‘The Looming Tower’ Episode 8 Recap: We’re Screwed

Serious question: When the makers of The Looming Tower called this episode “A Very Special Relationship,” did they have Jeff Daniels’s graphic sex scenes in mind?

To be honest, I’m not really sure if I’m pointing out the fact that we now know what FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill’s O-Face looks like because the sight of it sucks up all the oxygen of the episode surrounding it, or because I’m immature. Probably both. Nevertheless, yeah, writer Bash Doran and director Craig Zisk want us to know that in the waning days of his FBI career, O’Neill was smashing (even if he occasionally cried immediately afterwards).

Those waning days overlapped, not at all coincidentally it would seem, with the start of court-appointed President George W. Bush’s first term. Because President Clinton considered terrorism a priority, Bush’s minions, represented here mainly by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, treat the threat and those working on it like less than dogshit. Throw in O’Neill’s reputation as a womanizer, his profligate spending and skyrocketing debt, his mishandling of classified documents, and his personality conflicts with FBI honchos at home and U.S. ambassadors abroad alike, and it’s the perfect time to push him out of his job after 25 years.

So I think the reason O’Neill’s philandering is depicted in such lavish detail at the same time is to create a parallel between his disintegrating, clearly unhappy personal life and the similarly deteriorating security fabric surrounding the country, allowing the 9/11 hijackers to fly right through the gaps and into world history. But because O’Neill never quite cohered as a character, in large part due to the casting of Daniels, the parallel isn’t clear enough to work either. Daniels was always much better at showing us the screwed-up side of O’Neill than he was with the man’s alpha-male side. It’s hard for the show to structure the theme of making tragic unforced errors around a character that amorphous.

On the other hand, other parallels and contrasts work quite well, though I still wouldn’t say all of them make for good television. The most important such linkage is between Diane Marsh, the absolutely fucking infuriating head of the CIA’s Alec Station counterterrorist unit, and Rice, the absolutely fucking infuriating new boss of everybody on the show, Marsh included. Marsh stonewalls the repeated requests of FBI agent Ali Soufan, still on the ground in Yemen, for information regarding various suspects, and employs his FBI colleague Toni-Ann Marino as a catspaw so obviously that Marino’s old friends in the Bureau wind up cussing her out. Similarly, Rice freezes out everyone, from O’Neill to overall anti-terror chief Richard Clarke to CIA head George Tenet, by asking them a series of questions so maddeningly simplistic that her interlocutors are too flummoxed to come up with a suitably first-grade reading-level answer, the only kind that she’s willing to put in front of the president. If nothing else this gives the great Michael Stuhlbarg a chance to reach Coen Brothers levels of incredulity around her. (Rice: “Who are they?” Clarke: “Who’s…who? Who’s al-Qaeda?!”) It’s the kind of material that suits his quizzical eyes and grin-and-bear-it half-smile perfectly.

Anyway, if you wanna pick apart how the show treats women based on these two, I think you’ve got some interesting stuff to work with for sure. I think that the bottom line is that they’re both just assholes, though, and Rice’s refusal to pass information up to her boss, ignoring the increasingly panicked warnings from her underlings, is just Marsh stonewalling the Bureau writ large. However, none of this makes their scenes entertaining to watch, even from a villainy perspective. They’re too officious to have any sense of supervillainous cool, and too one-dimensional for their officiousness to scan as a symptom of underlying and empathetic faults. And no, I’m not counting Marsh’s obvious romantic interest in the equally weird CIA boffin Martin Schmidt; if anything that relationship makes her feel less human, not more, though I’ll grant you that Schmidt asking her “how often should a married couple be making love” out of the blue was a terrific laugh line.

Speaking of making love, and when aren’t we apparently, Ali gets his freak on in this episode too.

This seems an altogether healthier response to coming up short in his Yemeni investigation than picking fights with muggers, which leaves him with a huge shiner and not much else to show for it. Again, I think we’re supposed to see the way he talks (and fucks) his way through a fight with his girlfriend as a counterpoint to O’Neill’s hold-it-all-in-till-it’s-too-much-to-handle approach, but now we’re getting pretty far afield from why anyone’s watching this show in the first place. And if Condoleezza Rice is blowing off Richard Clarke’s warnings about al-Qaeda cells in the United States, then you know we’re getting closer and closer to the reason the series exists.

The real “very special relationship” of the episode’s title is the one between the United States and its chief ally in the Muslim Middle East, Saudi Arabia. Marsh informs an underling who’s concerned about the lack of information-sharing between Alec Station and their FBI counterparts that if they hand over the wrong piece of intel and the Bureau arrests a Saudi citizen, this will cause a domino effect leading directly to the overthrow of the House of Saud, handing over the region to murderous radicals and loosing a tide of blood upon the world . Her monologue on the matter, needless to say, is a note-perfect description of what wound up happening because she didn’t share the intel, minus the bit about the House of Saud. Those royals — represented here by the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., who cuts checks to the 9/11 planners while making arrangements to visit the Bushes on their Crawford ranch and who keeps George Tenet in his pocket — are still sitting pretty.

As for the hijackers themselves? Well…

Their bureaucracy is running quite smoothly, thank you. In one scene, Khalid al-Mihdhar, our entry point into the operation, visits the beach and strikes up a conversation with the mother of a cute little kid whose sun hat he stops from blowing away. Watching him smile at the pair, it’s clear he’s thinking of the wife and infant he still sings lullabies to over the phone when he gets a chance. It’s the closest the show has gotten to a truly provocative and weighty argument: that the hijackers saw themselves as fighting to protect the lives of families just like that mom and daughter on the beach, only with the misfortune of not having been born American. It’s easy to envision a version of this series in which al-Mihdhar and others like him were treated as co-protagonists rather than minor players in a cast of dozens. But as with Daniels’s portrayal of O’Neill, something’s just slightly out of balance, and it’s unclear that the whole project will ever get off the ground.

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 8 ("A Very Special Relationship") on Hulu