Friday, July 1, 2022

Round Two: The Old Man

The Old Man: Season 1, Episode 2 “II” (B+)

It wasn’t clear exactly what the extent of Dan and Harold’s interactions were in the past, and we got to see that they were quite intimate, with Harold warning him that he would be the one they would send to kill him eventually. That’s not quite what’s going on now, but given the way that Dan responds to situations and how he imagined doing so if the need presented itself, this can’t end any other way than either Dan or Harold dead (though news of a second season being ordered so quickly by FX suggests that it won’t happen for quite a while). I’m always happy to see Alia Shawkat, most recently the star of the genre-bending “Search Party,” and this feels like a much more serious role for her, one in which her character Angela is fiercely protective of Harold and not eager to give Raymond a warm welcome. The news that Emily died by suicide years earlier is startling, and it raises so many questions about who the woman on the other end of the phone is since Dan seems to believe that she’s his daughter. Dan, posing as Peter, nearly had to rethink his entire getaway plan when Zoe told him about the no-dog policy, but he proved that it wasn’t going to be a problem. I wondered whether him shooting the two cops and then her was a daydream moment since it went on for a very long time, but there’s still plenty to worry about given that Harold knows exactly where Dan and Zoe are and is calling in a top asset to find them.

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