before they catch up with him.

Ambassador Barbara Bodine, a figure of some controversy in 9/11 lore, is a somewhat unexpected obstacle. When she and O’Neill first introduce themselves, it’s impossible for people who’ve watched as much TV as, well, me not to read their vibe as a Sam-and-Diane-style antagonistic meet cute. (Yes, O’Neill has a wife and two girlfriends already, but clearly that wouldn’t stop him.) What’s more, we first meet Bodine (played by the talented actor Jennifer Ehle) when she visits the Cole herself, throwing her weight around to ensure the FBI has access despite Yemeni prohibitions against outside law-enforcement agencies. Her outrage and grief over the attack is clearly meant to be sincere.

And yet she can’t fucking stand O’Neill, from moment one. She sees him as a bull in a china shop, insulting and offending all of the officials she’s dedicated her life to winning over to the side of the United States. Even after helping to get General Qamish to cooperate with them — a move that yields the name of the Cole mastermind and a whole new (as far as he knows) al-Qaeda operation or meeting in Malaysia, which he happily reports to her — she goes over his head to the Bureau back home and has him unceremoniously yanked out of the country. It’s kind of funny, actually: We know whose side she’s supposed to take, but unfortunately she doesn’t. (The real Bodine has long disputed this portrait of personality conflict overwhelming professional judgement, but you can see why the show would go with it.)

Which brings us to the Final Bosses of The Looming Tower‘s moronic infighting: Alec Station chief Diane Marsh and her banished CIA puppetmaster, Martin Schimdt. The instant Soufan calls Toni-Ann Marino, the FBI’s woman in the Agency, to ask her to ask Marsh to provide them with any info they have on the various names they’ve dug up and the Malaysia meeting they’ve heard about, we know it’s going nowhere: Marino’s now Marsh’s creature, and Marsh is still very much Schmidt’s. Sure enough, in legalistic banter exchanged with the rapidity of religious cant, Marsh and Schmidt reject the idea of providing the Bureau with what they know about the Malaysia summit. The lopsided nature of their info war is represented with grim black humor by the way Marsh and Soufan are charting the connections they’re uncovering: Marsh has a whiteboard with dozens of names, photographs, and locations, cross-referenced out the wazoo, while Soufan has some hastily scrawled notes (one al-Qaeda operative is just labeled “long name guy” and “pegleg” for convenience’s sake) that he and O’Neill surreptitiously jotted down on the back of a window blind in the men’s room of the Aden police department.

It’s all so stupid and pointless. (“What are we fighting for?”) By the time Marsh goes so far as to physically remove the photos of everyone Soufan asked about from the board and place them in a locked drawer in her desk!!!!!!, I literally said “this is demented” out loud.

Here’s the problem: While demented, it’s also, frankly, boring. I get that this episode is supposed to feel frustrating, but if you’ve seen one “your country is not my country, Mr. O’Neill” official culture clash or “gimme the name” interrogation scene, you’ve seen ‘em all, and in this thing you see way too many. Marsh’s sociopathic behavior, meanwhile, has been underlined so many times they must be running out of room on the page. A ten-episode adaptation of a sprawling nonfiction story shouldn’t have to spin its wheels at any point, yet here we are. When Soufan’s fellow agent Floyd Bennet complains that no one back home, not even presidential candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush, are paying attention to what they’re doing out there, you kinda don’t blame them. Even hanging chads start look exciting by comparison.

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 7 ("The General") on Hulu