What I’m Watching: Designated Survivor

Designated Survivor: Season 1, Episode 5 “The Mission” (B-)

The test of this show’s durability is going to be living up to the excitement and shock value of the first episode and deciding what kind of series it’s going to be, somewhere between a political drama and an action thriller. I think it’s actually meant not to be the latter, but fans of “24” and its star will expect that this is where this show is going to go and the series will to a degree head in that direction in service of that expectation. This episode was much more action-oriented on all fronts, with Tom supervising the mission to kill the elusive would-be terrorist who we all know wasn’t actually responsible for bombing the Capitol building. Finding out that they waited too long was an initial setback, but then it ended up getting far more intense with Tom supervising the play-by-play and then hearing about a snafu that ended up resulting in a successful operation with one casualty. I’ve been seeing former “Nip/Tuck” star Dylan Walsh around in a few places recently, and I appreciated the casting of Alex Mallari Jr., who plays Four on “Dark Matter” as one of the soldiers in the operation. Jason trusting Hannah and realizing that something sinister is going on could be real, but something tells me that he’s actually one of the bad guys trying to keep her quiet through fear rather than intimidation. Hannah is dialoguing pretty openly with Kimble, and even though we’ve confirmed that Peter was likely in on the bombing, it’s possible that she too is working against the president in more than just a political way. That’s my paranoid conspiracy thriller brain at work, presuming that something worse than a man who served in prison actually being the father of the president’s son is likely afoot.