‘The Old Man’ Episode 5 Recap: Who Are You?

It’s remarkable how much can happen in an episode where nothing really happens. That, at least, is the conclusion I’ve drawn from The Old Man’s fifth episode. As a matter of physical business, it’s almost profoundly uneventful: Harold Harper and Angela Adams sit on a plane and wind up in a records storage closet; Dan Chase and Zoe McDonald take a car ride to a pet hotel and a banker’s house. But within that basic framework, secrets are revealed and allegiances shift back and forth like shadows. I’m not sure how much I’m buying what they’re selling, but it’s never less than a blast to watch.

We’ll start with Harper and Angela—or should I say “Angela,” since her real name is Emily Chase. (And “Chase” isn’t even a real surname!) Harper, to my surprise, has figured out Angela’s secret identity, and he’s understandably livid with her for acting as a mole and putting both him and herself in a situation so destructive to not only their careers, but potentially their lives. She’ll have to make a decision about which side she’s on before the plane lands, he tells her.

But he’s not the only passenger who’s figured something out about his seatmate. Angela/Emily knows that Harper sent an assassin to kill her father. She also knows he brought up her mother’s real name, Belour, in their meeting with Afghan warlord (and her mom’s ex) Faraz Hamzad’s lawyer to stick it to her—an act no different, she says, from her wielding his dead son’s name like a knife against him. Throughout all these exchanges, actors Alia Shawkat and John Lithgow do indeed use words like weapons, as actors of their talents can do.

In the end, Harper finds a flight manifest for the plane “Dan” and “Abbey” used for their escape all those years ago; for his efforts, Hamzad’s lawyer promises to expose his role in Dan’s initial escape even though she’d previously said otherwise. This leaves them with only one choice, as Angela/Emily sees it: Help her dad find and kill Hamzad, at which point they can make up whatever cover story they want.

Dan Chase, meanwhile, surprises himself to discover that signing over half his riches to Zoe is not enough to sever their partnership. Partly out of concern for her safety and partly out of a mutual recognition of her natural ability to find cracks in things and exploit them, they wind up as partners in his quest to…well, to what is unclear, though it’s got something to do with surviving and something else to do with wanting to make that big mining and metallurgy play his banker liaison urged him against. It’s Zoe who talks the guy into doing what Dan wants—her price of entry into his continued adventures, essentially. 

What does he want, exactly? And what does Hamzad want with him? Flashbacks reveal that it goes back to Dan and Belour’s abduction of a Soviet officer decades earlier. For one thing, the officer, Pavlovich, is the name that keeps getting dropped in tandem with that metallurgy play. For another, we learn via the flashbacks that Belour was acting as a double agent, feeding intel on Hamzad’s Afghan rivals to the Soviets in order to weaken their positions and strengthen Hamzad’s for the inevitable power vacuum when the USSR pulls out of the country. She also knows where an enormous vein of precious metals is located, which, again, we can deduce has something to do with Dan’s mining maneuvers all these years later.

There’s one final conversation worth noting here, besides the ones Dan/Johnny has with Abbey/Belour in his head. (A relationship that the imaginary Abbey/Belour tells him must stop, by the way.) Mild-mannered assassin Julian Carson confronts Morgan Bote, the man who passed his name to Harper for the hit on Chase, about the presence of a mole in Harper’s operation. Bote freely cops to having planted Emily/Angela in Harper’s office himself at Dan’s request, and he now finds himself in the strange position of ordering Carson to hurt both of his “sons,” Chase and Harper alike. 

At this point in the proceedings you may be asking yourself, is it all really that easy? Harper forgives Emily for deceiving him, and Emily forgives Harper for trying to have his dad killed? Zoe forgives Chase for involving her in his sordid life, and Chase forgives Zoe for extorting him for half of everything he owns? Bote, a rabbi for both Harper and Chase, now wants both of them killed? What gives?

Well, I think what gives is an effective espionage story. You can certainly write a spy thriller about family and friendship—to use a point of comparison I’ve mentioned before, The Americans wound up being as much about Soviet spies Philip and Elizabeth Jennings’s relationship with each other and their daughter as anything else. But what you really want to do when you write one of these things is create a world in which the hard lines that define us—up to and including a name, as Harper angrily speechifies at one point—become permeable, even illusory. Freed from the normal constraints that bind us to some core truth about who we are, what would we do? Who would we do it with, and for, and to? These are the questions seemingly every character on The Old Man is constantly asking themselves; the good news is that to have a good show, no one ever needs to figure out the answers.
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.