‘The Looming Tower’ Episode 3 Recap: The Big Bang Theory

The third episode of The Looming Tower was struck by two coordinated explosions. No, not the al-Qaeda-orchestrated embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, nor the CIA-orchestrated tough-guy retaliatory strikes on an AQ training camp in Afghanistan and its, ahem, “chemical weapons facility” in Sudan. As if invoking the “two-for-two” principle that led American intelligence and defense officials to launch the latter attacks, writer Bash Doran and director John Dahl teamed with their actors to set off a double detonation of their own: the interrogation-room outburst of FBI investigator Robert Chesney, played by Bill Camp; and the furious freakout over being kept out of the loop on the airstrikes, potentially lethally, by his boss John O’Neill, played by Jeff Daniels. The first of these hit its target. The second was a dud. The difference between them says a lot about what these two actors, each likeable in his own way, have to offer.

Camp’s Chesney draws first blood. Acting on a tip from a local, Chesney and his team arrest the would-be suicide bomber who tossed a grenade and fled, rather than die in the blast at the embassy as was his mission. In what amounts to a sort of international remake of similar scenes Camp played in 2016’s buzzed-about but better-forgotten crime drama The Night Of, Chesney questions the suspect with all the skills that got him labeled “a subtle beast” in that earlier show — asking him seemingly meaningless detail questions to trip him up, establishing empathy and rapport by talking about their similar military backgrounds, making quietly confusing power plays by ostentatiously writing down certain answers and letting others slide, bringing up questions of guilt and innocence and God to draw out the man’s ideologically intense side in a non-judgmental way (by outward appearances, anyway). Chesney even handles the holes in the guy’s cover story with seeming sympathy,  gently labeling them “rookie mistakes” in what was otherwise a very effective performance.

So when the lawman finally explodes — and man, does he ever — it’s sudden and shocking, yet it feels like that fury was fueling his every word until now. His face reddens, he shouts so loud you can hear the words catch in his throat, and his amiably disheveled affect now makes him look somehow monstrous. “WRITE IT DOWN!” he yells, before the suspect even knows what “it” is. When Chesney tells him he wants the phone number the man called after the bombing, the guy gives it up without question. The sheer labor Camp put into this scene to sell its believability is every bit as impressive as his character’s interrogation techniques.

When Daniels’s O’Neill has his own moment to let loose…well, “loose” is the operative word, I suppose. He’s no less worried about his colleagues abroad, whose lives he feels have been risked unnecessarily by the airstrikes since he’s not permitted to warn them about possible backlash in advance, than Chesney was grieved and outraged by the loss of all those lives at the embassy in Nairobi. But his flailing body language and 0-to-100 emotional acceleration renders his rage goofy rather than heartfelt of frightening.

It’s not entirely Daniels’s fault. Throughout the episode, he’s required to have conversation after conversation in which he and his interlocutors spell out the strategic and ideological debates of the coming War on Terror like they’d just hopped in Doc Brown’s DeLorean and purloined a copy of the New York Times from 2003. One moment he’s getting yelled at by Scotland Yard’s Barry James about his desire to bend the rules to get the result he wants (“That’s how the system falls apart!”). The next he’s warning his boss Richard Clarke (a perpetually sardonically amused Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays the part as if his Arnold Rothstein from Boardwalk Empire settled down and went legit and all his old friends ditched him because he got boring) that attacking bin Laden and al-Qaeda militarily is walking right into their trap and will land them “a ton of new recruits.”

When Clarke boasts “The American military is the American military. This is not a war al-Qaeda can win,” it’s like that cornball line in Mad Men‘s otherwise excellent pilot about how there’s no such thing as a magic machine that makes copies. Joke’s on you, person from the past! Now, to be fair, it was Clarke’s job to accurately predict the consequences of American actions, and his failure to do so is a bit different than Don Draper’s lack of foresight regarding Xerox. But dramatically speaking, you’ve gotta couch this kind of retrospectively obvious screw-up with writing that sells the conclusion as less than foregone, or it’ll land with the thud it does here.

Point being, I don’t blame Daniels for failing to deliver the dynamite that Camp cooks up in his similar scene, not entirely anyway. But it’s certainly true that Daniels is a far broader performer than Camp, even when the latter is screaming at the top of his lungs. His recent career has seen him repeatedly cast as ostensibly convincing figures of authority, be they good (his blustery Real News anchorman from Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, whose name I can’t remember but whom I now always think of as “Jeff Newsroom” thanks to a vocal anti-Sorkin contingent on Twitter) or evil (his extravagantly bearded one-armed mass murderer in Netflix’s Western series Godless, which feels like the part of a Broadway show’s run where a new actor takes over for the lead who originated the role, in this case most likely Jeff Bridges).

Yet these authority figures never actually convince. Again, the writing is often to blame, but either way it’s impossible to imagine a ham like his Newsroom character saving the moral heart of the journalism industry, or his pretentious, bible-quoting gunman becoming the most feared figure in the West in a show where Michelle Dockery and Merritt Wever both displayed more, ahem, true grit. His O’Neill commands respect insofar as we know he was right and his enemies were wrong, but Daniels is just the guy whose job it is to inhabit that suit of rectitude. He doesn’t wear it particularly well. (His secondary characteristic — an irresistible ladies’ man whose ruddy middle-aged machismo is irresistible to half a dozen different women half his age — is an even worse fit.)

Still, there’s life in The Looming Tower beyond those two twinned characters. Some of it, like Alec Baldwin playing Alec Baldwin as CIA Director George Tenet, is probably best left to fend for itself. But there’s plenty of amusing, edgy work from the rest of the core cast. Stuhlbarg is magnetic even when playing the world’s least dynamic man. Peter Sarsgaard’s CIA composite character Martin Schmidt is emerging as one of the year’s villains to beat — a preening, petulant, professorial pogue who’s as hilariously, cattily impatient with anyone who dares question him as a mad scientist who really has no time for your concerns about the corpse he’s about to reanimate. He’s also a sociopathic zealot who says, on the record, that he doesn’t care about non-American lives at all; the episode’s title, “Mistakes Were Made,” paraphrases his attitude toward “accidentally” killing innocent civilians for no reason.

Wrenn Schmidt plays Schmidt’s colleague and confidant Diane Marsh as the Ursa to his Zod. She suggestively pops edamame into her mouth while they glibly discuss the importance of killing as many people as possible as quickly as possible, as if their willingness to do so makes them superior to the rest of the human race. O’Neill’s lantern-jawed lieutenant Vince Stuart, played by Louis Cancelmi, has arguably the episode’s most interesting story arc: Per his boss’s request, he pulls out of a romantic encounter in order to infiltrate the CIA’s Alec Station and steal Schmidt’s prized al Qaeda hard drive. The sex scene is unnecessarily explicit, which is what makes it funny; the confrontation with Schmidt features the spook’s most supervillainous speech yet.

And to get back to the two-for-two rule, there are two moments in Afghanistan that I’ll take with me from this episode. First, there’s this incongruously lovely shot of AQ’s Number Two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as he walks through the wilderness to get a clear signal so he can phone in a threat to a London newspaper.

The second is the painfully long period of time between the point at which the cute, soccer-playing kids at the al-Qaeda camp that al-Zawahiri and his boss bin Laden vacated earlier that evening notice two strange moving lights in the sky, and the moment those lights hit them and the screen cuts to white.

To its great credit, The Looming Tower forces you to linger with the knowledge that a dozen children are about to be murdered by the United States government. Then it shows you their corpses the morning after. Like talent, terror comes in many forms.

Watch The Looming Tower Episode 3 ("Mistakes Were Made") on Hulu