‘The Old Man’ Season 2 Episode 2 Recap: Don’t Call Me Daughter

The Old Man did it: It created the best “part two of a two-part premiere” episode I’ve ever seen. It’s not just the fine dramatic content within that earns it this distinction, though: This tense and moving hour of television feels like it was written specifically to justify the double-premiere format itself. Networks and streamers are fond of two- or three-episode opening weeks these days, but it’s rare for the material to justify it. Simply by putting two of its three protagonists in Season 2 Episode 1 and the third protagonist plus the antagonist in Episode 2, The Old Man makes the most of the two hours it has.

I’m especially glad the show took the two-part approach, because this episode made up for all the shortcomings of its predecessor and then some. If the opening hour coasted, to an extent, on the inherent likeability of its leads, the follow-up dug deep. Director Jet Wilkinson wields the camera like an interrogator to lay bare the performances of Alia Shawkat as FBI Agent Angela Adams (aka Emily Chase) and Navid Negahban as Faraz Hamzad, her biological father.

And kidnapper. Jumping back in time to moments before the end of Season 1, this episode reveals what Angela has been doing as the prisoner-slash-guest of Hamzad, from whom she was kidnapped as a toddler by her mother, Belour/Abbey, and her adoptive father, Johnny/Dan Chase. Her real name is neither Angela Adams nor Emily Chase, but Parwana Hamzad. (Keeping track of the multiple monikers around here is a little like trying to remember who has what nickname in the Wu-Tang Clan.) 

The ordeal gives her emotional whiplash. Still reeling from her abduction, which left a friend and fellow agent dead, she then learns the truth about who her father really is via a home movie provided to her in her cell. The revelation hits her like a truck.

After she accepts the truth, her father summons her to a hilltop cemetery to regale her with tales of her family’s legacy of bravery in the face of the region’s countless invaders. Unimpressed, she demands to know the answer to the question she’d come to the region to ask: What was her mother like, before she became the cold and cruel woman Angela knew? An embittered Hamzad claims there was no such woman, that she was always this way. 

The next time they see each other, he comes ostensibly to execute her. But he can’t go through with it, because, Angela says, he’s a “fucking coward….You are dying to hear from me,” she continues, however much he dismisses her as her mother’s daughter and a hopeless case. She takes advantage of his hesitation and jumps him. A brutal fight breaks out that ends only when Hamzad has a nervous collapse with his hands locked around his daughter’s throat, and Angela finds herself as unable to pull the trigger on him as he was on her.

While all of this is going down, we also see the continuing adventures of Omar, the Taliban spy who lost an eye to Dan Chase last episode. Turns out he was in the region to prod Hamzad over both his top-secret American prisoner and his failure to deliver a scheduled bribe to the government, in exchange for which they let him run his own territory his own (far more liberal) way. He’s able to throw his weight around like this because of his special relationship with the American government: He’s not on their sanctions list, so any business involving the massive lithium deposit he’s sitting on has to go through him. 

When Hamzad refuses to hand over the American, who would put all of this in jeopardy, Omar knows the Taliban are being lied to. He tries to sideline Harper and Chase as a courtesy to Hamzad — and to stall for time for the Taliban’s interests — and loses an eye for it. Wiser, angrier, and much cooler looking, he makes his case for a crackdown to Kabul, who agree and send him back with soldiers to take over the lithium operation and take down Hamzad. This leads to a tense standoff between Omar, Hamzad’s right-hand woman Khadija (Jacqueline Antaramian), and their phalanxes of gunmen. 

But after getting tipped off by Khadija that the Taliban were on their way, both Hamzad and his American guest are in the wind. Having now lived as a normal guest in his estate for some time, during which she makes connections with her cousin Faruza (Sara Sayed) and her adorable son Farouk (Michael Sifain), she’s entrusted with her own gun and brought to, you guessed it, the cave where Chase and Harper are hiding, a cave only Hamzad and Belour knew about. On the way, she asks again if her mother had a good side, and all he can come up with is that she taught him you can never both love and trust anyone. 

When they reach the cave entrance, Hamzad detects the presence of intruders. He enters alone, a gun goes off, Angela rushes into the cave, and she stands there in shock as she sees…something we’ll find out about next week. Hope you enjoy hanging from that cliff!

After the first episode, I started wondering if The Old Man’s primary strength was just how enjoyable and talented veteran actors Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow are. This episode proves that Alia Shawkat is a vital ingredient, without whom The Old Man noticeably feels like half a show. 

It also shows that she, too, is a casting coup in the same way Bridges and Lithgow is: She’s simply a very interesting person to look at. Bridges has his Old Man of the Mountain visage, Lithgow his unparalleled look of officious aggrievedness, and Shawkat a prodigiously freckled canvas across which emotions as simple as rage and defiance and as complicated as grief for a life never allowed to exist are splashed like a Jackson Pollock. 

Indeed, her entire side of the story is advanced in a series of closeups or long takes. Her horrified, silently crying face as she watches the home movie and sees the truth of her own childhood staring back at her. Her plain denial when confronted by Hamzad with his unpleasant characterization of her mother, against all she’d hoped for. The almost off-handed framing of the vicious fight between the two of them, captured with such claustrophobic domestic-violence intimacy that I remembered it as one long take until I went back and checked. A similarly lingering look at Hamzad’s face, lined with age and regret, as he hears Angela’s questions for him in the voice of a little girl rather than a grown woman, the fact of which he still can’t quite accept. That final shot of Angela looking into the cave and seeing whatever it is she sees. This is very intelligent filmmaking, filmmaking that trusts the power of both the camera and the performers, and the patience of the viewer.

Also that fight scene was incredible, wasn’t it? It’s hard to make combat look that raw and unpleasant while still being riveting and tense as an action scene. It’s hard to do a lot of things this episode does. If this is the path The Old Man will be treading for the rest of the season, I’m heading right into that cave with them.

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.