Summary
The vibe has changed a little, but The Old Man remains exceptionally well-crafted television in this two-part premiere.
The brilliant first season of The Old Man was a slowly unfurling collection of secrets and mysteries, with occasional bursts of brutal violence. Not having all the answers is what kept you going. But since most of those answers were provided in the first seven episodes, Season 2 has to work differently, and its two-part premiere – Episode 1, “VIII”, and Episode 2, “IX”, this show not being one for fancy titles – lays out a characterful foundation for what is increasingly becoming a family drama first and an espionage action-thriller second.
This is not to say that Season 2 doesn’t have its share of mysteries, or that Season 1 wasn’t given a surprising degree of richness through its sense of character. But the vibe’s clearly different here, and the first two episodes show us we’re dealing with two separate halves of a connected story – Dan Chase and Harold Harper’s Taliban-evading double act on the one hand, and Emily’s homecoming on the other.
Chase and Harper Are In Afghanistan
Episode 1 of The Old Man Season 2 focuses exclusively on Chase and Harper, who sneak into Afghanistan in the back of a truck, still bristling with annoyance at each other and their mutual predicament. It’s three weeks after the Season 1 finale in which Emily was kidnapped by Faraz Hamzad. They both want their girl back, but they have a lot of dangerous terrain to navigate, and not only do they have different skill sets, but they can’t agree on which of them is most likely to benefit them.
Chase does the fighting, obviously, while Harper provides the logical thinking and, ideally, the contacts, though he pushes back against Chase’s suggestion to call “her” for help (more on this in a bit.) It’s pretty hard to describe this dynamic as anything other than a fish-out-of-water double-act, which I never thought I’d say when watching Season 1. But here we are.
Absent their dead driver Hameed, who was their contact with the local resistance movement, Chase and Harper make their way to the hideout on horseback and are greeted by understandably mistrustful Afghan fighters who hold them at gunpoint until they’re saved by a young man named Omar.
Omar explains to Chase how things have changed since he was last in-country. Resistance units are few and far between, and Hamzad has fallen out of favor with the locals after cozying up to the Taliban. Having evaded U.S. sanctions over the last three decades, Hamzad is the middleman between the government and the endlessly profitable lithium deposit that Abbey was worried about three decades prior. She cautioned that the power it represented would make a monster of him, and by Omar’s account, that seems to be exactly what happened.
Allies Become Enemies
Omar is compelled to help Chase and Harper by promises of U.S. support for his unit and the chance to annoy Hamzad, but he quickly reveals he’s not quite what he seems.
For one thing, he makes it very clear that he knows Chase from the legend of Hamzad’s embedded U.S. agent who would singlehandedly terrorize Russian garrisons back in the day. And when Harper finally decides to pluck up the courage to call his first wife, Marion, for intelligence, she tells him that the name of their contact is Ali, not Omar.
At the same time, Chase puts some pieces together and realizes that Omar isn’t who he says – he’s a Taliban double agent. Chase manages to fight him off until Harper arrives to make the save on horseback, and they flee to an old hideout of Abbey’s to regroup, where Chase reveals that he firmly believes Emily is dead and Harper should return safely to the U.S. rather than risk his life on a lost cause.
It’s the stress talking, clearly. But Chase is on a revenge mission in his head, which isn’t screwed on as tightly as it once was. As with Season 1, The Old Man continues to treat us to both flashbacks and horror-tinged surreal visions that Chase experiences when he finally gets his head down. And while Harper isn’t besieged by similar nightmares, he does have worries of his own, since his ex-wife has called his current wife, Cheryl, to tell her that she has been in contact with Harper.
Considering Harper hasn’t exactly been clear to his wife about where he is and what he’s doing, the sudden reappearance of an old flame isn’t going to do wonders for his private life.
Pictured: (l-r) Jeff Bridges as Dan Chase. CR: Bryan Cohen/FX.
Daddy Issues
Episode 2 of The Old Man Season 2 takes place simultaneously but from the perspective of Emily and Hamzad. Part of the reason why Season 1 was so much better than it had any reason or right to be was because of self-aware decisions like this, understanding that these two episodes work best as a double-bill instead of airing a week apart. I’m happy to report that the second season seems to understand the story it’s telling just as well as the first.
What’s key to understanding Emily’s arc in this season is accepting that she has repressed most of what she could recall about her early life. There’s no dispute that Dan Chase was a father to her as a child and that Harold Harper fulfilled a similar role in her adulthood, but it’s also clear that she was wrenched from a life that, with some coaxing, she can remember. One of the first things that happens when she wakes up in the custody of Khadija is she’s shown a movie that reiterates the fact this place was once her home, and Hamzad was once her father.
If you recall in the first season, it was the mere mention of Abbey’s birth name that caused Emily to abandon a façade she had sustained for years, revealing her true identity to Harper, and this is her motivating factor here, too. Alia Shawkat is given a lot of tortured interiority to display as she comes face to face with her biological father for the first time since childhood.
But Hamzad is a complicated figure too. He’s a man on borrowed time since his bribes to the Taliban can’t keep the wolves from the door forever and his kidnapping of Emily puts him in the position of technically having an American agent, his daughter or not, in his camp. But despite his initial intent to do so, Hamzad can’t kill his daughter, and after a brief scuffle, she can’t kill him either. They’re stuck.
As a result, Emily is ingratiated into the community at Khadija’s suggestion. She meets Faruza, her cousin, and Faruza’s son, Farouk, learning more about her mother and Hamzad’s relationship with the Taliban, which is more complicated than the power-hungry madman angle that Omar peddled to Chase and Harper.
Turning Point
Pictured: Jacqueline Antaramian as Khadija. CR: FX.
Towards the end things escalate rapidly between Hamzad and the Taliban after Chase and Harper’s confrontation with Omar. The two premiere episodes make a nice pairing again here as we see how the events in one influence the other, with a one-eyed Omar leaning harder on Hamzad at the urging of his Taliban bosses to get him under control.
This leads to Omar turning up in the village and forcibly conscripting all the boys into the Taliban. It’s clear that Season 2 is positioning Hamzad not necessarily as a sympathetic figure but as someone who – like Dan Chase, to be fair – is trying to do the best by the people he loves. While the Russians in Season 1’s flashbacks represented a kind of nebulous, unspecific invading force, the Taliban, clearly positioned as the season’s real bad guys, are a topical reminder of how totalitarianism still grips many parts of the world.
And, of course, there is a clear relationship between these regimes and Western powers. Khadija, who is the real brains of Hamzad’s operation, is in contact with an English-speaking string-puller who has allowed Hamzad to evade U.S. sanctions in exchange for assurances regarding the Taliban and the lithium deposit. The balance of power is beginning to tip.
The season premiere ends with The Old Man reusing some of its tricks; a vision that splices the past with the present day as Hamzad leads Emily into a mountain cave and imagines the younger version of her accompanying him, symbolizing how he pines for the childhood of his daughter that he was denied, and then a close-up of Shawkat’s face as she reacts to an as-yet unclear scene of violence inside that cave.
It might lack some of that initial mystery, but it’s clear that The Old Man hasn’t lost a step.
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