Annie Walker, the “derelict babysitter,” not only discovered a new love interest as she overreacted and had her niece treated in the ER for a bump on the head, but she went back to CIA school and took an unintentionally circuitous route to find the person who was leaking the identities of promising recruits onlines, thus ending their careers.
And I’m glad that the writers didn’t go for the obvious choice in a bad guy. They made Annie work for it.
The way they were setting it up initially, it seemed as though the Covert Affairs folks were going to make the hyper-serious recruit Emerson — who’d never let her new roomie Annie into their shared space if it was a second past 9 p.m. — be the baddie. That was after Annie followed stern Instructor Roy (tailing him in a painfully obvious fashion which someone of his caliber should’ve noticed) and he later gave her a strange, impromptu shooting lesson in the woods. But they resisted making either Emerson or Roy the leaker. Good for them.
Having Auggie swoop in to provide Annie assistance in the field — and deliver a bit of op tech to Annie (again, in a way that seemed too overt for my taste) — was a nice change of pace. However I was ill prepared for Auggie to show up, sans shirt, to save Annie’s behind when she was caught in Instructor Roy’s office after she’d downloaded the contents of his personal laptop to a flash drive. For once, it wasn’t the nubile female agent who had to flash the flesh.
When Roy emotionally asserted that he resented the CIA suspecting him of wrongdoing, while pointing a gun in Annie’s face, and then veered into a sad tale about the infertility struggles he and his wife were experiencing, I thought Annie bought it a tad too quickly. On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed how she quickly deduced, after one slip of the tongue while the recruits were waiting to jump out of an airplane, the real traitor’s identity. That was fun to watch.
Giving Annie a personal life, one for which she was willing to leave her mission in order to have a first date, is a grand idea, especially because if matters heat up between her and flirty Dr. Weiss, you just know that Ben Mercer will pop back into the picture to complicate matters.
The murky internal politics of the CIA — the posturing and veiled threats being exchanged by Joan and Jai — likewise seem promising, as does the congressional investigation into whether Arthur engaged in a CIA cover-up. (Is this the project Arthur has rogue Ben secretly working on? I can appreciate that we know little about this but I’m expecting we’ll be filled in eventually.)
I also want to know more about the backstory between Arthur and Gina, his ex-wife, who used to refer to Joan as “the blond.” Hmm. A suggestion that Arthur cheated on Gina with Joan? What’s Gina’s job and why is she fronting for that senator?
Questions, questions, questions … I can let them all percolate for a while as, three episodes into this sophomore season, I’ve been satisfactorily entertained. I could go for a little less obvious with the spy craft though.
Clacked by Meredith O'Brien 
on Jun 22, 2011 @ 11:20 EST5EDT
Sometimes it’s nice simply to see what’s expected. We all knew that Annie would be the only one not to go for the table full of guns, but I loved watching it happen, and always enjoy her tradecraft and improvisation.
The brilliance in having every random woman in a room swoon over Auggie is that it’s not at all suspicious when Annie approaches him as a stranger. She does look over her shoulder to make sure no one is close enough to overhear their conversation before telling Auggie that they’re good to discuss the mission. An observer would assume she’s just being more discreet in her flirtation than the previous woman who just left. Even Auggie handing her the earwig in plain sight is just the tech ops supervisor trying to impress a young woman. The whole exchange even sells their later liaison story to Gaskins, should he ask around about the two of them.
I was a bit annoyed that Annie didn’t put off the first date until the mission was over. It did help that this was just after Gaskins had caught them in his office, and Auggie has advised her to lay low for a while. Leaving the campus entirely for the evening certainly accomplished that.
Back in episode two, when Joan and Arthur were at a restaurant, she commented that when he was seeing her during his previous marriage, he’d always order the same steak, which was a constant throughout their relationship to their current troubles. Joan was also doubly upset at Arthur’s secret business dinners with the woman who turned out to be something like legal counsel or a budget officer, because he’d done the same thing with Joan to his previous wife. I assume that Gina is supposed to be the wife in question.
I got the sense that Gina was powerful in Washington in her own right, and wasn’t beholden to the Senator. In fact, she may even have prodded him to go after Arthur publicly just for the satisfaction of messing with her ex-husband.
I do appreciate that, for the must part, Covert Affairs, is more about the intelligence than the action, and more closely related to the real world than the typical espionage show. Annie doesn’t run around guns blazing, or routinely throw around opponents outweighing her by a hundred pounds in hand-to-hand combat. She uses real devices rather than magical gadgets. She can usually throw a quick story together, but even she can be caught flat-footed, as she was in this episode. As long as the show doesn’t turn into Alias, I’ll keep watching.
Hey now … Alias, when it stuck to espionage, was a great show!
Alias at its best was a fantastic show. Covert Affairs is, to me at least, finally coming around to something I really like after this last episode. I’ve always enjoyed the show, but this most recent offering was just a little bit more enjoyable than earlier episodes. I hope it’s just hitting its stride and will continue to improve. It’s nice to have original, scripted programming in the summer that you can look forward to!
For its time, it was a wonderful espionage show, and then they took down the Alliance, including SD-6. I believe that was Season 1? The decline after that was so gradual that it took years to extricate myself completely and leave behind characters I had once enjoyed, no matter how many ridiculous transformations they underwent. Since then, Abrams has not failed to disappoint me.
I had dinner with one of the creators of Covert Affairs and a staff writer last week and I asked them about the continual comparisons to Alias. Their response was what I expected, CA is not trying to be, nor does it want to be Alias. They are very different shows. I was happy to hear that.
I loved Alias, but I also love Covert Affairs – for very different reasons. So, I don’t think you have to worry about it becoming Alias.