TV Recap: The Brave – A Record of Our Sins …

The Brave
“Close to Home, Part 1”
January 22, 2018

I can’t believe we’re nearly at the end of the season; after tonight’s episode, there is only 1 hour left of The Brave …until Season 2 (renew the show already NBC dammit)!!

Tonight’s episode introduces a new villain that we’ll definitely see next week and I suspect will be a recurring creature in seasons to come (renew the show already NBC dammit). In addition, we got our first really in depth character backstory  (via flashback and fantastic wigs) for Patricia for the new villain, you see, is a close figure from her past.

The Brave continues to deliver movie-quality episodes and remain predictably unpredictable; there was no real “mission of the week” this hour but rather we were given a revolving door of mind games and the kind of delicious exposition and backstory that serialization and continuity junkies crave!

On to the recap of “Close to Home, Part 1” … after the jump!

DIA HQ. We jump right into the action with Patricia catching Noah and Hannah (and us) up on the latest crisis; a 16 year old American girl hacked into one of our Ohio Class Nuclear Submarines on patrol in the North Atlantic Ocean, taking it off line  (what we call, “going dark”) for 123 seconds and managing to take control of its navigation.  Which, really is terrifying.   Currently, the US Navy has 18 Ohio Class Submarines in service, 14 of which carry Trident II missiles with thermonuclear warheads … which accounts for about half of the entire American stockpile of our nuclear warheads.  Each sub can carry 24 Trident II missiles. You can quickly see why losing control to even one of them to a hacker is an immediate national world level crisis.

Adana, Turkey.  As Patricia continues to voice over the details of the threat, we see the teenage hacker and her father prepping for a hasty retreat. She apologizes (which … appropriate) while dad assures its going to be ok. They just need to get to Incirlik Air Base and everything will be sorted out.  We learn from Patricia’s VO that dad is an IT contractor at Incirlik which probably, partially explains how the 16 year old gained access to the systems.   Fun fact: Incirlik Air Base is shared, primarily, by the US Air Force and the Turkish Air Force.  Its also home to the Quonset hut of our favorite spec op force, Dalton & Co.

Patricia spins up the team – they need to bring this teenage hacker in from the cold.

Back in Dad and Daughter’s apartment building, as the lights go out in the hallway,. dad realizes that shit is about to get real. Rushing his daughter back inside the apartment, he sends her out the window while he stays behind to deal with … whatever is coming.  Verina (f/k/a as Teenage Hacker) (Chiara Aurelia) doesn’t understand the gravity of her actions and just how valuable hacking codes to US Nuclear Submarines can be but dad knows. Dad know they’re screwed.  If you read my Black Lighting Recap, you’ll understand, teenage kids can be The.Worst!  After Verina leaves, we cut away just as dad’s front door blasts wide open.

Dalton & Co arrive on scene some time later though it doesn’t appear too much later (afterall, they are in Adana already). Before we get started, I want to take a moment to talk about clothing.  On Twitter, Mike Vogel noted the “dope jacket” he got to wear in tonight’s episode  and it was a little bit of a running joke around the Twitter feed for a few days. But seriously, the bomber jacket with the fur collar is pretty dope. So, props to the costume designer for the show and to Vogel for making it work.  Lights are still out in the building which is bad sign number 1.  Preach and Amir are tasked with detaining all residents from leaving the building. Top, Jaz and McG sweep Dad and Verina’s apartment.  Sign of a break in and blood on the floor are bad sign number 2 and 3.  Bad sign number 4 is dead dad with 2 gun shot wounds in the chest and 1 in the head … which is a giveaway for a professional kill.  No sign of the daughter any where and dad’s bug out bag sits open but otherwise unmolested (that the cash and passports are still there is another sign of a professional hit – the killers were only looking for a person).  Dalton leaves his teammates to finish sweeping the apartment while he goes to check on the increasingly agitated residents gathering in the hallway.

