'Zero Day' Recap, Episode 2: Dazed and Confused

Zero Day

Episode 2

Season 1 Episode 2

Editor’s Rating 4 stars ****

Photo: Netflix

I prefer it when conspiracy thrillers refuse to explain too much — part of the fun of watching is to pause, rewind, and retread your steps to make sure you’re still with the plot. Unfortunately, that approach might be too bold for a streaming service reported to push writers on exposition-heavy dialogue so that spectators can follow the story while doing something else. In the first meeting of the newly minted Zero Day Commission, we hear a lot of repetition: The attack is unprecedented, no one knows what’s going on — except maybe the Russians — and everyone is freaking out. Also, everyone hates Roger, who has an awful attitude toward his co-workers. The appointed head of investigation is an attorney from the Department of Justice named Carl Otieno, who is on less than friendly terms with Roger. Going over what they know about the Bronx shoot-out that opens the episode, the commission recognizes Alexi Lebedev from his work in the GRU, but the identity of the runaway hacker, whom we saw destroy every electronic device in his apartment, is unknown to them. Worse yet, when Carl runs his picture through their servers, his facial recognition comes back “restricted.”

On his first day in his new post, George is mainly busy with trying to remember whatever information Natan gave him by attempting to reconstruct his exact surroundings at the time of their conversation. Natan himself is, of course, MIA. George can only sustain that kind of concentration for so long, though, since there are so many distractions, starting with the fact that President Mitchell wants to retaliate in 72 hours at most. A piece of code from a ConEd server spelling out the word “maidan” in Cyrillic, in reference to a Ukranian revolution, gives everyone’s Russia suspicion more heft. Besides, George isn’t even sure he can trust his own eyes: He asks Roger to check on Anna Sindler’s death. Did she really die on Zero Day? Roger agrees to “run it down,” no questions asked.

Roger has a lot on his mind, too. He owes something to a powerful billionaire named Bob Lyndon, who suspiciously shorted the market on Russian oil days before the attack. Lyndon’s incredibly forward request is that Roger make sure the attack is finally pinned on the Russians so he can make good on his market play. Through their conversation, we also learn the origin of Carl and Roger’s bad blood: When the former was U.S. attorney, he investigated Roger on corruption charges. I knew there was something slimy about Roger!

As it happens, Lyndon’s wishes are likely to come true: President Mitchell is eager to put this whole thing on Russia. Alexi’s presence at the Bronx massacre seems like the perfect piece of evidence, but George is still holding out for his memory to return. Whether or not George remembers, Mitchell resolves to address the American people in 48 hours and tell them she’s launching a cyber strike on Russia in addition to sanctioning the country and sending home a slew of diplomats. George asks her to trust him. “We get this wrong, the whole country goes to hell,” he pleads. Seems a little late, George! We’re already there!

It doesn’t help George’s confusion to learn that when Roger went to the morgue to check on Anna Sindler’s body, he discovered it was not there. And it doesn’t help Roger’s own confusion that George tells him he saw her at his commission-confirmation announcement. In the last episode, it seemed unclear whether George was having a vision or simply thinking of his visit with Anna, but now it’s likely he really is losing his mind. Sheila can sense this, which is why she enlists the help of one Valerie Whitesell, George’s former chief of staff and lover, to step up as George’s right hand in the commission. As of now, we don’t know how much Sheila herself knows of the scope of Roger’s corruption, but it’s enough not to fully trust him with a crisis. The allusions to Valerie and George’s affair are also the first we have heard of disreputable behavior in George’s past, and I’m wondering how much of it became public knowledge. I’m thinking specifically of one of the things Anna told him in their meeting: Some people think he might have foregone reelection for reasons other than the tragic loss of his son. Could the reasons include an extra-marital scandal?

Alex can’t believe her mom would have Valerie so close to George, but then again, Alex has her own issues. One, she and Roger are a confirmed clandestine item, and by the looks of it, their intimacy is unnervingly bureaucratic. Two, she has a cocaine problem. Three, Richard Dreyer, the Speaker of the House, is on her ass to do something, so she ends up the part of an oversight committee tasked with making sure the commission isn’t abusing its powers. Her announcement spooks George, who asks Roger to talk to her under the impression she “listens to him” — I’m not sure I’ve gotten the same vibe from their high-strung sexual rapport, but okay. The strongest opposition to the commission comes from the oversight committee and the influential conspiracists of the “alternative media.” One Evan Green, who believes the attack to be “the work of Russian plutocrats working with Wall Street,” is chief among them. We also hear briefly from a tech mogul with the intolerably goofy name of “Monica Kidder,” the CEO of a “popular social-media platform” being investigated under antitrust laws, who thinks the commission should actually hire her.

