‘The Old Man’ Episode 6 Recap: The Old Men

[whispering to date while watching The Old Man when The Old Man first appears on the screen] “That’s The Old Man!”

Apologies to Twitter user @vineyville, but that was the tweet that came to mind the moment John Lithgow’s Harold Harper, the simultaneously scheming and well-intention assistant director of the FBI, told Jeff Bridges’ “Dan Chase” that “the Old Man”—Joel Grey’s Morgan Bote—has his daughter, Alia Shawkat’s Angela Adams/Emily Chase. Their daughter, actually, if you want to count Angela/Emily’s close work relationship with Harold as a father-daughter thing, which both characters seem comfortable doing.

If that paragraph seems confusing, congratulations—you’re watching The Old Man! This penultimate episode of the skillful spy drama’s first season is an at-times dizzying display of conflicting loyalties, secret relationships, and sudden betrayals. Like the coded messages that Angela and Chase send to each other using secret bank accounts, it can take a lot of deciphering.

So let’s do our best. We’ll start with Chase, who flies out to an intended meeting with ex-Soviet captain Pavlovich (Rade Serbedzija, whom I know best from his memorable cameo in Eyes Wide Shut) with the intention of forming an alliance to take down Afghan warlord Farad Hamzad, who most likely wants both of them dead for their role in turning his wife Belour against him and her eventual flight to America. Pavlovich confirms Chase’s suspicions—but by this time he’s been recruited by Hamzad’s lawyer, Nina Kruger, to turn on Chase on Hamzad’s behalf. It takes some nasty wetwork for Chase to extricate himself from the situation—sparing Pavlovich’s life one more time, as he did decades earlier in an Afghan torture chamber—and rejoin with his semi-hostage Zoe.

Zoe, by this point, has had a crash course in espionage courtesy of Chase, who explains the craft as a matter of both empathy (learning your quarries dreams and hopes and fears and shames) and ruthlessness (exploiting them to your own ends). It does not escape her that their whole relationship is a matter of him practicing this voodoo on her from the moment he met her. 

Left alone at Pavlovich’s reception, she’s intercepted by Kruger, who tries to tell her she’s trying to do some good even while employed by a ruthless fucker like Hamzad. But the gunfire from Chase’s encounter with Hamzad causes the party to scatter, and Chase rescues (?) Zoe from Kruger’s clutches.

When they flee, however, they’re intercepted by a chopper carrying, who else, Howard Harper. By this point, Harper’s life is pretty much in ruins. His wife has been paid a visit by Morgan Bote, who apparently has informed her of Howard’s role first in helping Chase escape, then sending an assassin to kill him. (That assassin, Carson, appears to have linked up with nosy CIA spook Waters, which can’t be good for anyone.) Bote suggests to Harper that he frame Angela for everything, a proposition he refuses…but which Angela tells him is a good idea. When they separate, it seems as if Carson intercepts her and spirits her away—to where, and to what end, remains a mystery that only Harper and Chase can solve in tandem.

That’s about as simple as I can render the show’s perpetually twisty plot. So much of it is a matter of professionally perceptive people immediately seeing through one another’s smokescreens and disguises; consider the ease with which word spread of Harper’s role in Chase’s escape and the failed hit on him that followed, or how every major figure is now so aware of Angela/Emily’s role as a mole in Harper’s shop that Angela/Emily herself is willing to take the fall to spare her two “fathers.”

At this point in the show, with only one episode remaining in the season, it’s probably worth asking: Does any of this live up to the thrill and the promise of the premiere’s astonishing long-take battle between Chase and his would-be assassins? The answer I reluctantly give is no, even despite the presence of director Jet Wilkinson, a veteran of Netflix’s suite of Marvel shows and their many visceral hallway battles. 

But! There’s still one episode to go, with Wilkinson at the helm, Harper and Chase in alliance, Emily/Angela in custody, and Bote and Carson sniffing around the edges. There’s every possibility that this will end in riveting combat and bloodshed.

And for what? “Everything’s in free fall,” Chase tells Zoe early in the episode. “We’re not wired to cope with that, so we’ve all agreed to pretend that it isn’t happening, but it is.” So that’s where The Old Men leaves us: with a bunch of old men from dead empires, fighting to secure their meager future from one another as the world they’ve made for the rest of us burns. It’s an ugly place for an espionage thriller to go—but it’s an honest place, too, and in this business of deception, honesty is a pearl beyond price.

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.