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WashingTelevision: Crisis Recap, Episode Five, “Designated Allies”

Meg’s house is full of money, but her hair is full of lies.

Gibson’s ex-wife looks in no way like she’s about to make out with CIA Director Widener. Image by Chuck Hodes for NBC.

The one thing we know about Gillian Anderson’s character (Meg Fitch) so far is that her hair looks like it is made of sunshine but is most definitely full of secrets. In last night’s episode, “Designated Allies,” it turns out Meg has been bonking a handsome English doctor (Rod Hallett), whose name may or may not be Jonas Clarenbach (which is a great alibi, by the way), and who seems to have been working for the CIA to train extra-deadly soldiers or something, although he now feels pretty bad about it.

Say what you will about Meg, with her gazillions of dollars and her honeyed rich-person drawl—she’s enigmatic, whether she’s hugging Amber’s best friend, the daughter of the dead congressman from last week, or hissing at her sister to tell Finley that Amber is actually her daughter. Why are you so wise, Meg? Also: Your pharmaceutical division gets a contract with the CIA to produce super-secret drugs for super-secret soldiers and yet you don’t have the security clearance to know anything about the operation? I don’t buy that a control freak like Meg would let that happen for a second.

Gibson’s target this week is his wife, Janice, in a nice piece of subterfuge that reveals a few more cracks in his apparently shattered sanity. Janice is also mom to Beth Ann, a.k.a. the world’s most placid teen, and so when Scary-Voice Gibson calls her and tells her to poison the coffee of the bizarrely muscular director of the CIA, Widener, she’s all about it. But then Widener sees her trembling hands and tells her he isn’t going to drink it, before making out with her, which is always my playbook when people try to kill me. And Gibson tells his team that this was his ploy all along and that the poison wasn’t even real, before gnashing his teeth and crossing out, “HE WILL CATCH HER” and “SHE WILL BREAK” in his notebook. I don’t care what anyone says, this show is hilarious.

The creepy guard ups his creep factor this week by ogling Amber and asking her how she knows how to make beds (?), but also forcing one of her classmates, tortured artistic soul Ian, to search her person for the missing blade Beth Ann filched (and hid between her teeth, which sounds horrible). Turns out this traumatizes Ian so much, he goes to douchey lacrosse kid and asks for drugs from the stash he’s been accumulating by pinching them off other kids. Kyle, who’s nearly as placid as Beth Ann, has a sad when Gibson forces Hearst, his former Secret Service protector and father figure, to come out of the pokey and tell Kyle that he’s in on the kidnapping, even though he isn’t. And then Hearst cold-cocks a guy in the face before they throw him back in the hole. Also, a bunch of kids try to use the razor blade for nefarious things but none of them succeeds.

The real silliness this week, though, comes from Finley and Dunn, who go to see the two kidnapped soldiers in the hospital and then decide to kidnap them themselves after the CIA threatens to grab them back. This involves Dunn coolly putting on aviators while Finley backs an ambulance through a glass wall. They also take the British doctor with them to monitor the patients, only this backfires when he turns out to be working for the CIA and drugs them both before calling in help. Then Gibson actually steals the patients back from the CIA using his ol’ “this road is closed” plan.

Also, Gibson is clearly completely bananas but he somehow manages to hold it together when he’s pretending to be his dorky dad self.

Thoughts:

That mask that lacrosse kid fashioned for himself out of a piece of cardboard was the scariest thing I’ve seen since Saw.

These kids have a ton of clothes considering they’ve been kidnapped.

What did you think of last night’s Crisis? Let us know in the comments.