‘The Old Man’ Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: Silent Partners

The iconography of The Old Man ’s opening title centers on a dog fighting to survive. In the case of this week’s episode, we’re centered on a couple of dogs that haven’t done much barking or biting yet this season. Neither remains the dog that didn’t bark by the time the closing credits roll.

The man sitting under the umbrella here is Julian Carson (a quietly mesmerizing Gbenga Akinnagbe), Morgan Bote’s personal black-ops operative. With his mentor dead, Carson has reconsidered his life of wetwork, settling down for a cozy romance with a civilian woman who knows nothing of his past. Since he has the feeling Bote himself was reconsidering what he’d done with his life, he’s done much of the same.

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Unfortunately, Carson was the man to whom Bote sent his final email in the moments before Suleyman Pavlovich’s assassins gunned him down. That means he’s not out, whether he wants to be or not. Just in case he doesn’t realize it, Harold Harper shows up in his apartment unannounced to remind him. This would have been impossible for Harold to do while Morgan was alive, but the old man’s death means the slow collapse of the wall of secrecy he constructed around Carson. Harper can help protect Carson from his many enemies and save the life of both him and his girlfriend, but only if Carson ponies up the email.

Turns out Carson was maybe not as out as he indicated. Harper has his theories — perhaps he’s hardwired to stay in the life, perhaps he wants revenge for the old man’s murder — but at any rate, Carson hung onto the contents of the email rather than deleting it as he initially wanted to do. The email is just a photo of Pavlovich…with Marion, Harper’s ex-wife, who’d supposedly been helping them throughout their Afghanistan sojourn. Another double-cross? On this show you can set your watch to them.

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Our other largely unsung antihero this week is Zoe. She’s always been the most curious character on the show, an anomaly who wasn’t trained for this life like the others. She just kind of naturally took to it, transforming herself from Chase’s unwilling hostage to his frequent partner, seizing half of his ill-gotten fortune in the process. The idea that she’s a person “who breaks things” comes up over and over — an insult from Season 1, now recycled as a sort of “Winter Is Coming” mantra for herself.

She finds she’s a little too good at it, in fact. While Zoe aims a gizmo designed to tap phones from a distance, Chase shakes down the terrified assistant to Pavlovich’s lawyer, Nina Kruger (Rowena King). Just as Chase figured she would, the woman calls Nina in terror after he leaves, giving away the lawyer’s location, then sitting and sobbing in abject terror. “I wish it hand’t been so easy to do what we just did,” Zoe laments later. “I wish it had been harder to do that.” Just because she herself doesn’t scare easy doesn’t mean she enjoys working her mojo on people who are. It’s an ugly business.

It gets even uglier when the pair track Nina down to remote country house — filled with an airborne poison. Chase gets the better of the gas-masked guard on the scene, but is obviously dosed with whatever agent winds up killing Nina. But before she dies, she gives away the location of a thumb drive containing her final warning about Pavlovich: He and several other rogue actors and pariah states plan to form a rare earth mineral cartel using the deposits they secretly control, and they plan to use this new power to bring governments around the world to their knees. It’s James Bond’s SPECTRE meets 1970s OPEC. Now all Dan can do is wait to be captured, in hopes they have an antidote to whatever he’s sucked down.

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It’s funny: The Old Man , along with The Americans and Better Call Saul , are three of the best shows to ever do it when it comes to the craft of espionage and sabotage. But they’re also three of the quietest shows ever when it comes to the people doing the spycraft. Dan and Zoe and Carson barely raise their voices in this episode. Mike Ehrmantraut and Gus Fring and Nacho Varga rarely spoke above a low purr. Philip and Elizabeth Jennings could be explosively angry, but their jobs involved nearly as much quiet, wordless drudgery as it did honeytrapping; their unintentional Ahab, FBI Agent Stan Beeman, his partne Dennis Aderholt, and his KGB counterpart Oleg Burov talked like they worked in a library.

Every single actor involved in the above roles (deep breath: Jeff Bridges, Amy Brenneman, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Jonathan Banks, Giancarlo Esposito, Michael Mando, Matthew Rhys, Keri Russell, Noah Emmerich, Brandon J. Dirden, and Costa Ronin) deserve kudos for shying away from the high-decibel, demonstrative acting style we associate with action and adventure. Sure, the spies keep quiet when they don’t wanna get caught, but otherwise they live for the excitement, right?

Not these guys. Whatever compels them to keep doing what they’re doing has not translated into a bonanza of excess energy for them to spend. It’s rendered them thoughtful, quiet, cautious, careful. As Zoe puts it at one point, doing this means having to be okay with never trusting anybody again. She also says that while she’s always been a person who breaks things, her experiences with Chase and Bote, the things she’s learned how to do, mean she’s now “armed.” You speak softly when every word is a weapon.

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.

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