The Bridge 2.4: Marco Redeemed and Mr. Writ Large

Well, Marco didn't really have to be redeemed.   There was no way he would have ultimately sided with Fausto in the complex web in which he found himself.   Yes, he owes Fausto, but he owes more to his profession and even to the El Paso police who, while no angels, are truer to the profession than his own Capitan Robles in Juarez.  And so it was not surprising, but nonetheless satisfying, to see him commit to Prosector Pintado before the end of the 4th episode.

Meanwhile, Sonya continues her development as one of the most compellingly peculiar cops on television.   But what makes her so compelling and odd is not her police work, but her personal life as a woman whose sister was murdered.  She wants some sort of closure on this trauma, and understandably reacts when the killer dies.   But she continues to sleep with the killer's brother, which is certainly giving a lot to maintain contact with whatever is left of the killer, and apparently enjoys it, including the rough sex she initiates.  Asking the brother of the man who killed your sister to choke you during sex -- that's far more unsettlingly grey than fifty shades.

Speaking of grey, John Billingsley starred in just about every episode of Intelligence on CBS this year, including one called "The Grey Hat," before the series was unfortunately cancelled (I liked it, it was a good series).  He only made it to the 4th episode of The Bridge, in which he blows his brains out as Mr. DeLarge.  He has some upcoming appearances in the popular Masters of Sex, which I'll be watching carefully to see if Mr. Mortality Writ Large survives.

The continuing characters most involved in DeLarge's death, so far, are the pair of reporters - who, I've got to say, are my least favorite characters on the show.  It's not that I don't like reporters and stories about them - to the contrary - but these two barely add up.   With any luck, they'll be woven into the central action in a less idiosyncratic way.  Though, come to think of it, idiosyncrasy could be the middle name of this strange and appealing series.

See also The Bridge 2.1: What Motivates Sonya? ... The Bridge 2.2: First-Class Serial Killer ... The Bridge 2.3: Marco's Dilemma

And see also The Bridge Opens Brooding and Valent ... The Bridge 1.2: A Tale of Two Beds ... The Bridge 1.6: Revelations ... The Bridge 1.7: A Killer and a Reluctant Professor ... The Bridge 1.8: Some Dark Poetic Justice ... The Bridge 1.9: Trade-Off ... The Bridge 1.10: Charlotte's Evolution ... The Bridge 1.11: Put to the Test ... The Bridge Season 1 Finale: Marco Joins Mackey and Agnew

 
another kind of crime story

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Intelligence Season 1 Finale: The Stars and the Chips

An excellent Intelligence Season 1 finale tonight, which tied up some loose ends, and brought out at least one new one to dangle before our eyes and beckon to a second season.

You can analyze this episode by a look at the stars.

Tomas Arana, who played the bad guy in the 1992 movie The Bodyguard - who portrayed the assassin who masquerades as a bodyguard - reprises much of that role in Intelligence.  He plays an intelligence chief who in fact is one of main bad guys - Iranian super spies deep undercover, out to kill a governor on her way to likely being elected President, and anyone who gets in the way.

Lance Reddick plays another intelligence chief who turns out not to be such a bad guy, after all.  But his character doesn't have much luck, and suffers the same fate as his character over on NBC's The Blacklist, also on Monday night.  The character dies.   Reddick played two memorable, long lasting characters on The Wire and Fringe, but his characters haven't had much longevity since.

And Peter Coyote, an outstanding character actor for decades, and Lillian's father on Intelligence, turns out in a nice twist to be the bad guy who hired Mei Chen.  We'll need a second season to find out why.

Gabriel's mother, played by Debra Mooney, makes her first appearance in the series, and is an important new character who lends humanity to Gabriel.  Not that he needs it - as Riley and everyone who knows him sees - he's a human being enhanced not degraded by his chip.  And that's really the thesis and essence of this story, and what makes the series so good.  It has a balance of tech and human, of digital and flesh-and-blood, which is right where it should be, and where I think it will indeed be in our real future.

