Covert Affairs
Walter's Walk
USA Tuesdays 10 p.m.
So I promised y'all that I'd get to the second episode of USA's newest original series, the spy-actioner Covert Affairs, and I always keep my promises* (*Note: not a promise). In any case, despite my general lack of interest in most of USA's fluffy fare, I found the pilot to be surprisingly enjoyable and intriguing, enough so that I decided to stick around and try a few more episodes. Let's just say that Walter's Walk was not quite the pleasant surprise I was hoping for.
TV is an interesting medium to analyze, partly because it's actually comparatively easy for shows to make changes and tweaks, or even completely reinvent themselves. It's hard for the makers of, say, a movie to make adjustments halfway through filming that dramatically change the tone or emphasis of the film. TV, however, provides ample opportunity to do just that - and perhaps the amplest of opportunities comes after a show's pilot, which is made far in advance of the rest of the episodes. It's apparent in watching Walter's Walk that the showrunners of Covert Affairs decided to seize the chance to make a few tweaks. The Domestic Protection Division (DPD) has a new office, a set change which is pretty unremarkable, but hey, it's there. The character of Conrad (Eric Lively) has been replaced with Jai (Sendhil Ramamurthy, or Mr. Mohinder "Annoying Voice-Over" Suresh from Heroes), and I can't say I was particularly attached to Conrad, so the switch is fine by me. But beyond the set and casting changes, it seemed to me like the showrunners removed something that's a bit more disconcerting: they took out the fun.
Oh, don't get me wrong, they certainly appear to be trying to make the show entertaining - there's still a healthy portion of hand-to-hand combat and explosions. However, whereas the pilot moved at an entertainingly fast clip that kept me glued to the screen and helped excuse some questionable writing, this episode seemed more as if the show was moving super-quick to try to prevent the viewer from realizing just how shallow and shaky the core of Covert Affairs is - this episode is basically tantamount to putting expensive spinner rims on a rusted out '98 Honda Accord and hoping no one notices what a crappy car you're driving. Maybe that's a tad harsh - this episode isn't awful, and it's definitely still watchable - but there are some issues here that really bothered me. First, the writers still are dishing out exposition in incredibly lazy and annoying ways. The pilot used a random polygraph test, and here we have a dream sequence* that essentially shows you most of what happened in the pilot, followed by a scene with Annie (Piper Perabo) going through security at the CIA and saying, off-camera, to the guards, "I'm Annie Walker. I work here." Thanks, writers, I'm sure there was no other way for us to get the name and occupation of the show's protagonist.
*Side-note: Does anyone actually dream like that? Just a series of images and random memories? Or is that just one of those painfully cliche TV devices that writers use when they're too lazy or not creative enough to come up with a way to relay information?
Walter's Walk also attempts to shoehorn in a theme for the episode, namely: How can Annie balance having a family and working for the CIA? I have no particular qualms with that theme - it's one that pretty much every show about spies deals with frequently - but it's presented here in one of the most ham-handed and brutally obvious ways I can imagine. The side-plot of this episode is that Annie's sister Danielle (Anne Dudek) wants Annie to sign a will and agree to take care of Danielle's children if something were to happen. Naturally, given Annie's career (which her sister doesn't know about), it's not a simple choice. It's a pretty easy dilemma to comprehend, and yet the show feels the need to cram it down the audience's throat by having everyone Annie interacts with essentially give her advice directly pertaining to her situation. Part of the problem is that the show is again moving so quickly that it's impossible for Annie to develop any type of rapport with the people she's talking to, but the script basically just skips that whole step - even with Annie's own sister. This is the second episode of the series, and the Danielle character didn't have a huge role in the first episode, so the fleetingly rapid scenes here of Danielle arguing with Annie here have no resonance - and the scenes are almost comically short and make Danielle come across as a giant bitch. The show similarly seems to think that having a few scenes and some pseudo-snappy dialogue with a British agent (who SPOILERS is actually the episode's villain, in a twist that I had been anticipating from the moment he appeared on screen END SPOILERS) is enough for him to have some kind of "connection" with Annie. Again, though, the episode simply moves too rapidly for this connection to develop naturally, so the writers are simply forced to write as if it were.
Other problems are much smaller, such as how the show doesn't really explain why the IRA would be going after targets in America (I know they say at the end that the intended target was a British bank in DC, but that has the distinct odor of contrived TV logic) or why it requires two trained operatives from the CIA and MI6 to search an empty apartment (if the doctors on House can manage, I'm assuming it might be a bit above Annie's pay-grade). I'm guessing Covert Affairs isn't really the type of show that bothers too much with those kinds of questions, and I don't really have a problem with that. What does concern me is that the light, fun, and even a little humorous tone of the pilot is largely absent in Walter's Walk, replaced by a clumsily-executed "serious" theme and even shoddier writing. Maybe it's just me, but I don't want a spy show where the attractive female protagonist spends each episode contemplating how her job relates to her life and the world in general (or at least I want that show to be written much better). I want Covert Affairs to be a fun, action-packed show filled with intrigue and excitement - something I think the show still has the potential to be, especially if they focus more on this Ben Mercer (Eion Bailey - yet another actor whom I couldn't place that turned out to be a Band of Brothers alum) storyline. So while this episode wasn't as terrible as this review probably makes it out to be, it seems to be steering the show towards a place where I won't have much interest in watching. Here's hoping Covert Affairs can make some more tweaks to bring back the fun.
Grade: C-
"Don't ask, don't tell your family you're on a mission in Columbia"
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