Summary
The teen drama can’t get out of the way of the plot in “Bad Romance”, leading to another frustrating episode.
Did you know that on every equinox, the late afternoon sun casts a shadow down the northern staircase of the Temple of Kukulcán at Chichen Itza that looks like the silhouette of the feathered serpent God creeping down to the underworld?
This is the kind of fascinating fact that shows like National Treasure: Edge of History throw around for fun — in fact, it’s only brought up by Billie’s so-called “expert”, Dario, so that she can prove his theory wrong. But it’s all part of the fun. For all its insufferable Gen Z posturing, bad puzzle design, and angsty teen drama, this is a story built on the foundations of genuinely interesting history and culture.
National Treasure: Edge of History Season 1 Episode 5 Recap
Billie, for what it’s worth, still thinks the mystery of Mesoamerica’s lost treasures is related to Malinche, so goes out of her way to acquire her missing, presumed-theoretical codex from a black market auctioneer in exchange for Caligula‘s missing mosaic (a real artifact that may or may not have ended up as a Manhattan coffee table.)
But you’ll recall that in National Treasure: Edge of History Season 1 Episode 4, Jess, with the help of a cameoing Riley Poole, had figured out that Elvis’s riddle instead referred to Sacagawea, the woman who helped the Lewis and Clark Expedition. She needs to head to the governor’s mansion in Louisiana with Liam, who might be a traitor, to look through Meriwether Lewis’s journal dedicated to his Newfoundland dog, Seaman.
Because Liam might be a traitor — Tasha is adamant he is, and Ethan predictably agrees, but Jess remains unconvinced — Jess goes to the governor’s mansion with Ethan. When they get there, though, Liam is already there, asking about the journal, which apparently isn’t kept on display full-time but will be wheeled out for the next day’s $500-a-head fundraising ball for the governor’s re-election campaign.
It’s obviously designed to price out the plebs, but Liam can afford it, mysteriously. Luckily Tasha phishes him and discovers that someone deposited $50,000 into his account all of a sudden.
Jess can’t keep this information to herself, so confronts Liam about it at work, and he’s offended. Almost immediately afterward, Jess and Tasha discover — in an incredibly contrived sequence, one has to admit — that there isn’t a mole at all.
Instead, Billie was getting her information in a bug in the pair of Jordans that Oren acquired from Billie when he was briefly kidnapped, and he was wearing them when they revealed the Elvis clue to him. This explains why Billie is still focusing on Malinche when Jess and Liam have moved onto Sacagawea — she isn’t aware of the latest developments, which, if Liam was the mole, he would have told her about.
And she turns out to be wasting her time with Malinche anyway, since when she takes the codex — really one of Hernán Cortés‘s journals that she contributed a couple of pages to after secretly teaching herself to read and write — one of the professors in Mexico who Jess spoke to on the phone reveals it to be a fake.
This setback lasts roughly five minutes until Billie figures out a) that Jess is the daughter of famed and presumed-dead treasure hunter Rafael Rios — she sees the Daughters of the Plumed Serpent medallion she’s wearing in the background of Oren’s sneaker unboxing video — and b) that Jess and Liam are going to the governor’s mansion in Lousiana to look through Meriwether’s dog journal. She’s tipped off to this by her surveillance mentioning that they left Sadusky’s place in a tuxedo, and one Google search reveals the only black-tie event in the area.
I hate stuff like this. If Billie’s powers of deductive reasoning are so profound she could have just waited until the kids left the house in the first place and not bothered wasting the private jet fuel — and Caligula’s mosaic! — traveling to Mexico and back.
Oh, and Liam and Jess are fine now. She apologizes to him for her paranoia and blames it on being racially profiled as a kid, which is at least on-brand.
For reasons it’s probably best not to get into, all of the kids end up going to the Governor’s Ball. And for reasons that it’s also probably not worth going into — a dance number to Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” — Liam and Meena both end up sulking with Jess and Ethan.
Meena saw the way Ethan looked at Jess and points out, quite rightly, that he needs to figure out what he really wants before he commits to her, but Liam takes it way too far, steals Meriwether’s journal, and leaves Jess to take the blame for it.
While Tasha and Oren cause a distraction with some “youth activism”, Jess barely makes it outside, where the only option for evading the authorities is to jump in a car with Billie.
National Treasure: Edge of History Season 1 Episode 6 Recap
National Treasure: Edge of History Season 1 Episode 6 (Credit – Disney+)
Billie tries to put Jess at ease by taking her out for a swanky dinner, outfitting her in a nice cocktail dress, and ordering her go-to Mojito Mocktail, obviously not realizing that knowing everything about someone she has never really met isn’t charming but actually deeply weird.
