‘The Old Man’ Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: This Old House

“What if we put Jeff Bridges, John Lithgow, Amy Brenneman, and Jessica Harper in a dark house together for 45 minutes, and had Alia Shawkat call them on the phone to say goodbye forever?” That feels like the question creator and co-writer Jonathan E. Steinberg posed himself when putting together this moody and moving episode of The Old Man . The answer, of course, is that you’ve got a recipe for a good 45 minutes of television so idiot-proof you’d almost have to try to screw it up. The Old Man does not screw it up.

The refrain of the hour is family . In Afghanistan, Emily Chase/Angela Adams/Parwana Hamzad chooses to fight and die for her new family over returning to the United States to be with her old one. Actually, make that old ones, plural. Throughout the episode, we see more and more proof that Harold Harper and his wife Cheryl really did treat “Angela” as one of their own, family photos and all. Doing this was a then-rare breach of Harold’s vow to never take work home with him, which made it all the more important to them all. This was something Dan had to make his peace with, watching her become an adult without him.

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Now neither of her American fathers is there when enemy forces burst into Hamzad’s compound and riddle the room where she’s hiding with bullets, cutting off their call and…well, I’d say she was killed, but we very pointedly don’t see a body, or even any first-hand perspective of what’s going on. It’s just shouting and screaming and gunshots on the other end of a phone call. I’m not trusting it.

That goes double when you factor in the identity of the attackers: not Afghan soldiers loyal to the Taliban government, but Russian mercenaries in the employ of ruthless businessman Pavlovich. By torturing one of the men who assassinated Morgan Bote on Pavlovich’s behalf last episode — unnecessarily, given Harper’s expertise in interrogation; he just wants to hurt someone — Chase learns that Bote was not the Russian’s only target. He was after “Marsha and Henry Dixon,” the aliases Zoe and Dan used when they encountered him last season.

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Would Pavlovich go through all this trouble and risk, up to and including murdering high-level government officials on American soil, just for some mineral deposits? Whatever money he’d gain would be lost in the shitstorm that would inevitably follow. Chase and Harper suspect there’s more at work, something they’re not seeing yet.

It’s that state of not-knowing that drives all these people crazy, and not just the ones whose job it is to know things. Speaking with Zoe — whom she knows full well has been sent by Dan to distract her while he and Harold work over the assassin — Cheryl sums up the dilemma of loving people like her husband and Angela in a very succinct way. The last words she’ll ever hear Angela say were directed to Harold: “I don’t blame you for what you did.” Because of the nature of Angela and Harold’s jobs, Cheryl will never be able to find out what this means. Ten years spending holidays as a family, and there’s a part of them both she’ll never know at all.

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What’s what makes Zoe’s status unusual. Cheryl divides people in and adjacent to this line of work as either being inside or outside — you either know, or you wish you knew what the others do. Cheryl is outside. Angela, Harold, and the mysterious man who Harold introduces to Cheryl as Angela’s father while refusing even to say his name? Inside. Zoe speculates she’s in a “transitional state.” But with Pavlovich making her a target, she’s all the way inside now, and happy to be there.

Should she be? Look at the lives of The Old Man ’s old men. Hamzad is dead. Bote is dead. Chase is on the run from countless pursuers after decades underground with a woman he made miserable and a daughter he couldn’t come into contact with anymore. Harold has lost his son to suicide, his adoptive daughter to (presumably) a hit squad, and even his grandson Henry to the boy’s other set of grandparents so as to keep him safe, all without being able to say goodbye. The old women fare little better: Khadija (presumably) dies in the attack on the compound, and Cheryl lives in Schrödinger’s marriage, never sure if the man she’s with is fully present.

Throughout the episode, the basement is flooded by a leaky pipe and the power goes out. The metaphors pile atop one another until Dan tortures his victim in the same few inches of water he was trying to stem minutes earlier, in the same darkness. Even after the lights come back on, the episode ends with a shot of Harold grabbing a saw to dismember the dead man in that same basement. Splashing around in a murky basement, hurting people in a literally broken home. I think you have The Old Man ’s answer on whether this line of work is good for the soul right there.

But the darkness and the white noise of the water serve another purpose: They block out visual and aural distractions. Each closeup on the quartet of actors in that house, Cheryl and Harold and Dan each confronting the compromises they’ve made, and most of all Dan breaking down and sobbing over Emily’s death…You might as well shine a literal spotlight on Bridges, Lithgow, Brenneman, and Harper for how well this episode showcases them just in how it looks and sounds. It’s like this house was built with their emotions on that night in mind.

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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