My one criticism is the continued refusal to mix pleasure (aka sex) and business by Gabriel and Riley. But that can be easily remedied, and is one of the many reasons I hope Intelligence gets the future on CBS it deserves.

See also Intelligence Debuts ... Intelligence 1.2: Lightning Changes ...Intelligence 1.3: Edward Snowden and 24 ... Intelligence 1.4: Social Media Weaponry ... Intelligence 1.5: The Watch ... Intelligence 1.6: Helix meets Rectify and Justified ... Intelligence 1.7: Nanites ...Intelligence 1.8: Heart of Darkness, Cyberstyle ... Intelligence 1.9:  EMP Amnesia and Children ... Intelligence 1.10: Lillian's Daughter ...Intelligence 1.11: American Chernobyl Countermeasures ... Intelligence 1.12: Cyber Adam and Eve

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Like stories about near-future high-tech counter-espionage?  Check out The Pixel Eye

Intelligence 1.12: Cyber Adam and Eve

Intelligence checked in with its best episode of the season last night, with the first a two-part finale, of what I hope will be the season not the series.

The set-up puts everyone on the show in crisis:  Mei Chen has killed three high-level agency people, and made it look like Gabriel did it, under some enemy's nefarious control.  This sets Gabriel and Riley - who of course implicitly believes in Gabriel - on the run, and gets Lillian removed from command, too.   The Cassidys are expected to keep working for Cyber Command, but soon lend their acumen to helping Gabriel and Riley find out what really happened with the murders.  This leaves Lance Reddick's Tetazoo in charge of a mostly ruthless Cyber crew - hey, it was good to see Reddick back on the screen after his character was killed last week on The Blacklist - but in a good final twist, it seems he may not be that bad, or at least not the worst, after all.   If we can believe Mei Chen, she was working for someone else in our government when she did the killings and framed Gabriel.

There's lots of good material here, not just for the finale but a second season.   Gabriel gets the cyber drop on Mei by pretending he's enjoying her overtures and appeals that they both comprise a new kind of humanity who are above the rest of us, whatever the side, U.S., Chinese, or otherwise.   But as the audience at least can see, this perhaps was not a complete pretense on Gabriel's part.   He likely not only finds Mei physically attractive, but agrees to some extent with her view that the two of them share something very special and different.   The question for the future would be, to what extent?

Meanwhile, it was good to see Lillian take her most independent stance in the series so far.  Cyber Command and Gabriel and Mei indeed represent something never seen before in intelligence gathering and espionage, and binding such an operation to old-fashioned government structures and lines of command will never be able to make the best use of it, and indeed may hobble the operation.

Intelligence has rolled out a provocative start to an original and important narrative, and I'm looking forward to more both next week and next season.

See also Intelligence Debuts ... Intelligence 1.2: Lightning Changes ...Intelligence 1.3: Edward Snowden and 24 ... Intelligence 1.4: Social Media Weaponry ... Intelligence 1.5: The Watch ... Intelligence 1.6: Helix meets Rectify and Justified ... Intelligence 1.7: Nanites ...Intelligence 1.8: Heart of Darkness, Cyberstyle ... Intelligence 1.9:  EMP Amnesia and Children ... Intelligence 1.10: Lillian's Daughter ... Intelligence 1.11: American Chernobyl Countermeasures

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Like stories about near-future high-tech counter-espionage?  Check out The Pixel Eye

Intelligence 1.11: American Chernobyl Countermeasures

One of the things that sets Intelligence above most of the other espionage thrillers with a futuristic bent on television is that Intelligence comes up with thoughtful, scientifically plausible solutions to the high-tech perils it throws at its heroes and viewers.

In Intelligence 1.11 on Monday, the peril soon turns out to be a worm designed to invade and cause a meltdown in a nuclear power plant.   The combined thinking of Gabriel, Riley, both Cassidys, and the young genius hacker who created the worm (which was misappropriated by the bad guys) is all brought to bear in a sequence of moves designed to stop the worm before it triggers an American Chernobyl.  Each move makes logical sense, but is stymied as the facts in one way or another change on the ground.  This puzzle is actually far more difficult to crack than any natural scientific mystery, where the facts usually stay the same.

