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S01.E02: Secrets & Lies

Tara Ariano

By Tara Ariano
in State Of Affairs [V]

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Roaster

Roaster

I didn't see the pilot but turned into tonight.  Question: is this show a self-parody?  Maybe they can push the ludicrousness of it all and go over the top, Sleepy Hollow style.  That might be a way forward.

 

I did like Woodord and Heigl discussing cold-hearted revenge in the cemetary.  Yeah! And the saxaphone solo after the eulogy.

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NewRadical

NewRadical

I caught bits and pieces of this show... I tried. I cannot get behind it. There is nothing light to it but it's also not at all intense. It's just boring.

And I had high hopes. I really liked Katherine Heigl on Greys until Ghost sex.

Anyone know the song at the end... something by Lana Del Rey?

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ottoDbusdriver

ottoDbusdriver

What bugged me the most was all the J. J. Abrams-like lens flares on the sub -- enough with this effect already.

 

The story of the week was just that -- weak.  Why exactly was the sub tethered to the surface ship that caused the accident ?

Was the whole purpose just to show that Charlie is both a cold-hearted bitch bent on revenge for the death of her fiancé, but also has a heart of gold and can cry ?

 

Thing is I don't see Charlie's dept. actually handling the day-to-day nonsense like this guy on the sub -- they're just in charge of prepping the PDB.

 

Do I have to drink every time Charlie says POTUS ?  If so, I will be as drunk as Charlie seems to be all the time.

 

The whole Fatah story is just nonsensical and boring.  If Charlie's relationship with Nick is so secretive and hush-hush, why was she meeting with him in her office ?

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Aethera

Aethera

Much continues to not make sense.  And I'm not pleased they introduced Nestor Carbonell as what looks to be a cardboard villain she has to go around all the time. That's not going to go any better than Ivanek on Madam Secretary.

 

Questions I have right now:

1. Why wasn't Courtney B. Vance at the memorial service last episode?

2. What if Anatoly hadn't managed to shoot his way through the entire sub? That was so overdramatic.

3. Did they really need to bring her dad into this?  Now I guess Sid must be Dad's old best friend.

4. Is any non-Charlie character going to get fleshed out at all?

5. She wanted to point a gun at Nick but now he's in her office?  DL fail.

6. Has the CIA had some kind of massive budget cut?  6 people do everything?

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Kromm

Kromm

(edited)

Why is the super-sarcastic reaction of that one guy they didn't expect to show up at the office the most realistic piece of this episode? (he was basically our voice, giving the same "I can't believe any of this shit" reaction we ourselves are)

Edited by Kromm
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DrLar

DrLar

One thing we could say about Nestor, as his character in Lost, he never ages! I also think he's going to be the semi-evil, semi-good character just as in Lost.

 

Sad ending for Anatoly, nobody will know except the team and POTUS what he did

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CooperTV

CooperTV

Why is the super-sarcastic reaction of that one guy they didn't expect to show up at the office the most realistic piece of this episode? (he was basically our voice, giving the same "I can't believe any of this shit" reaction we ourselves are)

I think that was a moment of meta but it was delivered from the most sleazy character so far, so meta fell flat!

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Kromm

Kromm

Sad ending for Anatoly, nobody will know except the team and POTUS what he did

I have trouble feeling sad though because the bubble of unbelievably around the whole show.  They're asking us to accept contrivances that other shows might earn a year or two in, but they want us to accept them an episode in.  Consequently Anatoly doesn't seem real to me.  I mean he's in the middle of a show where the almost daughter-in-law of the President is also her CIA briefer, who has Thanksgiving Dinners with her, while the President and her husband drop truth bombs and make suspiciously ironic and heavy-handed statements which make Charlston Chew, The Spy Briefer, even more uncomfortable.  Then no doubt she goes off to get drunk and hook up with a random guy, because that's what high level intelligence officers do.

 

And for pity's sake they couldn't even have Anatoly's last moments by himself in Russian.  Geez.  And wait.  Are we supposed to believe his daughter was somehow in America the whole time?  I didn't get that at the end at all--was that supposed to be her that Charleston Chew was watching before she deleted his recording?