As Dalton quickly inspects the residents, trying to assess which, if any, may be connected to the murder., he hits upon a bearded man is way too twitchy. He has a gun on him to boot.  They quickly pull up his record and running down his bona fides when another resident begins to complain of chest pains. Dalton, distracted with Twitchy Beard tells them to cut the sick resident loose so he can get medical treatment when Patricia, who has been watching all of this activity unfold through the team’s body cam live feeds, perks her ears up at the “sick man’s” voice. She literally stalks closer to the DIA HQ big board viewer as we physically see her agitation level rise.  Something about this guy has her dandruff up and she demands to see his face.  “Sick man” is busy making a beeline for the apartment building door when Top pulls his gun to make him stop.  When he turns, his face is now uncovered and Patricia’s face has contorted to something I’ll call sickened rage. She tells Dalton to button that man up airtight and tell no one that they have him.  Patricia tells Dalton that she’s coming to him and that this man is more dangerous than Verina (the teenage hacker). This man is Alex Hoffman (special guest star, James Tupper), decorated field officer gone rogue, guilty of more crimes than she count and supposedly dead for the last 9 years … or so she thought.  Alex faces the body cam, as if he knows Patricia is on the other line of the comms and simply says, “Hello P.”  Title Card.

What.The.Fuck.Is.Going.On.

When we come back, Patricia (I will not call her “P” unless I am quoting Hoffman in this episode)  is watching video of Alex Hoffman’s alleged death scene by exploding car and fading in and out of flash backs.

Vienna, Austria. 12 Years Ago.  Alex Hoffman is meeting with newest handler, a long haired Patricia. He is offended that she’s setting up a tape recorder but she doesn’t care as she explains that recording allows her to recall with accuracy the details of conversations that would otherwise be lost on a typed transcript.  Inflections. Pauses. The verbal cues that reveal more than a speaker even knows they are revealing.  Patricia is good at her job.  She goes on to explain to Hoffman that he might be the best agent they have which also means that he’s a natural born liar … even with his own people. She’s going to analyze him for every ounce of information he has, spoken or not. She’s going to be his handler and shrink and more.

“I’m your partner.
I’m your protector.
I’m your parent …
and  your priest.”

She’s his 4 Ps … which maybe is why he calls her P.

Incirlik Air Base. Dalton & Co complete their covert abduction of Hoffman as they escort him gagged and bound into their Hut.  Jaz and Amir draw first watch outside and Amir, understandably, wants to know what’s going. Top doesn’t know but he trusts Patricia so he’s going with it until he knows more.  If Preach is the moral conscious of the team, Amir is the optically aware member of the team – he always has the big picture in front of him and is thinking about the ramifications of their actions.  Its an interesting character trait they have really developed in him. When Dalton announced the crazy plan to out Jaz as a spy so the Iranians would move her … it was Amir that voiced “the Patricia is committing a crime, could go to jail” angle. I am sure there are other examples but I am trying to keep this under 5,000 words.  I digress.

Quonset Hut.  As Preach binds Alex to a chair, McG and Dalton go through his briefcase. Pretty normal businessman items, rolled cash bundles; fake papers from Kenya, Iran, South Africa, Uganda (Uganda? Who the fuck goes to Uganda?!?), and Germany.  Dalton disagrees with me and says that Hoffman is no boy scout.  On the plane, Patricia is still trapped on memory lane when Dalton calls to give her a sit rep.  Hoffman is in custody and no one saw his arrival. Now, what is going on, he asks?  Patricia continues to be dodgy and evasive.  and warns him (she calls him Adam so you know its serious) to keep one eye on Hoffman but to not otherwise engage. Patricia continues that Noah and Hannah are still tracking the Verina angle and she will task Adam and his team to retrieve her when they have a location.  Hoffman is radioactive and his being alive is … well , she expects major fall out from his being alive, and doesn’t want Dalton & Co among the ruins when the dust settles.

What.The.Fuck.Is.Going.On.

After he disconnects with Patrica, he tasks Preach and McG to clean out the equipment cage (because that is where they are going to keep Hoffman but also to keep them occupied) while he asks Hannah and Noah to move to a private comms channel. In hushed tones, he asks them if Patricia said anything on this Hoffman situation. They are also in the dark … Patricia just said to keep quiet about what they saw and continue trying to track Verina.  Hannah offers to reach out to her CIA contacts to do some digging but Dalton has someone that can do that (Amir, I’m guessing given his background?). Commercials.

Now that Alex is in captivity, bound to a chair in the equipment cage, the real meat of the episode begins. What I referred to on Twitter as the Hannibal Lecter portion of the episode.  Hoffman literally speaks every minute he’s on screen and its all psy ops (psychological warfare); he’s trying to manipulate our team and get inside their heads. The opening salvo here is a general commentary on what Dalton & Co’s real objective should be with Verina but he gets much more focused as the episode goes on, taking on team members one at a time.