In the end, the remedy to this impending disaster in motion is to distract the worm with a virtual construction that "looks" like the digital architecture of the system that controls the nuclear plant, and is is an even more attractive target than the plant.   Riley comes up with the idea for this flare-like countermeasure - a basic part in our reality of aircraft defense against surface-to-air and air-to-air attacking missiles - and it's quickly constructed by Gabriel with the help of the team.

Would that we could have such a team on the case in the missing MH 370 flight, or in place to combat the cyber attacks that no doubt daily confront us - though, for all we know, we do, and their work and the catastrophes they prevent are kept as secret as the accomplishments of the Cyber Command on Intelligence.   All of which makes this series especially enjoyable to see.

See also Intelligence Debuts ... Intelligence 1.2: Lightning Changes ...Intelligence 1.3: Edward Snowden and 24 ... Intelligence 1.4: Social Media Weaponry ... Intelligence 1.5: The Watch ... Intelligence 1.6: Helix meets Rectify and Justified ... Intelligence 1.7: Nanites ...Intelligence 1.8: Heart of Darkness, Cyberstyle ... Intelligence 1.9:  EMP Amnesia and Children ... Intelligence 1.10: Lillian's Daughter

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Like stories about near-future high-tech counter-espionage?  Check out The Pixel Eye

Intelligence 1.10: Lillian's Daughter

A good Intelligence 1.10 this past Monday, with personally motivated terrorism in San Francisco, and Gabriel, Riley, and Lillian heading out there to stop it.  Once again, digital sophistication is not enough to stop an attack - boots on the ground, worn by people with talented as well as cyber-assisted heads on their shoulders, are needed.   As I pointed out at length in my 2003 book, Realspace: The Fate of Physical Presence in the Digital Age, the palpable reality of flesh and blood in the physical world will be an ever necessary accompaniment - sometimes enjoyable, sometimes not - as we increasingly live important parts our lives on the Internet.

But the best part of Intelligence 1.10 was learning more about Lillian and her life, which becomes a center-stage issue because her daughter is living in San Francisco.   Lillian's relationship with her daughter is not the greatest - interesting, because Marg Helgenberger's Catherine Willows also had a difficult relationship with her daughter on CSI.   This is more than coincidence.  It has to be especially difficult for any mother in law-enforcement to have a good relationship with her children, with the life-and-death demands of the job taking precedence over family.   Maybe in Andy Griffith's Mayberry, but not in our real world.

J. J. in Criminal Minds is constantly torn between her family and her work, but Lillian has it even worse on Intelligence, because she doesn't live with her daughter, and indeed they live on opposite sides of the country.  It's easy enough, to get back to the digital world versus the real world, to keep in touch with a child or a loved one via Skype and any number of Internet ways.   But last time I checked, you can't give a reassuring hug through digital means - even three-dimensional holography wouldn't do the trick - and that possibility of a hug makes all the difference.

See also Intelligence Debuts ... Intelligence 1.2: Lightning Changes ...Intelligence 1.3: Edward Snowden and 24 ... Intelligence 1.4: Social Media Weaponry ... Intelligence 1.5: The Watch ... Intelligence 1.6: Helix meets Rectify and Justified ... Intelligence 1.7: Nanites ...Intelligence 1.8: Heart of Darkness, Cyberstyle ... Intelligence 1.9:  EMP Amnesia and Children

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Like science fiction about chips in the brain?  Check out The Pixel Eye

Intelligence 1.9: EMP Amnesia and Children

A good Intelligence 1.9 last night, in which an EMP - electromagnetic pulse - knocks cybercommand offline and robs Gabriel of his memory.   Given Gabriel's Delta Force abilities, and Jin Cong's capacity to point Gabriel's chip in the wrong direction, i.e., make him believe his colleagues including Riley are the bad guys, we have an enjoyably tense and dangerous situation.