Here's the important question. Has this show reached "Craptastic" status in record time?

 

Craptastic means that as bad as it is, we watch it to make fun of it, because it's so over the top.

 

Or is it simply crap without the "tastic"?

The true sign of how ridiculous this show is?  It's making the unbelievable Madame Secretary look almost realistic in comparison.

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CooperTV

CooperTV

Then no doubt she goes off to get drunk and hook up with a random guy, because that's what high level intelligence officers do.

 

One irrational act per episode is required. I think she was DUI this episode, so no random hook-ups for her this time.

 

And for pity's sake they couldn't even have Anatoly's last moments by himself in Russian.

 

Probably because his Russian was not that great.

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Netfoot

Netfoot

Best part of the show was trying to get my head around the idea that the whole Defense Department and the CIA, route  their "entire intelligence apparatus" through fibre optic cables in the Bering Strait.  Once I mentally swallowed that, it was easy to believe that a tug on a communications tether was able to disable and essentially sink (barring a fortuitously placed ledge) an entire submarine looking at least as big as a HK.  (It didn't look like no Piranha midget-sub to me, but even so!)  After that, the idea of the Russians threatening to fire on a US icebreaker in US territorial waters was no trouble at all.

 

Chartreuse looked good in the maroon dress (Izzie still fills out her scrubs well) but the drawn hair and pearls looked very severe, and the lipstick seemed a bit heavy for her complection.

 

Director Ray Navaro instantly proves himself a tool with his "you won't be working with me, you'll be working for me" remark.  The response should have been "No, I work for the President, and so do you."

 

"Hey, it's such a beautiful dog!"  Next, I was expecting "Where did you steal him?"

 

Why Anatoly's last words had to be withheld from his daughter, I simply can't fathom.  He didn't say a single compromising word.  I just can't think why the recording had to be deleted. 

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Dowel Jones

Dowel Jones

...the whole Defense Department and the CIA, route  their "entire intelligence apparatus" through fibre optic cables in the Bering Strait.

 

Maybe the CIA and DoD got a group rate from AT&T (or, from the original The President's Analyst,  the archenemy TPC).  And wouldn't the information be in the most secure code available?

If the Russian ship was in US territorial waters, we would have a shadow ship there, period.  Unless our intelligence apparatus is that incompetent.  Don't answer that.

All I can say is:  Less State.  More Affairs.

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ottoDbusdriver

ottoDbusdriver

(edited)
Maybe the CIA and DoD got a group rate from AT&T (or, from the original The President's Analyst,  the archenemy TPC).  And wouldn't the information be in the most secure code available?

 

Aside from the fact that it was a fiber cable to nowhere (kind of like the Bridge to Nowhere, maybe it was an earmark project by an Alaskan senator), those comms for CIA and DoD should be ridiculously encrypted -- splitting the fiber and copying all the data wouldn't get you much of anything if you couldn't decrypt it.  Wouldn't the national security apparatus have noticed some shenanigans on the fiber optic cable six months ago ?  Or at least noticed a foreign trawler hovering in the same area over a sensitive cable ?  Because when they finally paid attention, they had very clear intel on all the ships in that area of the globe.  And yeah, there would have been a shadow ship or sub during the first visit so they should have already known there was a Russian sub in US territorial waters (as it was explicitly spelled out at the start of the episode) and so no surprise that the Russians were back.  Don't they pay people to monitor this nonsense -- or was Charlie drinking during her shift to monitor Arctic waters (since she seems to be doing everything in the dept. at this point).

 

Turns out the CIA on this show must be taking the same classes in ineptness as the FBI have done on 'The Blacklist' and 'The Following'.

Edited by ottoDbusdriver
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Kromm

Kromm

Why Anatoly's last words had to be withheld from his daughter, I simply can't fathom.  He didn't say a single compromising word.  I just can't think why the recording had to be deleted.

This show is made of Pure Stupid. But this ONE part I actually get.

