The billionaire did it! Well, that wasn’t such a chore, now was it? After over three weeks of dead ends, bad hunches, deliberate misdirection, and the torture of Left-Wing Ben Shapiro, George Mullen and his Zero Day Commission have finally cracked the case and bagged their first big players in the attack: Leon (Ryan Spahn), the programmer alleged to have souped up the NSA’s malware to make the attack possible…and his employer, Monica Kidder, the athleisure enthusiast billionaire who’s been trying to muscle her way into the Commission since nearly day one. Turns out corrupt billionaires really like having the ability to police their own crimes. Might be worth noting!
It all comes together in a fairly compelling way, for a show that has evinced little to no interest in portraying spycraft and forensic work with any sense of the technical, practical mastery required for the jobs. (Think The Americans, think Mike in Better Call Saul, think the message-on-the-toilet-paper sequence from Manhunter, think any scene from Sneakers.) And it’s all thanks to Roger, whose keen powers of observation and deduction led him to finding the attackers’ AM radio frequency — via his own billionaire patron, Bob Lyndon, who’s now in the wind — and writing down their communications. With the help of a small army of cryptographers assembled by Valerie, George cracks the code, poses as Lyndon, and sends Leon right into the waiting arms of law enforcement.
The Kidder operation does not go nearly as smoothly. For one thing, she’s got a small army of private security guards who simply refuse to obey the law and honor the search warrant George insisted his warrantless Commission get to raid her home. Just when it seems as though she might make an immunity deal with George and Valerie, an unknown party — neither from the Commission nor Kidder’s security force — triggers a lethal firefight. Kidder is arrested and evidence is uncovered, though there are fatalities and Carl is hospitalized. Virtually all of this is livestreamed by Kidder, by the way.
Not that it matters much when George announces his findings to the world. His tenure as head of the Commission was supposed to end earlier that day, with the ambitious Speaker Dreyer, his eyes on President Mitchell and his potential candidacy in the next big election, taking over. Now he’s cracked the case and busted a massive corruption scandal wide open, making him more or less untouchable. What’s more, there have been no further “Who Killed Bambi?” episodes, which is good news.
Mostly good news, anyway: The Proteus weapon that’s supposedly triggering these episodes has not been recovered from Kidder, so it’s still out there…if it even exists. And though he assumes he has the conspiracy licked, he hasn’t been able to track down the other voices on that long-range AM radio frequency — all of whom immediately stop talking to Kidder when they realize she’s going down.
But we lucky audience members know something George doesn’t: His own daughter, Alex, is part of the conspiracy. So is Speaker Dreyer, which makes their weird alliance — in the diligently de-politicized world of Zero Day, no one ever has an R or a D listed next to their name on TV, but she really does seem like a generic progressive and he like a generic conservative — make a bit more sense now.
Revelations abound, in fact. Alex believes that her brother Nick committed suicide, contra George’s view that he simply OD’d. George fathered a whole-ass child we haven’t met yet named Lily with Valerie, and they’ve kept this a secret from the kid her whole life, though Kidder threatens to expose it unless she’s given immunity. (The shootout renders that point moot.)
George’s biggest problems by the end are twofold. First, Kidder kills herself — excuse me, “kills herself” — in her jail cell, Jeffrey Epstein–style, before she can be questioned. Second, there are Alex’s frantic please to Dreyer to “call it off, call it off!” Call what off?
One note to end on: When George and his wife Sheila chat after the day’s events (earlier she’d been called to testify against him and defended him instead, and he’s grateful), they discuss Kidder.
“It’s amazing how powerful these tech types have become,” Sheila says.
“Yeah, well, I’d have imagined she’d bee too smart to take this kind of gamble,” George replies.
The idea here is that even the richest, most powerful people can bring about their own downfall when they fly too close to the sun. Fingers crossed.
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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