Riley saves the day, with the realization that she can reach Gabriel by appealing to his heart - what he really feels when he looks at her - rather than his intellect, and this provides a good lesson about the most important things in life.  It also shows why we're still such a long way from developing the kind of emotionally sensitive android we see, for example, with Dorian in Almost Human.  Our most sophisticated AIs today can only mimic emotion - much like a parrot speaks words - and lack what Riley was able to call forth in Gabriel.

But speaking of emotions, I wasn't happy to see Riley's shocked and embarrassed reaction when Gabriel asks if he and she had been intimate, as he tries to understand the nature of their relationship that he's forgotten.  A better and more truthful answer would been a quiet no, with an additional divulgence that someday they might, though.

Meanwhile, we also get an important ethical treatment of the Athens List - the list of children with the gene that allows successful embedding of the Gabriel chip - which is the ultimate target of Jin's attack. Is using children, even for the worthy goal of maintaining world peace, a morally defensible strategy? Just about everyone, including Shenandoah who developed the list, thinks not, and it's left to Lillian to defend the need for such a list.   She does a surprisingly good job of that, and the fact that the question is ultimately not answered is much where it should be - sometimes there are no clear answers in questions of war and peace.

Intelligence continues as one of the most thoughtful, enjoyable new shows of the season.

See also Intelligence Debuts ... Intelligence 1.2: Lightning Changes ...Intelligence 1.3: Edward Snowden and 24 ... Intelligence 1.4: Social Media Weaponry ... Intelligence 1.5: The Watch ... Intelligence 1.6: Helix meets Rectify and Justified ... Intelligence 1.7: Nanites ... Intelligence 1.8: Heart of Darkness, Cyberstyle

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Like science fiction about chips in the brain?  Check out The Pixel Eye

Intelligence 1.8: Heart of Darkness, Cyberstyle

It was flashback time on Intelligence 1.8 on Monday, with a combination of the least amount of high-tech gadgetry we've seen on the show so far, and the most backstory for Gabriel.

This makes for a nice enough episode, but one which resembles the CBS mega-hit NCIS more then it does the science fiction on Person of Interest, Revolution, Almost Human, and Intelligence.   Still, the developing chemistry between Gabriel and Riley was good to see, as was Gabriel before he had the implant.

And the story of Norris - who partnered with Gabriel in the flashback, and is the crucial character in the present part of the narrative - has echoes of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Coppola's Apocalypse Now, which is to say, important and moving.   The toll of war on those who survive can make them something less than human - or less motivated by the empathy that most of us have - and Norris provides a powerful contrast to Gabriel on this score.  Both survived.  Gabriel was embedded with a chip which connects him directly with the Internet.   Norris was not.   And who is the more human?   It's Gabriel, despite or maybe because of his techno assist.

This also makes a point which is consistent with my view of technology, and the view of a small number of other academics and theorists.  The Nobel laureate biologist Sir Peter Medawar once said that technologies are what make us human.   You can see evidence of this every day.  When someone puts on a pair of glasses, is she or her less human?  No, they are more human, because by seeing better, they can navigate their world better and more effectively accomplish their human goals.    When someone puts on on Google Glass, are they less human?  No, I would say they are more human, for the same reasons that corrective glasses better enable out humanity.

Gabriel and what he represents are not that big a step beyond Google Glass in its enablement of humanity.  That's one of things that makes this series so good.

See also Intelligence Debuts ... Intelligence 1.2: Lightning Changes ...Intelligence 1.3: Edward Snowden and 24 ... Intelligence 1.4: Social Media Weaponry ... Intelligence 1.5: The Watch ... Intelligence 1.6: Helix meets Rectify and Justified ... Intelligence 1.7: Nanites

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Almost Human 1.12: If Guy de Maupassant Had Been a Science Fiction Writer

A really fine Almost Human 1.12 tonight, with touches of O'Henry and The Twilight Zone, all wrapped up in nanobot plastic surgery for love story.   Nanites are making their rounds in science fiction television this season, appearing in Intelligence as a separate episode last week, and as one of the foundations of this whole season of Revolution.