Jess is switched on enough to worry that the medallion might be a fake, but she’s somehow convinced by a photograph of Rafael and someone who Billie claims is her brother, Sebastian, but she isn’t actually in the photograph so I don’t know how that proves anything. Nevertheless, it ties in a throwaway line from a previous episode about Billie’s brother having died in the quest for the treasure — she says he was, like Rafael, killed by Salazar.
She also says that Liam has been working against Jess for financial gain for quite some time, and in fact, he ran off with Lewis Meriwether’s dog journal because Billie paid him to. That means Billie has the journal aboard her luxury treasure-hunting boat, so she takes Jess to decipher the next clue, which she does instantly with the help of her Sherlock Holmes mind’s-eye magic vision.
Kacey and Dario are super friendly and welcoming to Jess in a way that doesn’t ring true at all, and Billie “reveals” that she’s in possession of the jade box because Liam sold it to her, falsely claiming to Jess that it went missing when his father died. It’s all too obvious!
Oh, and the next box seems to be in the well at the Alamo — right under the noses of the Spanish who used the indigenous people to help build it — and will be easily discoverable, despite the Alamo being a tourist trap now, thanks to the lodestone magnets in the other two boxes. Convenient!
Anyway, Billie sends Jess back home, where she deliberately starts an argument with Tasha about using the “distraction” at the Governor’s Mansion to push her political agenda. Tash storms out and goes to Oren’s place where, and I swear I’m not making this up, they watch Captain America: The Winter Soldier and explain how the relationship between Cap and Bucky relates to their situation in one of the most shameless bits of Disney cross-promotion I’ve seen in quite some time.
The power of Marvel is so strong that they end up spending the night together, but at least we get a fun morning dance from Oren out of the whole affair.
This also leads Ethan to check on Jess, and I must confess to being less than interested in any of these teen-drama shenanigans, especially any involving Ethan. He advises Jess to confront Liam personally, so she goes to his grandfather’s house where she finds the clue room trashed and half of the actual clues missing and is grabbed from behind by the scruffy guy who, until this point, we’ve assumed was Billie’s spy. Kacey arrives right in time to interrupt the guy, who jumps out of the window.
The implication here is that if Liam was Billie’s spy all along, then this guy was working for someone else and the editing deliberately misled us. Kacey says he works for Salazar, and that she happened to be at Sadusky’s place because Billie told her to watch Jess’s back, but this all seems much too convenient for my liking.
The coincidences don’t stop there. Ethan goes to the hospital to tell Meena that he really is still in love with Jess and was just lying to himself about it — she takes it really well — and on his way out spots an orderly wheeling around a bunch of clothes that have been taken from patients. Among them is Liam’s tuxedo, covered in blood. Liam is on a ventilator, badly beaten and bruised. See? Told you Billie’s story didn’t add up.
And it’s kind of laughably obvious — she keeps a replica of Hernán Cortés’s sword on her private plane as, she claims, “a reminder” of all the atrocities he committed against the Daughters of the Plumed Serpent.
Luckily Jess has this figured out and you can tell she’s testing Billie’s “friendship” with her mother by baiting her, but the show assumes we haven’t realized this so it can be a surprise later, which is pretty naive. Liam’s story to Ethan is also treated as a twist, when he reveals that he saw Billie show up at the mansion and tried to leg it with the diary before she could see it, only to get battered by Kacey outside. But that’s a pretty logical assumption too.
Again, though, Jess had this figured out anyway. We saw earlier that she left Tasha a note, so she and Oren are outside the Alamo when Jess locks Billie in the well (they’re using a re-enactment of the battle as cover.)
The box isn’t there, since it’s really at Viesca, formerly known as Alamo, Mexico, in a well there. She briefly explains to Tasha and Oren all the stuff we’ve already figured out — arguing with Tasha was intentional, none of Billie’s “proof” was compelling, her mom hated soccer — and plans their next steps.
The bad news is that the well had a bank built over it, and that bank was robbed, exposing the well. The guy who did it was caught and is still in prison in Mexico, but his name is Diego Salazar. Oh, and since Jess is undocumented, if she crosses into Mexico, she can’t come back.
Elsewhere we see Billie being arrested. The only genuinely quite surprising turn occurs when Kacey calls their real spy, who turns out to be Sadusky’s nurse, Myles. Kacey instructs him to deliver some clearly doctored “evidence” to Agent Ross at the FBI which implicates Jess in Sadusky’s murder.
What did you think of National Treasure: Edge of History Season 1 Episodes 5 and 6? Comment below.
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