He begins the conversation by creepily referring to Dalton and Preach by the real first names though is impressed when they stay cool and reject the bait to ask how he knows so much. Moving on, he says that their real mission is to secure the girl’s backed up hack code and that she, and her father, are meaningless collateral damage.  Why should Dalton listen to him? Because he’s good, good enough to fake his own death .. good enough that Patricia is flying half way around the world to deal with him person.  All good points, Hoffman.

As Hoffman is laying down his opening villain soliloquy, we are watching Verina enter a coffee shop and hack into her father’s home security system. When she plays back the tape from last night, she (and us) gets to see what happened after the front door was busted in.  Mike (that’s Dad’s name) was unceremoniously shot and the killer went to work, looking for the air gapped computer or thumb drive that he is sure Verina made with the hack code.  To Alex, this was doing his job of protecting the country … isn’t that what Dalton & Co are supposed to do? “Or am I dealing with a bunch of Boy Scouts?”  Which is right about when the gag goes back in his mouth. But the game has already begun.

Vienna, Austria. 11 Years Ago. A year into the relationship and things are going well between Alex and Patricia.  They’ve just secured big intel on the Chinese and Patricia asks him how he got it.  Which he finds odd because she never asks the how .. just the what.  He deflects a for moment by asking her if she ever gets lonely (and lays out the reasons she may in fact get lonely) but she persists and he tells her. Well, he tells her a story of how he manipulated some known weaknesses but through cutouts, so it can never come back to him. Someone else may die for the information he obtained but “omelet. eggs.”  Patricia asks if that bothers him and he says no without hesitation. He reciprocates the question and though she also says no, it doesn’t bother her, she takes a beat to respond.  He tells her that together, they can make a difference and that he’ll make her a star. She turns off her tape recorder as she comes closer to him. “I already am a star” and yes she does gets lonely. Then they get down to sexy times.  This comes off as the first time they’ve done it but the flirtation and chemistry was palpable from the first moment they met.  A fait accompli.

Quonset Hut.  We get a quick glimpse at the super redacted Alex Hoffman file on DIA HQ’s computer which I mention only because Hannah tells Noah, a file only gets that redacted when they want to pretend like you never lived but you’ve done too much damage to actually get away with erasing you from this Earth completely. Which is interesting information … that Hoffman was that dangerous.  But like I said, we’re in the Quonset Hut where we see Preach reading the same file Noah and Hannah were reviewing.

Hoffman v. Preach.  Hoffman starts off with a question about redemption at the moment of death and whether its possible.  Man, he really knows these guys — that’s a targeted question at a spiritual man like Preach. Preach gives a measured response full of wisdom as Preach is wont to do, including the fact that the Bible is a how to, not for getting into heaven but rather, how to live on Earth more abundantly.  “More abundantly” is a beautiful phrase. I love the writing on this show, so much. Hoffman makes an almost fatal mistake right here. See, he tells Preach that he too likes the “more abundantly” line which, fine. But then, then Hoffman says that its good Preach has a family, a man like Preach deserves a family.  *Record Scratch*

Preach turns his head and gives Hoffman that I described on Twitter as, “The Fuck Did You Just Say To Me” look.

Preach stalks towards Hoffman while Alex talks about how Preach’s next deployment may be his last given his age but oops, isn’t there a superstition about talking about such things?  Preach says he isn’t superstitious, slowly regaining his famous Preach self control.  But Alex goes even a step further, telling Preach he fears he has now doomed Preach. Dude!!! He will kill you. Are you blind?!? Do you not see the killer in those Preach Wisdom Eyes?!?  Thank god for commercials.

Verina’s Apartment.  The next morning, Jaz, Top and Amir have returned to the scene of the literal crime. This time, Amir is going in impersonating Army CID (the criminal investigation unit in the military) from the Air Base with the plan to sweep the house in detail but before real CID shows up. On his way in, Amir glad hands the Turkish detective on scene who was already expecting the CID so Amir’s appearance doesn’t ring any bells.  Confidence in a place where you don’t belong goes a long way to getting acceptance for being in said place.   Anyway, in the apartment, which is crawling with Turkish cops, Amir is under the gun almost immediately as real Army CID is in fact en route and only 3 minutes away.  Amir spies a Chinese Puzzle Box in Verina’s room and guesses its as good a place to hide as any other. Holding the box up to his camera broadcasting to DIA HQ, Hannah can see the infrared outline of something hiding inside the box. With real Army CID literally pulling up, Amir solves the puzzle box in the exact way anyone who has ever tried to solve one of those wishes they could. He smashes the damn box with his foot and pockets the thumb drive inside. He dodges the CID entering the apartment but as he is leaving, a resident is telling the Turkish detective that Amir saw on the way in that there are 2 different people from CID and it makes no sense.  Amir gives the detective a raised eyebrow as if the woman is crazy and then continues on his way. Bullet = dodged.