But Almost Human brings them to bear in a love story worthy of Guy de Maupassant and the classic short fiction mentioned above.  In de Maupassant's "La Parure" ("The Necklace") published back in 1884, for example, a young woman borrows her friend's pearl necklace, accidentally loses it, borrows a huge amount of money to buy a replacement, and works like a dog for years to earn the money back. At the end of the story, she learns that the original necklace she borrowed was made of paste, and not worth much at all.  Or, in The Twilight Zone's "Eye of the Beholder" (1960), a woman undergoes repeated plastic surgeries to improve her appearance.   We see the doctors only from behind, and the woman's face only in bandages.  At the end of the story, the doctors inform her that the surgery has failed.  The camera finally shows us her face - she's beautiful - and pans around to show the faces of the doctors and nurses, which are grotesque in this alternate or alien world.

In tonight's Almost Human, the villain kills beautiful people to improve his appearance - he injects nanites into the victims to harvest the desired facial characteristics, but the injections leave the victims with fatal heart attacks.   He does this because he's in love with a beautiful woman - they have fallen in love online and have never met in person - and he doesn't want her to be disappointed with his looks, which were ruined in an earlier experiment.   He finally meets the woman near the end of story, only to learn that she is blind, can't see what he looks like, and loves him for who is - that is, the person she got to know online.   So, all of his killing was for naught.

All of this yearning for love ties in with Kennex and his loneliness.  And in a very nice final touch, he asks Stahl to go to a bar with him, just as her date - a Chrome - shows up to take her to that very bar.

Almost Human has shown itself to be completely human in the richness of the stories it has given us, a rarity in science fiction television, more rare than nanites.   The season finale is next week, and I hope Fox gives it at least another year.

See also: Almost Human debuts: A Review ... Almost Human 1.2: Sexbots ... Almost Human 1.3: Change of Face ... Almost Human 1.4: Almost Breaking Bad ... Almost Human 1.5: Clones and Holograms ...Almost Human 1.6: The Blackmarket Heart and Double Dorian ... Almost Human 1.7: Meets Criminal Minds ... Almost Human 1.8: Guided Bullets ... Almost Human 1.9: Literally Bad Robot ... Almost Human 1.10: Killer Genes ... Almost Human: 1.11: The Metaphysics of Flesh

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Intelligence 1.7: Nanites

Nanites made their way on to Intelligence 1.7 last night, in the high-tech bio-tech science fictional manner which the series does so well.  Nanites have played a quasi-metaphysical role on Revolution this season, and will be the subject of a How to Survive the End of the World episode on the National Geographic series this season (the "Monster Storm" episode airs this Wednesday - all episodes feature brief appearances by me as an "expert" in an undisclosed underground location).

The plot features a latter-day uni-bomber who fields nanites that invade and quickly kill the body.   His targets are his competition, and eventually the elder Dr. Cassidy is "mechanically infected".  The nanite bomber turns out to be one of Cassidy's "favorite" students, but not the brightest, and his quest for fame and power got the better of him.  Cassidy survives a close call, but I wouldn't go to him for a letter of reference if someone was applying for a job at Fordham University, where I teach.

The personal chemistry between Gabriel and Riley is still percolating, which is good and I hope continues and develops into more.  Riley's defense of Gabriel as human, because he makes choices rather than responds to commands, is not only gratifying to Gabriel but makes an important point that goes beyond a man embedded with a telecommunicating chip.  To the extent that we just respond to stimuli or orders or anything without deliberation in our work, we are behaving more like robots than human beings.

Intelligence has struck a winning balance between high-tech and human life, in a way I find more satisfying and real than, say, Person of Interest, which also explores this intersection.  I'm looking forward to more.

