Summary
The Old Man Season 2 ends with a clunky cliffhanger setting up a third outing. I’m still excited by the prospect, but this finale was tame.
I can’t help but feel a little bit disappointed by the ending of The Old Man Season 2. It’s very popular, so I can’t say I was surprised by how blatantly it sets up a third season. But Episode 8, “XV”, is unsatisfying in a lot of ways, keeping the action contained to only a single sequence, sidelining one of the major characters, and suddenly reinventing another as a potential villain in a way that I’m not sure entirely takes.
There are plenty of highlights, though. Julian gets his obligatory badass action moment, and there are some telling extended dialogue sequences that all hint at a much bigger picture that we can assume Season 3 would unveil. I’m excited by the prospect of more, even if I must slightly lament how tame this finale feels in and of itself.
From A Certain Point of View
The opening scenes of the finale are all devoted to Emily/Angela/Parwana, whom we haven’t seen — aside from a brief glimpse at the end of the previous episode — since she said goodbye to her fathers in Episode 5. We actually begin with Parwana’s side of that very phone call, seeing how Pavlovich’s mercenaries burst into the room during it and shot dead Khadija, Faraz Hamzad’s only other surviving relative.
This leaves Parwana in a position of some inherited authority, so she volunteers the Russians information in exchange for the safety of the villagers. It’s all simple stuff — the location of weapons and suchlike — that buys her time, but when Parwana’s fairly friendly jailer, Pavel, starts asking for names, she knows she needs to take action. One bottle of liquor to the head later, Pavel wakes up to find the villagers freed and murderous, framed by the stormy night like ghouls. Pavel meets a swift end.
But I like this opening. It makes good on that throwaway comment about how many languages Parwana can speak that was made in a previous episode, and the exchanges between her and Pavel are pretty intriguing. He asks her if she fears that when she returns to her loved ones, she might be too changed, too far gone, too “ugly” to be recognized. It’s likely a thought that has already occurred to her.
Julian Gets His Moment
Like the Season 1 finale, the ending of The Old Man Season 2 lets Julian off the leash. He has barely been in this season, so it’s once again a pleasure to see him cleaving through swathes of bad guys, including, as it happens, Suleyman Pavlovich.
Julian is allowed to go postal on Pavlovich at a cartel delegation because Harper convinces Marion to turn on him. But it’s a purely selfish, practical decision. After getting word that the Meshbahar deposit had been liberated from Pavlovich’s control by a local force led by an American woman, Marion doesn’t need Harper to remind her that Parwana would be a much better business partner for Marion and the Chinese government that Pavlovich was.
The complicating factor is Zoe. She’s tagging along with Julian after he picked her up at the end of the previous episode, and she’s solely concerned with getting an antidote to Chase. Julian agrees to keep one of Pavlovich’s men alive to extract Chase’s location from him, but while he’s doing exactly that, Zoe finds the spot using the GPS on one of the cars parked outside and races off to play hero, leaving Julian behind.
This is a profoundly stupid decision. Julian had already agreed to help, and he’s the most dangerous guy in the whole show by a country mile. Zoe leaving him behind is just awkward. And it’s especially dumb since when she gets to the wrecked church where Chase is still unresponsive on the ground, she has to call Julian for help administering the antidote and giving CPR anyway.
Pictured: Amy Brenneman as Zoe McDonald. CR: Chuck Hodes/FX.
A Brief Retirement
Nevertheless, Chase is saved, and Zoe is able to keep him well looked after in one of Bote’s safe houses. The dogs are there! Julian isn’t, having apparently served his usefulness to the plot. But nobody else knows they’re there except, apparently, Zoe’s grown-up son, who can’t be traced back to her (so she claims!). It’s a little paradise where Chase can fret about getting dementia and not having any answers to the many questions they left behind.
Chase doesn’t know Parwana is alive, it’s worth pointing out. He has no idea if the spook Zoe met told anyone about what was going on, and doesn’t understand why they haven’t heard anything about the cartel on the news, which they presumably would have done if it had seized control of the world’s rare earth metals or, conversely, been shut down. The safe house is in Auburn, Alabama — I think; Zoe visits the Auburn Community Centre, so I guess so — and it’s clear that Zoe would be happy to stay there forever, with things exactly as they are.
But an unexpected delivery puts paid to that idea. A box is dropped off on a nearby road containing a phone and a note with a number on it. Chase calls it, but we see this from Zoe’s perspective, standing on the porch a ways away, so we don’t know who he called or what was said — at least not until the next scene.
A Clear Setup For ‘The Old Man’ Season 3
The phone was a gift from Parwana. But The Old Man Season 2 doesn’t end with a tearful father-and-daughter reunion. Instead, it recasts Parwana as a bad guy of sorts, or at the very least as someone who is willing to get what she wants — even if it’s at the expense of Chase.
What she wants is to liberate Harper from wherever Marion is holding him. His ex-wife has been using him as leverage to force Parwana’s hand over the Meshbahar deposit, which she now controls. And Parwana doesn’t like that. She has a plan to liberate Harper from Marion’s clutches, but it will require Chase to assume one of his former identities — that of Lou Barlow, who was first mentioned in Episode 6. Mention of the name made Chase bristle the first time, and he does so again here. Apparently whatever he did as Lou Barlow is worse than any kind of violence. What does that mean?
Either way, Parwana isn’t giving him a choice. And to prove her point, the diner they’re meeting in is suddenly bathed by the headlights of a fleet of FBI cars. Parwana now has all the string-pulling power her biological father had, and she clearly isn’t afraid to use it.
Read More: Old Man Season 2, Episode 7 Recap
