Summary
The Asset — and specifically Folke — once again puts Tea in an impossible position in Episode 5, and it’s very hard to see how a happy ending might emerge from all of this.
Folke’s awful, isn’t he? Here we were, thinking that Tea had done a pretty good job of sending Ashley back into Miran’s clutches with a bit of tasteful reassurance, but that’s not good enough for Folke, who is adamant that Ashley needs to stay with Miran at all costs. And he really does mean all costs, including Sofia’s well-being. Episode 5 is the murkiest that The Asset has got, morally speaking, and its cold open is genuinely uncomfortable — way harder to watch, in my view, than any of the extended suspense sequences.
In that cold open, Sofia is forcibly removed from Miran and Ashley’s care by Child Protective Services, flanked by the police, which Tea later learns through Folke was under direct instruction of the PET. It’s a disgraceful abuse of power, and Tea is appalled by it. Folke’s justification, that the families of criminals are equally liable for their sins, holds little water, for Tea or the audience. Folke’s the bad guy, which only becomes clearer throughout “Into the Deep”.
The scenes with Sofia are awful, by design, but they’re also intended to warp our opinions of Miran and Ashley, the former especially. We’ve been told consistently that he’s a truly terrible guy, and frankly, we’ve seen snippets of that in his private interactions with Ashley, but I’m not sure we’ve seen him doing anything considerably more heinous than what the PET is willing to resort to in order to catch him. And you can see when Folke emerges from the shadows to smugly threaten Ashley in person that he’s enjoying the whole process more than he should be. Yasin’s later claims to Tea that his occasional narrow-mindedness doesn’t mean he doesn’t care ring totally false.
To be fair, Miran does beat Erik to death with a brick, so he’s certainly capable of getting his hands dirty, but Erik had his brother killed and threatened his daughter, so I don’t know if you can necessarily condemn him for that. Episode 5 of The Asset really rejoices in this tricky morality. You can see it reflected elsewhere, too, like in Ashley’s predicament. She has a night on the town with Tea to take her mind off things, but in her drunken stupor, she mentions not only that Folke approached her directly, but that she can’t flip on Miran because she used to help him with the seedier sides of the business before Sofia was born. If Miran goes down, he’ll take Ashley with him, and Sofia will end up at the mercy of the system.
What does this mean for Tea? Well, she seems not to have considered that Ashley is probably right. If Miran is taken down, and he takes Ashley with him, Sofia will be left on her own, and absolutely nothing we’ve seen the PET do thus far should reassure anyone that they’d do right by Ashley or Sofia. Tea’s in an impossible position, made even more impossible by Folke, where even if she completes her mission, she’s likely to condemn a mother and her child who are, for all intents and purposes, totally innocent.
This compels Tea to make a decision that immediately backfires. When Ashley mentions that Folke threatened to implicate “Sara” in Miran’s crimes, Tea confesses who she really is. What she’s trying to do is compel Ashley to turn on Miran, to reassure her that the PET has a solid case and that, if he goes down, she and Sofia will be protected. But does she really believe that? As it turns out, it might not matter either way, since Ashley reacts extremely badly to the revelation that her only ally has really been working against her the entire time. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m very much struggling to see how any of this is going to have a happy ending.
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