Back at the Quonset Hut, we learn the thumb drive isn’t the hack code, its Verina’s diary. Which stinks but may yield a lead on where Verina is. Lots of mentions in the diary of a friend, Esma, that Verina thought she was hiding from her dad (she wasn’t, one of the last things he said to her alluded to him knowing that she snuck out regularly  to see her) and Hannah posits they can use Esma to find Verina.   And she’s right. Noah pulls Esma’s information and verifies that Verina appears in pictures with this Esma.  They start working on pinging Esma’s location.  Dalton & Co move out leaving Amir behind to babysit Hannibal Lecter.  Preach is not here … unclear where he is right now.   Adam gives Amir permission to shoot Alex somewhere not vital if he pisses him off.  For his part, Hoffman would like a thank you for putting them on the Verina hunt.  This guy? Big Balls. Commercials.

Vienna, Austria. 10 Years Ago. Another year gone by.  Patricia is lying Hoffman, post-coitally and they are talking about how the powers that be are taking a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to their sexy times relationship.  Lots of rules don’t apply when you’re being a productive member of a team.  Which Patricia and Alex are … very productive.  Alex is being overly sentimental so Patricia pushes him on what’s wrong.  He brings up a mission from the week before in Jakarta. Patricia interrupts him to get the recorder but he waves her off.  That she listens to him and doesn’t get the recorder? A Huge Red Flag that she’s lost objectivity.   Like Red Flashing Lights Warning Bells Red Flag.  Oh, Patricia.

Anyway, the story.  In Jakarta, Alex tells Patricia he had to kill a BIN Agent … no biggie, disappearing is kind of what Alex does, but the guy almost killed  Alex.  This revelation is what disturbs Patricia (red flags!). Alex is having a sad because he didn’t get any great “life flashing before your eyes” moment but says it was more a reflection on things he would never have or do. Like meeting Patricia’s son.  She mentions that they’ve talked about a life down the road but she misunderstands Alex. He doesn’t want to “grill steaks in the backyard and talk about ball games.” No, He wants to be a spy AND see Patricia.  She responds by saying they should turn the recorder on, “just in case.” He shakes his head and repeats, “just in case.” But when he says it, its ominous.

We pull out of Patricia’s flashback as she watches, again, Alex getting into a car and then the car instantly exploding. Like there is no time delay. The only interesting thing in the video is that after the explosion, the hood flies up covering the windshield and blocking Alex from view (where you saw him clearly behind the wheel for the split second before the car exploded).  The pilot announces that they are starting their decent into Incirlik

Hoffman v. Amir. Like he did with Preach, Hoffman goes at Amir from a religion angle asking if he is a practicing Muslim and if the Agency recruited him. Not getting a response from Amir, he deduces out loud that the prayer rug doesn’t belong to Preach nor to the “firecracker who seems to be in denial about who she is or what she wants.” Tread very carefully here Mr. Hoffman. Talking shit on Jaz may get you killed. Real Talk.   Hoffman goes on, he was recruited. They told him it was because of his facility for language but he suspects it was more for his “moral flexibility.” There it is, the hot button ticket for Amir, he shoots back that he doesn’t “share” Hoffman’s moral flexibility.  Having set the hook, he reels in Amir, questioning his moral superiority. He asks Amir how many times he stood by and let a woman be beat, someone be tortured while undercover in a terrorist cell.  He physically draws Amir in, like Preach, he stalks towards Hoffman’s cage but unlike Preach who was able to pull back, Amir gets as in his face as he can telling Hoffman that he has no idea who Amir is or what he’s been through.  Satisfied at having had more success with Amir than Preach, he throws Patricia’s words in Amir’s face, telling him that you can tell so much more by “a pause, an inflection” than actual words and Amir has told him  a lot.   Amir stalks off.

Back on the mean streets of Adana, DIA HQ is close to pinpointing Esma’s cell phone signal while we watch Esma (Salena Qureshi ) meeting Verina in the coffee shop we saw her in earlier, apparently its on of her favorites.  As Top waits for an address, Amir pops on to the comms to warn Dalton that something is wrong with this whole situation. “I’ve been doing this a long time now and I know when I’m out of my league.” He tells Dalton that something much bigger is at work here.