HAVING those actual words on tape to play for the daughter means admitting he was on that ship and admitting he was an intelligence asset. Neither of which the CIA could do.

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Netfoot

Netfoot

HAVING those actual words on tape to play for the daughter means admitting he was on that ship and admitting he was an intelligence asset. Neither of which the CIA could do.

 

The message didn't say anything about being on a ship, working for the CIA, or anything else that could be considered  incriminating.  They could have anonymously sent her a tape that would self-destruct 5 seconds after playing.  If they could do it for Mr Briggs in 1966, they could do it for her today! 

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saber5055

saber5055

(edited)

I've actually been trying to make sense of this episode and just can't. When the sub sank, all I could think of was the Kursk. Everyone on board was a dead man. So did Anatoly call Heigl ... why? To tell her he was going out-of-commission? So the sub had all that secret intell ... does it sink with the sub to never be recovered or was it transmitted already back to Russia? In either case, Anatoly committing suicide by gunfire was the same choice I would have made, much preferable to a slow death in a metal tube at the bottom of the ocean.

 

Other that that, I didn't understand anything that happened on this show. The heck ...

Edited by saber5055
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alias1

alias1

I really wanted to like this show.  I was so distracted by Katherine Heigl's very severe (and not flattering) hairstyle and her way too dark (and not flattering) red lipstick to pay that much attention to the plot.  I even thought Alfre Woodard's acting was terrible in that dinner scene.  Too bad.  I feel the show is going downhill fast.  They need to tone down her wardrobe, makeup, and drinking.  Well, getting some better scripts might help, too.

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CooperTV

CooperTV

(edited)

I've actually been trying to make sense of this episode and just can't. When the sub sank, all I could think of was the Kursk. Everyone on board was a dead man. So did Anatoly call Heigl ... why? To tell her he was going out-of-commission? So the sub had all that secret intell ... does it sink with the sub to never be recovered or was it transmitted already back to Russia? In either case, Anatoly committing suicide by gunfire was the same choice I would have made, much preferable to a slow death in a metal tube at the bottom of the ocean.

 

Other that that, I didn't understand anything that happened on this show. The heck ...

 

He called her because he had important intel about Russians digging the whole in that underwater cable and hacking six month of the CIA info on its agents and operations. And he wanted an extraction (they did had an icebreaker near the location the boat sunk but couldn't send it because the Russians was closing up on the site and was threatening to blow the icebreaker up). When CIA found out about the hacked intel, they started to jam all the signals from the boat so the Russians didn't get it.

Edited by CooperTV
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saber5055

saber5055

Thanks CooperTV. I sure missed the entire plot of this episode. And since I was sitting on the couch alone watching just this show and still didn't have a clue what was happening, that says pretty everything about how engrossing I find this show. I had a total mind-wander for the entire hour.

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Netfoot

Netfoot

That was another thing I found puzzling.  Do all submarines, at least the Russian ones, have a "Push this lever to sink the sub" apparatus on board?  It sure went down easily.

 

I think he fired a torpedo which detonated against the rock outcropping only yards from their hull.  If the blast itself didn't crack the already weakened hull, it pushed the sub off the ledge so it sank into deeper water, past crush-depth.  We saw the sub receding into the depths, and suddenly give way to a mass of rising air bubbles.  That was the hull imploding, I suppose.

 

Buy yes, a good point.  I don't think submarines can launch torpedoes as easily as that.  The tube has to be loaded and pressurized prior to firing.  The torpedo itself would have to be fused and armed prior to loading.  It wouldn't be kept in a ready-to-fire condition at all times.  Certainly no reason for that when the sub was on a clandestine deep-water mission far from any enemy activity, with every expectation of escape without encountering any sort of enemy.

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Netfoot

Netfoot

If you want bad, wait for Agent X, coming next year.  Only good thing about that will be when VPOTUS cat-flashes her political opponents each week.   State of Affairs isn't good, it is entertaining rubbish which is pretty much all you can say about the majority of television.   It won't ever be realistic or believable but -- especially if it's polished after the first few episodes as Madam Secretary appears to have been -- it might be worth a casual watch.  We'll see.

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