See also Intelligence Debuts ... Intelligence 1.2: Lightning Changes ...Intelligence 1.3: Edward Snowden and 24 ... Intelligence 1.4: Social Media Weaponry ... Intelligence 1.5: The Watch ... Intelligence 1.6: Helix meets Rectify and Justified

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Like biological science fiction? Try The Silk Code

Intelligence 1.6: Helix meets Rectify and Justified

Intelligence 1.6 zoomed into Helix territory last night, with a sharp story that had Gabriel, Riley, and Cyber Command on what looks like a bio-terror virus-gone-wild case, but turns out to be our own military up to no good on behalf of what one general sees as a greater good for our country.

But the best part of the plot is the puzzle of the set-up in which Patient Zero turns out to be someone we just saw getting the death sentence in Texas, so how can he be the vector of an epidemic which started after he was dead?   Turns out our military spirited him away after injecting him with something not immediately lethal, to use him as a guinea pig for development of a vaccine for a possible terrorist attack via horrendous virus.

Some nice resonance in this twist on capital punishment to Rectify and last season's The Killing, and the contribution to viral fiction - writ large not only in Helix but of course The Walking Dead and even in National Geographic's Zombie Earth specu-docu-drama, where, believe it or not, I had a brief walk-on appearance as an "expert" - was good, too.

And speaking of welcome interconnections, it was great to see Nick Searcy as the wrong-minded General Carter, whose plan for the vaccine goes awry when the condemned prisoner escapes from the military lab, and becomes Patient Zero as he mixes into the crowd.  It's been a good week for Searcy, who put in one of his best performances on Justify last week, as Chief Deputy U. S. Marshal Mullen makes like the inimitable Givens in a diner.  (I'm glad I finally got a chance to mention Justified and Rectify in the same post.)

Back to Intelligence, we also find out more about how Gabriel came to be embedded with his chip, including that two previous candidates died and another wound up paralyzed in the process.  He did it in the hope it would help him find Amelia, we learn again, but with her gone now, he admits to Riley that he thinks all the time about whether it was all worth it.

Intelligence is shaping up as one of the best new shows on television this season.

See also Intelligence Debuts ... Intelligence 1.2: Lightning Changes ...Intelligence 1.3: Edward Snowden and 24 ... Intelligence 1.4: Social Media Weaponry ... Intelligence 1.5: The Watch

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Like biological science fiction? Try The Silk Code

Intelligence 1.5: The Watch

Another excellent Intelligence tonight - 1.5 - with another completely different kind of story.  This diversity of story style, an almost different genre every week, keeps viewers on their toes and is one of Intelligence's most appealing characteristics.

Tonight we get Gabriel and Riley out to rescue a Senator's daughter kidnapped by a Mexican drug king, in a story that could have been on NCIS-LA.   But Gabriel of course has all the fancy computer connections and graphics in his head, which makes for far faster response time than on NCIS-LA, and a minimum of trivial chit-chat in the control center.

We also get to meet Lillian's father, played by Peter Coyote, always good to see on the screen.  Lillian, who's proving to be a more interesting character than first I thought, has a difficult relationship with her father, as she would with any government bigwig who marches to his own "greater good" drums. Lillian's going against her father's orders in the end is one of the best moves she's made in the series to date.

But my favorite part of this episode concerned an old-fashioned analog watch - the kind with second, minute, and hour hands - and the way it helps Gabriel crack the last part of the case.   This is good writing and an example of something else that puts Intelligence a cut above the rest.   A lesser show about a chip in the brain and cyber-command would wield nothing but digital super tech on behalf of its stories.  But Gabriel has an almost MacGyver-like affinity for anything that does the job, anything he can press into service which happens to be at hand, however mundane.

One last thing: it's good to see the stirrings of attraction between Gabriel and Riley.  This can be trite if handled clumsily, but I have a feeling Intelligence will roll it out in the unexpected and satisfying way it's shown us everything else so far.