Before Dalton & Co can get to the coffee shop, some Turkish thugs walk in, stick both girls with a sedative, grab Verina and her laptop, and walk out with her.  In broad daylight. In a full coffee shop.  With people that clearly see what happens and just sit there.  As the thugs are departing with Verina, one man, at least, gets up to follow but a look from the main thug backs him down. Gah, Turkish people are the worst. If this happened in NYC, 15 people would have beat those thugs’ asses. Facts!

Dalton, Jaz and McG roll up just in time to catch a dazed Esma stumbling out of the coffee shop. She can’t tell them anything more than they learn from the manager inside the coffee shop and they are exactly no where. Meanwhile, we see Verina being brought into a junkyard looking area in a fancy Mercedes. So, at least we know we are dealing with thugs with style and money.

When we return, a nice enough villain is making a simple request of Verina, recreate her submarine hack.  She says she can’t that the backdoor will have surely been patched. Undeterred, the kindly terrorist believes in her and knows she can find another way. I know I shouldn’t be normalizing the terrorist but after dealing with Hoffman tonight, this kind doesn’t seem so bad … yet.

Vienna, Austria. 9 years ago.   We come into the Flashback already in progress, Patricia is trying to sort through a jumbled lie-filled story that Alex has just told her.  He dismisses his inconsistencies and then requests a break.  He wants to pretend they’re not who they are for 5 minutes. I took this to mean handler and spy which is how Patricia also takes it; she says she likes who they are, that they’ve done good work and made a difference.  He pivots again and asks her how her son is.  He wants to go to ROTC and she doesn’t want him to. Which makes her feel guilty and maybe like a hypocrite. What does it say about her as a person that she’s willing to risk her life and others’ lives but not let her son risk his own? Alex says the human thing, that it makes her human. She summarizes the situation by saying it fills her with dread. He understands, he says, he feels the same way.  This causes her ears to perk up in that way that only Patricia can do and asks why he would have a feeling of impending dread.  He doesn’t really answer.  I should note that Alex looks haggard in this scene, certainly not the polished, James Bond type we have seen in the past few flashbacks. Whatever he has been up to in this year 9, its taking its toll.  Also, 9 years ago – we know from Patricia’s narration early in the episode, Alex has supposedly been dead for 9 years so, we’re definitely racing to the end of their blissful time together.

Adana, Turkey.  DIA HQ has got nothing for Top who is driving back to the Quonset Hut.  Someone took out the traffic cameras surrounding the coffee shop right before the abduction. That, together with the precise sedative injections in the girls’ necks … proof that we’re dealing with serious pros.  Jaz muses that it can’t be a coincidence that they have a serious pro of their own hog tied back at the Hut.

Quonset Hut.  Dalton & Co. return and Hoffman peanut galleries “where’s the guest of honor.”  Top is in no mood and enters the cage with a left hook everyone has wanted to throw this entire episode and some tough talk questions for the spook of honor. This is what we wish Clarice had done to Hannibal Lecter, amiright?  This is an aggression we last saw when he was hunting for Jaz.

Hoffman doesn’t know where the girl is, his orders were just to pick her up and deliver her. When Dalton calls bullshit and says that Hoffman WILL tell them everything they need to know, Alex turns to Jaz, “does your boyfriend have such a short fuse?”  Jaz:

Hoffman is a pot calling the kettle black because he knows from experience.  Adam steps back in and says quit it with the mind games.  Hannibal Lecter hasn’t even had a chance to sit down with Dalton but boy oh boy, he’s looking forward to it.  Top says, why wait? But before they can get into their mental chess game, Noah cuts in to say that another sub has gone off line but this time in the South China Sea (we see on a quick flash to the big board in the DIA HQ, its the USS Wyoming. Fun Fact, all but 1 of the Ohio Class subs are named after states).   Also, Patricia has landed and is inbound to the Hut.  Good, Dalton says, maybe she can get some answers from Hannibal Lecter.  Ah, but Hoffman isn’t done yet. Being the quick study that he is (though as I’ll mention below, he’s not really a quick study at all), he plays on Dalton’s hero/unending loyalty trait, and says that Patricia isn’t coming to find Verina, she’s only coming to take Hoffman home and in the process, destroy her career and life. And to be clear, and further exhibits his uncanny access to information, he doesn’t mean a slap on the wrist suspension like for the Jaz outing business but real, straight up “life in prison.”  He further drives the knife into Dalton when he says, she’ll fall on her sword and Adam will have been “the accidental executioner.”  Ouch, Dalton is not going to deal with that well. At all. Dalton still isn’t sold but his interest is piques. “Prison for what,” he asks?  “For everything we did.”

