Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 49 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT This Wheel Shall Explode
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 2 | Aired on 09.30.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Ellen's postponement of the assassination plot leads to dire shit immediately: She returns home to find her family blindfolded in the basement, execution style, and then Duncan puts a gun in her hand so she can shoot her husband in her head. She immediately tries to shoot Duncan, of course, but he turns it into a teachable moment about how she keeps talking about how she can't kill anybody (such as the President) but seems actually just fine with killing Duncan, for example. Then he shoots her husband, and that's all before the credits. It's all very much more exciting than last week, even with the music still all coked up.
But then just kidding, Duncan didn't really shoot at Tate Donovan, just near him, so now everybody's all freaked out. They hustle the family back upstairs and make Ellen put microchips in everybody so that they can follow them around and spy on them using their cellphones and iPads and microchips. Ellen doesn't get a microchip, basically because Duncan is messing with her head at all times and is really good at finding new ways to mess with her head.
Somehow -- this part was confusing to me -- Tate's mistress has been getting effusive text messages of love, which he didn't send but I think the captors think he did. So Sandrine (the chick one, played by a chick named Sandrine IRL, which is confusing because is that even a name?) takes him to the gross mistress's gross apartment for their usual gross Tuesday hookup. Turns out they only started the affair like two months ago. Anyway, Sandrine listens to them do it -- for all his protestations of regret and remorse, that natural Tate Donovan virility is simply too strong for conventional morality -- and then drives him home again, where he acts moderately sketchy.
The daughter tells Ellen she is stupid and should just kill the President already, then almost tells her mom about how she's knocked up, then dissolves into a soppy mess that thinks they're all going to die. Meanwhile, the son is downstairs asking the beard guy if he can please find that drug money and use it to pay off drug dealer Nico, but beard guy is more interested in finding drugs of his own to do, because beard guy is into drugs. Duncan yells at him for being a drug addict, because Duncan only likes to work with the best. It's still confusing how all these people know each other, kind of: Black guy knows Duncan in some very intimate way, and Sandrine because they were in Afghanistan together, but we don't know why beard guy is there or any of their roles, like, what any of them actually do besides point guns at you.
The team investigating the blood-thinner switch includes a sexy/creepy g-man who is on Team Duncan, and scares the pee out of Ellen in one of the episode's best scenes by standing very close to her and threatening her family, like everybody on this show is constantly doing. The main investigator guy is also sketchy enough that I think we might have multiple factions or sides involved in this before we're done, but I don't know for sure.
Ellen is really good friends with the nurse who is getting blamed for the switch, but her natural instinct to comfort the woman pisses Duncan off. Even after he talks Ellen through beating a polygraph test -- however easy other shows have made it look, this show makes it look ten times easier, it's hilarious; he's like, "Beating a lie detector is no big deal, Ellen!" and then she embraces her greatness and beats the lie detector -- he is still mean to her and tells her to scare the nurse into acting weird, like how a terrorist would act. Ellen does this in a perfectly reasonable way, but it's apparently not reasonable enough to get the nurse to confess.
The g-man tells Duncan that they're sweeping the hospital for DNA of who could have done the blood-thinner switch -- since as we're told, if Ellen hadn't "caught" the mistake it would have killed POTUS anyway -- and so with very little immediate options (and Quentin Creasy breathing down his neck) Duncan is forced to send the black guy to murder the nurse lady and make it look like a suicide. Sorry, nurse lady! I guess you should have just confessed to almost killing the President out of sheer incompetence, ruining your life and career forever, for no real reason.
So in the end, Duncan's punishment of taking someone away from Ellen turn out to be true. But as he tells the FBI inquest into his shooting from last week, that's most of what you have to do as a taker of hostages. Think quick on your feet, never lose your cool, wear black everything, and always be saying rockstar shit and walking out of rooms in the middle of conversations.
Next Week: Things get crazy when the President decides that he needs a man doctor after all, because women doctors are so scattered and do things like save you from getting accidentally murdered by blood thinness. This pits Team Duncan against Quentin Creasy, since their whole point in the overall plot is to handle Ellen, so if she's not relevant they all become liabilities. That sounds very cool, actually. Meanwhile, Ellen decides she simply hasn't caused enough trouble for herself, and goes to see Soy-Soy at kindergarten. Then, presumably, everything goes back to what it was like last week, and the Sanderses are hostages again, and Duncan's like What on Earth am I gonna do with you.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!PREVIOUSLY
Gifted (mostly with unnecessary swag) FBI hostage negotiator-by-day Duncan Carlisle put those skills to off-books use by taking hostage the entire family of Dr. Ellen Sanders, a DC surgeon scheduled to operate on the President of the United States. It couldn't happen at a better time, really, considering how quickly her family is falling apart: The son's on the hook for a grand to drug dealers, the daughter might be pregnant, and the husband is rascally Tate Donovan, who obviously is having an affair. Only a last-minute (and bad-ass) Hail Mary -- in the form of "accidental" Heparin in POTUS's IV -- helped Ellen postpone the murder, but now she's probably in bigger trouble than ever.
SPOILER ALERT: SHE IS
We pick up immediately on the heels of Ellen's into-the-camera declaration of war -- "I don't give up that easily," she intones, staring intensely into the camera slash Duncan Carlisle's soul -- which she immediately regrets.
Ellen: "Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck Duncan please pick up and if you have a second if you could you tell me if you just murdered my family or..."
Secret Service: "Dr. Sanders? Did you seriously think you were just going to walk out of here? Come on, we have to debrief the shit out of you."
Ellen's wonderfully twitchy as they escort her into the building, and then shifts into hyper-comforting when the nurse in the most trouble approaches them.
Angela: "I am so screwed, Ellen, I can't believe they..."
Ellen: "I promise you that you did not do this. You are not to blame. Everything is..."
Secret Service: "Ma'am? We're doing something here?"
Ellen: "Okay, Angela I gotta go. Please stop freaking out, okay?"
Agent Hoffman: "Dr. Sanders. Have a seat so I can stare at you for a long time. Don't worry about the hot guy in the corner, he doesn't matter right this second."
Ellen: "Is the President okay? I sure hope so!"
Hoffman: "Yeah, he's fine. Thanks to you. But I'm going to act real sketchy anyway."
Ellen: "Whatever you need. I'm anxious to get home and look for my family's dead bodies, but you know, take your time."
Hoffman: "You seem to think this is all just some kind of accident?"
Ellen: "I mean, what kind of asshole would kill the President? Am I right?"
Hoffman: "Who had access to him today?"