See also Intelligence Debuts ... Intelligence 1.2: Lightning Changes ...Intelligence 1.3: Edward Snowden and 24 ... Intelligence 1.4: Social Media Weaponry

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Intelligence 1.4: Social Media Weaponry

An excellent Intelligence 1.4 last night - good plot, good banter, good action. But what made it excellent were the cyber details, which, as they should be, are the heart of the series.

The one I like best was Gabriel's invocation of social media to get the Syrian prison guards to think there was an imminent attack.  Online chatter is indeed taken seriously by all intelligence agencies, and the use of it to fake out an enemy - in this case, to get a prisoner out in the open, where Gabriel could rescue her - was a savvy move.  And, for icing on the cake, it seems that Gabriel is talking to our people back in the U.S., and getting them to put out the disinformation, when in fact and as we know, Gabriel is putting out the misleading info directly himself.   I'll probably cite this episode in the next edition of my book, New New Media, in the chapter that deals with the future of social media and terrorism.

The other notable aspect of this episode happens at the very end.  The President, we're told, is concerned about Gabriel going off script, which human beings, cyber-embedded or not, are of course prone to do. But the result is apparently that Lillian will have less off a free hand in putting Gabriel and Riley in the field.  As I mentioned in my review of Intelligence 1.2, this series seems to be moving along with transformative episodes much more quickly than other series on television, which I take to be a good thing.

So far, the series has also had a very good mix of different stories in the episodes.  Last night's Syrian action was, along with last week's Snowden show, the most literally all-but-ripped from the current headlines, and shows like that are always a pleasure to see.  Former President Finnigan, a Bill Clinton-like character, was also good to see on hand.

-> Hey, I had the pleasure of meeting John Dixon at the American Library Association conference this past weekend, and got a copy of his novel, Phoenix Island, which was the inspiration for Intelligence.
Look for a review of that novel here soon.

See also Intelligence Debuts ... Intelligence 1.2: Lightning Changes ... Intelligence 1.3: Edward Snowden and 24

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Intelligence 1.3: Edward Snowden and 24

A good Intelligence 1.3 last night, in which the targeted character is a woman who wants to defect to the Chinese and give them a hard drive with all kinds of US intelligence secrets.   Sound familiar?  Well, the character is transparently based on Edward Snowden, who went to China and wound up in Russia with a boatload of all kind of confidential information.

The Snowden story is still in hot dispute.  Some consider him a traitor, and would lock him up if not bring him up on treason charges if the U.S. ever got its hands on him.  Others consider him a hero, seeing as how he revealed that our NSA is spying on us, in some part illegally, as it amasses "meta-data" collecting the numbers and times of every phone call we make, etc.  Given that Daniel Ellsberg is correctly regarded as a hero for his release of the Pentagon Papers, which showed the lies upon which our involvement in the Vietnam War was predicated, I tend to put Snowden on the positive side of the ledger.

Not so in Intelligence 1.3, in which his surrogate character - played by Annie Wersching, aka Renee Walker of 24 - is at best portrayed as a confused woman, and subject to all the criticism leveled against Snowden, such as why didn't he stay and face the music in the U.S. (as did Ellsberg), and the irony of defecting to a country that has such low respect for freedom of expression.   (See my Fraudulent Hunt for Snowden for my views on that.)  But it was great to see Wersching back on television - she's had brief stints in the new Dallas and Revolution - and makes me wish she'd be in the new 24 due on TV in May, which she can't unless 24 pulls another Tony.

But back to Intelligence - the game changer is the follow-though of an ominous flicker at the end of the first episode:  Mei Chen is at large, and her chip is a slightly improved over Gabriel's - since it's newer - which opens up a good plot facet.   In episode 1.3, the collective intelligence of our team, especially Gabriel's insight, is enough to get the better of Mei, but this will not necessarily be the case in the future.

Good continuing story, and I'm looking forward to more.

See also Intelligence Debuts ... Intelligence 1.2: Lightning Changes

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