Vienna, Austria. Still 9 years ago.  Patrica comes to the pied-à-terre to find not Alex waiting for her but the Langley Director, the President’s Chief of Staff and the National Security Adviser.  That’s a lot of power suits in one room.  Her concern is for whether Alex is ok, initially ignoring the gravity of the situation which, given the Patricia we know today, shows you how far down the rabbit hole she had fallen with her relationship with Hoffman.  The Directors informs her that Hoffman is a murdering monster who has done dirty deals with the worst of the worst to get the tremendous intelligence information that he’s been generating for years at this point. They are inclined to believe she had no idea of the extent of his sources and methods but they want her help. Because, motherfucker needs to go.  Stat. 

Her obsession about watching the car explosion all makes a lot more sense now.

Quonset Hut.  Patricia rolls up  as we get a couple of quick flashbacks to her smoking and having a come to Jesus moment about having been played and what she knows she needs to do now.  Preach is there to greet her and welcome her to home away from home.

She walks through the door and says “Hello Alex.” “Hello, P.”  And scene. Oh, It is on next week. On like Donkey Kong!

Thoughts. Fuck.  Only one more hour to go this season (renew this show already NBC!!!) and so many questions to be resolved … just from this episode alone.

Lets talk about Patricia first.  This episode served to really fill in Campbell’s backstory and her experiences with an officer she not only got too close to but in the process lost all objectivity with.  And its not like she was some rookie noob. No. Hoffman was just that good. A natural born liar as she predicted in their first meeting.  The successful asset manager we see today has clearly been shaped by this experience but it also informs how she deals with her people in the field; in particular, I felt like I understood better Patricia’s motivations n how she handled Dalton during his freak out when Jaz was captive. She understood the mental space he was in because she could not only sympathize with what he was feeling, but also, she could empathize at those feelings that cross the line from the strictly professional relationship.

Which leads us to  Hoffman and his comments about Jaz that he made to Amir and to Jaz’s face about loving Dalton.  Jalton is a thing and you’re blind if you don’t pick up on the under the surface relationship the two have been communicating for at least half the season.  This is not lost on Hoffman who, as Patricia taught him, understand that body language and nonverbal cues communicate as much as the words that come out of our mouth.  This is an issue that needs to be dealt with lest it eventually compromises the teams ability to operate. At some point, Dalton and/or Jaz are going to make a call out of feelings for the other and not for the good of the mission or the team as a whole. You could make the argument that Dalton already did that in his attempts to rescue Jaz.  I don’t think we see this resolution before the season finale but I am hopeful we see Hoffman do his Lecter impression with either Dalton or Jaz (or both) before the end of next week’s Part 2.

And finally, let’s talk about Hoffman.  He’s not your classic ciolent cillain. Sure, he kills without conscious and is walking proof of his flexible morality but he’s smart. Very smart. Intuitively and learned.  He understands people on a cellular level, what drives them and motivates the.  He’s clearly done his homework on SOG7 and has kept tabs on their missions, even their most recent exploits. Which means he is not only excellent at his job but he’s also got an amazing mole/well placed source of information inside the DIA.  No one mentioned that this episode but I have to imagine, Hoffman’s source of info has to be dealt with next week.  We’ll see.

Is Hoffman evil?  Throughout the episode in the present and in the flashbacks in the past, he consistently defends his actions as being what was necessary for the security of the nation. And, isn’t all of their jobs.  Where do you draw the “morality” line when not doing the unthinkable could cost lives, innocent or otherwise. When do you say, “I won’t do that.” Hoffman doesn’t seem to have that line and seems to judge poorly those warriors that do.   Its the age old question,. do the ends justify the means. Hoffman certainly believes so and didn’t so many people defend Top’s actions to finds Jaz, under the same argument?  You do what needs to be done or else, we’re all just a bunch of Boy Scouts.

I’m not saying I like Hoffman, I don’t. He’s terrifying and psychopathic. But, like Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, he;s a genius of lies and manipulation and human nature.  And, I think you have to respect that. At least professionally.  Even the CIA Director agrees with me. In the closing flashback, after detailing some of his crimes to Patricia, he makes the point that Hoffman’s information was accurate and immensely helpful and he was a patriot in service to the nation … buuuuuuuttttttt. It always comes down to the “but,” doesn’t it?

Join us Next week as we wrap up this season and talk about what Season 2 might hold in store.  Until then. Stay Strong, Brave Nation!!