The Madness of King George
Are we meant to sympathize with George Mullen? This is largely a rhetorical question, as the answer is obviously yes, or else you don’t ask legendary actor Robert De Niro to play the character as America’s Grandpa. But it’s not entirely a rhetorical question. It’s one thing to sympathize with the man’s plight: his mission to uncover the parties responsible for a devastating cyberattack, his need to navigate the political rat’s nest he’d previously extracted himself from, and his fight against the slow, insidious development of senile dementia. It’s quite another thing to sympathize with how he’s dealing with all of it: pressing on blindly in one of the most-high stakes jobs in the history of (fictional) America, knowing full well his aging brain can no longer hack it. Gosh, if only we had one or two recent real-life examples of what a bad idea this is.
George’s condition really is interfering with his ability to get the job done. This episode begins with him receiving a phone call from his contact in the espionage world, Natan, that he can’t hear or understand, with reality glitching in and out of focus all around him. He’s shown in extreme closeups and eerie, paradoxical long-distance shots from within his study. The TV cuts in and out with digital noise on the audio and visuals. He’ll be sitting behind his desk one second and standing in front of it the next and sitting in the helicopter on the way to work the second after that.
He can cover for some of this stuff, claiming to his “body man” Roger that he’s simply stressed and occasionally overreactive. But when President Mitchell gives him a 72-hour time frame to bring her answers before she starts striking Russia out of a need to retaliate against somebody, anybody, even if they’re not really involved, that garbled phone call and his inability to recall anything from it becomes a real problem. He spends three days waiting for a call he’s already received, telling him information he already knows. (Well, sort of knows — more on that in a moment.)
Meanwhile, Roger reveals himself to be much more than Zero Day’s answer to Brandt from The Big Lebowski. Turns out our boy has not one, not two, but three secret lives going on — that we know of! He’s having a clandestine affair with George’s congresswoman daughter, Alex, who is rather inexplicably made the head of the oversight committee keeping tabs on her dad’s commission by his rival, Speaker Dreyer. (This show was written when “conflicts of interest” were frowned upon by the United States government.)
Roger’s also got a billionaire benefactor named Bob Lyndon (Clark Gregg) who wants him to keep the investigation focused on Russia. Lyndon’s fellow megarich chud, a Silicon Valley messiah named Monica Kidder (Gaby Hoffman), keeps volunteering her services unasked for; if nothing else it’s a better use of cable news time than the screechingly reactionary talk show hosted by Evan Green (a bespectacled Dan Stevens), who tears so-called “King George” a new one every night in the sneering tone endemic to the right these days.
Finally, Roger in contact with a Russian operative (Stass Klassen) who, with apparent honesty, tells Roger that the Russian government had nothing to do with the attack. That hacker collective that gunned down in the Bronx by GRU agent? He was covering his tracks because of the shit he was involved in with these guys, which didn’t include the takedown of the transpo and communications grid. Roger’s buddy, in turn, takes care of the agent by running him over with a truck.
Somehow, this vehicular murder happens just yards away from where the feds make their first arrest, bringing in an ex-NSA hacker named Patrick O’Keefe (Jasjit Williams). The government finds him in part by hacking literally every phone in Lower Manhattan; you may recall this as the reason Lucius Fox had a falling out with Batman in The Dark Knight. O’Keefe, too, denies Russian involvement; he says the weapon they used was developed by the US government itself, and he’d been told it would only be revealed to the public, not enhanced to be even more dangerous and used against the very same public.
The real culprits, according to Roger’s contact, are a left-wing militia with tons of money to throw around to bankroll the attack — you know, one of those filthy stinking rich left-wing militias, backed by all those famous left-wing billionaires. George sends the intel to Mitchell just in time to avert the strike on Russia and a possible third World War, but it really makes a hash out of the patriotic politics of it all. The idea that the entire American system wouldn’t lose its mind with ecstasy if given the excuse to violently crack down on leftists is almost adorable in its childlike innocence, but there you go.
George delivers the latest news to the American people in a hastily scheduled presser that replaces the president’s previously scheduled “We’re striking Russian oil refineries; on a completely unrelated note, please be aware of the location of the nearest fallout shelter” address from the Oval Office. He names not only the militia, the Reapers, but the cyber-weapon they employed, Proteus, after recalling the name from his half-remembered phone call with Natan. There’s just one problem, according to the CIA director: Proteus exists, but it’s a different kind of secret weapon entirely.
Between George’s, uh, loose command of the facts and his boy Roger’s many extracurriculars, maybe it really is a good idea for his wife Sheila to bring in his former chief of staff, Valerie Whitesell (Connie Britton) to be “a real chief of staff” for George. No one comes right out and says it, but George and Valerie clearly had an affair in the past, which makes Sheila’s gesture a rather magnanimous one for all concerned.
There’s one last complicating detail to note, though. However shady Roger’s dealings with Alex, Bob, and the Russian may look, he diligently pursues George’s seemingly quixotic instruction to look into the death of Anna Sindler, the ghost writer who died when her car was struck by a train near George’s house. When he tells Roger he saw her at the press conference the next day, not even we in the audience believe what he saw was real. But Roger takes a trip to the morgue, and wouldn’t you know it, her body is missing. Her mother quickly hangs up on Roger when he calls her to confirm the death, so he doesn’t get any answers. But would a double agent even bother doing this kind of detective work for his boss? And if he discovered the body was missing, would he report it? There’s more to Roger than meets the eye, which I suppose is why you hire an actor with the talent of a Jesse Plemons to play him.
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.
