‘The Old Man’ Episode 4 Recap: True Lies

“Keeping you alive and safe: That became my priority, Zoe,” says Dan Chase—excuse me, “Dan Chase.” He’s talking to the woman he spirited away from her own home, which had been invaded by a hitman, by secreting her in the trunk of his car. Zoe’s understandable reaction is to back away from him like a beat dog. He tells her to call her son and let him know she’s being held against her will, in a ploy to keep the Feds from considering her an accomplice. She tries to do so, but her son is screening her calls and won’t pick up.

The next thing we know, FBI Assistant Director Harold Harper is saying “Dan Chase is gone.” The phone calls we’d just seen happened three days ago. Time flies when you’re a rogue black-ops veteran on the run from the government, I guess.

It’s bold little maneuvers like this—sweeping three pivotal days aside in a breath—that make The Old Man such compelling viewing, even three full episodes removed from the pilot’s astonishing long-take fight scene. The show, and its characters, are full of surprises, and spring them on us at nearly every turn.

Take “Angela Adams,” as “Chase”’s daughter Emily is known to the world, and to her employer, the FBI. We learn that she’s gay in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. We learn that she once punched a supervisor in the face for condescending to her, and was saved from termination by Harper, who threatened to quit if she was fired. And we learn that despite the position she’s been put in, she refuses to leave it all behind and go on the run under an assumed name, even though that’s what her father urges her to do. She’s worked too hard and gotten too good at her job to just throw it all away, she says. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Then there’s the matter of warlord Faraz Hamzad and his quest for…what, exactly? Harper tells his imperious lawyer Nina Kruger (Rowena King) that the hunt for Chase is really about Hamzad’s first wife Belour, who ran off with the man Chase used to be decades earlier. The attorney is caught flat-footed at first, but returns later with a new demand: Harper must fly to meet Hamzad at a mysterious destination, or a letter will go out detailing Harper’s role in allowing Chase to escape in the first place. Angela, his right-hand woman, will travel with him; anything less would draw more suspicion to her, and as I said, she’s not about to give up her life if she can help it.

And in a brief aside, hitman Julian Carson—who’s a hospice worker by day, and who has at least one coworker involved in his life as a contract killer—lets Harper know he believes there’s a mole in Harper’s operation. The subsequent cut to a shot of Harper and Angela/Emily implies, though of course it can’t state it outright, that Harper suspects his protégée. I mean, if not her, then who?

Then there are the flashbacks to Afghanistan in the ’80s, where Dan Chase—then known as Johnny Coaler, or something to that effect—is helping Hamzad take the fight to the invading Soviets. Like a movie monster, he stalks and kills guards at a Soviet base, helping local forces kidnap a commander by the name of Sulyeman Pavlovich (Andrew Perez). In the present, we learn that Pavlovich survived his ordeal, because he’s now on board with a mining and metallurgy company that one of Chase’s super-rich alter egos wants to get involved with.

Weaving together the actual events of the past with Chase’s reflection on it in the present, the ghost of his wife Belour/Abbey warns him they’ll become monsters. When he says “I don’t have it in me,” she replies “If I ever loved you, that was why: I believed you believed that.”

“The world is full of monsters,” she continues in his mind. “Sooner or later, we all take our turn.” Perhaps this is why Emily/Angela’s memories of her mother see her as a hollow shell, someone who’d given up one life for a new one with which she was never satisfied.

But Belour/Abbey isn’t Chase’s only wife. There’s also “Marcia Dixon,” Zoe’s forced alter ego. Quickly sussing out the contours of Chase’s new secret identity, Zoe concocts a letter to the board of his company announcing her intention to divorce him, then blackmails him: Either he coughs up half of everything he owns and gives it to her right here and now to ensure her further cooperation, or he presents her with a reasonable enough amount of money to let her walk out on him. Either way, she says, “You will account for me.” This is a woman damaged enough by her divorce that she’ll never let herself be taken advantage of that way again, even if the man doing so is a trained killer.

And so, rather impressively, The Old Man has woven together a tapestry of lies and liars, blackmailers and the blackmailed, people forcing themselves into the lives of others and being forced to accommodate others’ demands. The fact that there’s no real political salience to any of it—both the USSR and the USA lost their imperial adventures in Afghanistan, and the contours of conflict between Russia, Afghanistan, and America now look totally different—only heightens the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy vibe of it all. These people run around chasing and killing and hating each other, and for what? To preside over the smoking ruins of two empires? To give their own lives, and their own lies, justification? Is such justification even possible? Do they know that it’s not?

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.