‘The Old Man’ Episode 3 Recap: Father Knows Best

Not everyone on The Old Man has the chance to meet-cute during their espionage hijinks. Take Julian Carson (The Wire vet Gobenga Akinnagbe), for instance. When he gets the call from FBI bigwig Harold Harper that there’s a new target awaiting him, he has to cut short his flirtatious interactions with a young woman on crutches, waiting at the same bus stop as he. Perhaps his refusal to get on the bus with her and continue their like-at-first-sight encounter is meant as a pointed contrast with Dan Chase, who basically took a break from running for his life to bed down a divorcée who had no idea what she was getting herself into. Maybe one of these guys is serious about what he’s doing, and the other has grown so accustomed to life not on the run that he doesn’t know how to do anything else anymore.

But he’d better learn fast. It’s not just that Carson closes in on him in no time, using Harper’s intel to pinpoint his location at Zoe McDonald’s place and try—and fail—to kill Chase. It’s that his daughter is secretly in play: She’s Angela Adams, Harper’s protégée, and she’s maintaining contact with (sorry) her old man despite the hell she’d catch for it if she were ever caught.

It’s she who successfully talks Zoe out of calling the cops on Chase before heading back into the lion’s den of FBI/CIA turf wars, represented by Harper on one hand and the insufferable Agent Waters—noted to be “the nosiest motherfucker in the history of the CIA”—on the other.

And that isn’t the only surprise served up by this episode. In a series of flashbacks, it’s revealed that Chase’s wife, she of the slow and painful decline and death by Huntington’s disease, was once in fact the wife of Chase’s Afghan-warlord contact Faraz Hamzad. Though she seems largely at peace with the life that the war against the Soviets has created for her, she still remembers a childhood in which her professor parents were supposed to move to America. Is that the promise that John, Chase’s real name, represents to her? Or was it the fact that he made good on his vow to deliver long-distance sniper rifles to her husband, so he could plug Soviet officers from a thousand yards away?

It’s a murky business from top to bottom. There’s still some vestigial Rambo romanticism to Johnny, a would-be Lawrence of Afghanistan who openly says he joined the CIA to kill Russians, and headed to the one place where he could do so directly without triggering a nuclear war. But in hindsight, we of course can track our own empire-killing misadventure in Afghanistan with that of the USSR; no one, except perhaps the so-called natives, comes out looking good, or without incurring fatal wounds. John/Dan is a dashing figure, but his chivalric promises are empty ones.

So in a way, his sell-job of himself to Zoe is history repeating itself. He gently quizzes her as to why her instinct, when stopped by the cops at what seemed like a sobriety checkpoint, was to lie and say that he was her husband. Somehow, he implies, she knew that the cops were looking for him; Amy Brenneman’s face as she realizes what she’s invited into her home is an absolute marvel, a cross between “I can’t believe it” and “I fucking knew it.” After the assassin tries and fails to kill Chase, Zoe winds up having to flee with him, or at least it appears so, as he shoots down the drone assigned to monitoring him. He let her into his life, and thus condemned her to it.

And what of “Angela Adams,” John/Dan’s daughter? She’s left fending off both her boss Harper and their mutual antagonist Waters, and she’ll have to be an extremely canny operator—more so than her dear old dad, even—to escape unscathed. In an intense conversation between the three of them, it’s heavily implied that Hamzad wants more than revenge for Chase stealing his wife. What does he want, then? Answers to unanswered questions, as Angela suggests? Or does he know the answers already, and is he angling for the daughter he never had?

It’s juicy material, all told. And if it isn’t quite as pulse-poundingly delivered as it was in The Old Man Episode 1 — Zoe’s witnessing of Chase’s battle with the assassin notwithstanding — it’s still pretty riveting stuff. Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow, Amy Brenneman, Alia Shawkat: If you were wondering if a series with these leads might be entertaining to watch, wonder no fucking longer. I’m still waiting for a return to that astonishing long-take battle from the premiere, but regardless, this is a spy game worth playing.

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.