The investigation takes a decisive turn. Carl discovers that the runaway hacker’s file was restricted because he was an officer with the Tailored Access Operations, or TAO, a group of the country’s “most elite offensive hackers.” But when Carl requests the TAO to give them a name, the director, Admiral Bernard, tells him he’s too busy planning President Mitchell’s looming cyber strike on Russian oil fields to be of any help. George consults his notebooks and finds out that he knew Bernard years ago, in Japan. This is the first time we have seen the contents of the notebook in real action: By referring to seemingly frivolous information, such as Bernard’s favorite yakitori place in Okinawa, George earns Bernard’s confidence and favor. It works: They’re looking for a kid named Patrick O’Keefe.

Patrick, who could tell since that morning that shit had hit the fan, was making preparations to leave the country. He tells his sister he messed up badly at work and needs to flee on a boat since airports are likely to be monitored. Alexi is on his tail up until the moment when he says good-bye to his sister at a port in Red Hook. The police arrive on the scene, unwittingly saving Patrick’s life: Alexi was just about to shoot him when he had to back away. As he does, he gets full-on hit by a truck driven by someone we will learn is a more senior Russian intelligence officer.

Having no other option, Patrick deposes: there are no Russians, only a group of whistleblowing hacktivists. “Felix” is the name of some kid he went to Dalton with. Patrick had provided him with governmental malware under the agreement it’d be leaked to expose the dangers of America’s power of surveillance, in the model of the Vault 7 documents published by WikiLeaks. But he insists that whatever the government had developed, it had to have been modified by the Zero Day culprits: It couldn’t cause damage on that scale. George isn’t sure he believes Patrick, and neither does Carl, who suggests they torture him to get the truth out faster. It’s a trite moment manufactured to convince us of George’s virtuosity, giving him the opportunity to remind Carl that “history is watching.”

Patrick’s statement is corroborated by the murderous Russian intelligence officer, who more-or-less literally appears in Roger’s living room. How come every unsavory character in this mess has an established rapport with Roger? The Russians know it looks bad, but they didn’t have anything to do with Zero Day, and they’ve already “dealt with” the “ambitious” officer and his “occasional business partners” who were making them look so guilty. Additionally, through methods that remain mysterious to us, Russian intelligence determined that the hackers were funded by a domestic terrorist group called the Reapers, offering the statements of their financial transactions as proof. Carl verifies them seconds before President Mitchell is to announce the retaliatory strike against Russia, just barely swerving the United States off the road to World War III.

Just as he’s hearing Evan Green spew odious theories on TV, something Green says helps George think of one thing Natan told him that night: something about a weapon named Proteus. In a press conference to announce the investigation’s latest developments, George goes rogue: He tells the world that the Reapers stole a cyber weapon named Proteus from the National Security Agency, modified it, and deployed it. He has no way of knowing whether or not that’s completely true. His own gut instinct is obviously impaired: He asks Roger to keep an eye out for Anna Sindler among the crowd, even though Roger had just confirmed her death with her grief-stricken mother moments before. A frustrated Patrick tells the authorities he’s never heard of anything named Proteus. Equally frustrated is President Mitchell, who wishes they could just blame Russia since, for the U.S. government, it’s easier to lie than to tell the truth. Most disturbing, though, is Jeremy Lasch’s confirmation that there is a government program named Proteus; it’s just not what George is saying it is.

• Actually, most most disturbing is the fact that it seems as though President George Mullen only writes on one side of the paper in his Moleskins. The pen doesn’t even bleed through!

• Alexi being run over is already the second death by collision in a six-episode-long show, if we’re remembering Anna’s in the last episode. That’s a pretty high count, and kind of sets up the expectation that in episode three, someone will be fatally run over. These things tend to lose their effect the more they’re repeated, so I’m watching out for that dullness here.

• At the beginning of the episode, when George is taking his daily Lipitor, it seems for a moment that he might be doubling his dose. So far, the show has teased a few potential reasons for George’s confusion and discombobulation: the medicine, PTSD, panic, or a more sinister fourth option. Cast your ballot!