‘The Old Man’ Season 2 Episode 8 Recap: The Young Woman

Dan Chase’s first sign that something is wrong is that nothing is wrong. 

He lost his daughter Emily, yes. He’s out of touch with the only person in the world he can come close to calling a friend, Harold Harper, since contacting a high-ranking FBI official is probably unsafe no matter how careful he and Zoe might be. She, at least, has figured out a way to keep in touch with her semi-estranged son. Dan doesn’t seem nuts about the risk, but it’s a small price to pay for domestic tranquility. I’m not sure what names they’re living under anymore — Henry and Marcia Dixon seem well and truly blown — but they’re living together alright, and happily, dogs and all.

But again, there’s just one problem: There are no problems. There’s been no news of the rare earth minerals cartel — all the members of which looked the other way when Zoe and Carson showed up at their meeting place so that Carson could kill pesky Suleyman Pavlovich and avenge his “partner” (?) Morgan Bote — arising to shake the American economy to its foundations. There appears to have been no consequences at all from an American secret agent attached to the American embassy getting shot to death at a police station in broad daylight during Zoe’s escape from Pavlovich’s assassin. They may be off the grid and impossible to find, but they can still read newspapers, and there’s just nothing doing. Something is up.

Then, in a creepy little scene, that something makes its presence known. Dan (or Henry, or Johnny, all of which he’s called in this episode) nervously eyes a delivery van making its way down the dirt road outside the old Morgan Bote safehouse he and Zoe are holed up in together. Is it an assassin in disguise? No, it appears to be just a delivery guy. But what’s in the box he leaves in the middle of the road, and who knew where to send it? It’s not like they’re expecting a care package.

But inside is a phone and a number. And after Dan calls the number, this happens.

Friends, I flapped my arms like an excited goose when I saw Dan and Emily reunite. This despite the fact that I already knew she was alive — they revealed it at the end of last episode and spent the first third of this one explaining how she pulled it off by killing all her Pavlovich-hired captors, duh — and that their reunion was almost certainly inevitable. I’m just that invested by this point in how much these two characters love each other. 

And why wouldn’t I be? The whole point of the show is about how their love for one another persists despite all the madness and misery. It’s the only constant in either of their lives, through multiple identities and countries and continents and allegiances. You can question whether their love for each other is healthy, you can question whether professional killers feel love the way you and I do, but you can’t question that connection between them, flawed and befouled though it may be. 

The same is true of Harold for both of them, of course. Our man in Hong Kong winds up trapped there by his ex-wife Marion — seized as a bargaining chip for leverage against Emily Chase/Angela Adams/Parwana Hamzad. In this last identity she is now in firm control of the hotly contested Afghan mineral deposit everyone’s been scrambling for. Parwana is now one of the most powerful women in the (under)world, and Marion needs any weapon she can get to keep her in check. That’s meant taking Harold off the board for what could be weeks or months by this point.

Which is why Emily/Angela/Parwana shows up at her dad’s safe house. Turns out that when you’re Parwana Hamzad, there are few houses that can remain safe for long if you’re looking for them — not when you’ve got the American foreign and domestic intelligence agencies at your beck and call. This isn’t a tearful family reunion: This is a recruitment mission, and Dan and Zoe have just been volun-told to join the quest to rescue Harold by Dan’s warlord daughter.

There’s one additional catch, though. Parwana’s not there for Dan. She’s there for Lou Barlow, another Morgan Bote protégé who’s been mentioned on and off throughout the season. The strong implication is that he’s an even darker customer than Dan was when he was Johnny, the Monster of Afghanistan. You don’t have to be a top-level intelligence analyst to figure out that Dan was once Lou Barlow, too — or to see it’s one alter ego he’d rather never inhabit again. Unfortunately, Emily is not giving him that choice.

Quite beyond the plot, there’s some lovely material in writer-creator Jonathan E. Steinberg’s last Season 2 salvo. Parwana’s time in Russian captivity is handled with almost lyrical sensitivity, as she befriends a conflicted mercenary named Pavel, who fears his time in the field will render him emotionally unrecognizable to his wife and daughter.

“Will they take you back, the ones you compromise yourself for?” Pavel asks Parwana, when it looks as though she’s cooperating in order to spare the lives of the villagers. “What if you come back too different, too changed, too — ”

“Ugly?” Parwana finishes for him. “What if I was always this way, and it’s just that no one ever noticed? What if there is nothing I am not capable of to make the people I love safe?” Pavel takes this as a declaration of surrender, when it’s really a declaration of war.

Harold’s argument with Marion about the need for moral absolutes is revealing as well. Marion’s a low-down creep with no morals that aren’t contingent on her own immediate self-interest, but I double dog dare you to go through Harold Harper’s full CV and see which of the two of them is responsible for more heinous shit. But we’re not talking about politics now, not really — we’re talking about Harold’s sense of loyalty to those he cares most about, like Johnny and Angela. “The things we owe people we love should be constant, involable!” he proclaims. He’s an admitted absolutist, but he’s more of an absolutist about that than he is about the American way. (Politics on The Old Man are generally just the stage on which the human drama is performed; think about how all of this comes down to Johnny and Belour falling in love, or something close to it, and running away with a baby like a couple in a soap opera.)

Marion’s not hearing this from her ex. “You could have been a great man, Harold,” she says, “were you not so frightened of disappointing anyone.” From his moral absolutism to his driving need to demonstrate his love and commitment to his wife, his friend, and his adoptive daughter and thus earn their approval, Marion has identified in Harold a serious case of Good Boy Syndrome. Now, Marion’s definition of “great man” is probably different than yours or mine, but she’s absolutely right that the desperate desire to be seen as okay in the eyes of everyone is a recipe for mediocrity. That’s probably as hard a pill for him to swallow as getting swept away by her goons after their meeting. (“I’m sorry,” she says. “Yeah,” he replies, “I’ll bet.”)

And so we arrive at the end of another grimly poetic season of The Old Man. “The Americans, but the couple is Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow” is only half-jokingly the way I’d describe this show to people now. The action/suspense sequences are that tight. (Carson taking out Pavlovich’s whole retinue with the calm determination of a guy who has to get to the supermarket to pick up milk before it closes in eight minutes, for example.) The acting is that strong. (I didn’t hear a false note or clunky line reading from Bridges, John Lithgow, Alia Shawkat, or Amy Brenneman all season — not that I expected to, but Steinberg’s scripts often read like prose poetry, and that can be a hard sell. Not for this crew, though!) The human emotions are that raw. (Though rarely that sexual; this is perhaps the show’s main flaw, that we don’t see heat between Zoe and Dan, even though Bridges and Brenneman can smolder at each other with the best of them.)

And now, in Parwana Hamzad, we may have the show’s answer to Keri Russell’s ferocious Elizabeth Jennings. Shawkat’s Parwana is a trained operative and (certainly by now) experienced killer, but she grew up in a sort of psychological limbo, living a mix of lies and half-truths. Now she knows herself, and that knowledge has given her the terrible power to leverage the American government against her own dad in order to get what she wants. She’s feeling herself, in other words. On a show centered on men whose primary struggle is that they can feel it slipping away, what will unleashing this kind of crescendoing energy in human form do? I look forward to finding out.

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.