'Zero Day' Recap, Episode 4: The Manchurian Candidate

Zero Day

Episode 4

Season 1 Episode 4

Editor’s Rating 4 stars ****

Photo: Jojo Whilden/Netflix

I have been waiting this whole time to find out what Proteus is, and now that I know, I barely have time to process it before a shitstorm of other tragedies flood this episode. As we’d expected, George’s confusion is part of the conspiracy. Valerie tracks down a scientist named McKenna, who was one of Proteus’s developers, and he enlightens her on the fact that the mystery weapon was neurological, not cyber. It was devised to cause a traumatic brain injury from a distance in so precise a manner as to be untraceable. The symptoms of a Proteus victim correspond with George’s dizziness, confusion, and hallucinations, and since McKenna tells Valerie that the weapon works best when it’s targeting a location, it’s decided he can’t go home to Hudson anymore: he has to sleep in his office.

It’s just as well because Sheila doesn’t really want to talk to him. She and Alex discuss George’s visible unfitness over the phone. Not even Valerie’s disclosure that George might be the target of a neurological weapon devised in violation of the Geneva Convention can convince Sheila that he should be let off the hook about anything. If he’s not sound of mind, he should resign; if he’s sane, he should also resign for adopting and escalating fascistic tactics. Sheila is actually one of the more reasonable minds involved in this mess — they should put her in charge. Instead, all she can get George to agree to is a few psychological evaluations, which determine there’s nothing really wrong with him.

For how intensely we’ve been building up to George’s symptoms and the discovery of what Proteus is, I found the revelation to be anticlimactic at best. Nothing about Zero Day or the commission is normal, but as I mentioned in my last recap, and as Sheila herself brings up, the whole basis of George’s character is his humanity. I can’t imagine any human being would receive the news that they are the object of an MKUltra-ass weapon with such tranquility. I can’t imagine being in the vicinity of a weapon like that, the way Valerie and Sheila are, and keeping my shit together. The lack of gravity with which this information is disclosed exposes the mechanical nature of this plot: it’s like another Jenga piece in the construction of the conspiracy. I want to see George freak out. We saw Robert Redford become way more harried for way less in Three Days of the Condor. 

But a lot happens before the episode gets to Proteus, beginning with a new cyber attack, this time on a major bank called American Homestead. As a protective measure, the government, in conjunction with the commission, puts a freeze on all financial transactions through the weekend; predictably, complete chaos is installed. How are people supposed to go through a whole weekend without access to their money? What if they need, I don’t know, water? It’s not immediately clear that the American Homestead hack has anything to do with Zero Day, Evan Green, or the Reapers, and Richard Dreyer wants George to reassure the American people of this. He pushes Alex on it, and she wonders, as you must be wondering, and as I have often wondered, when he will learn that George doesn’t listen to her. The camera cuts between Alex and Richard’s phone call and Roger and Valerie’s, blurring them until it’s revealed that Roger is at Alex’s apartment. I didn’t like this gimmick; it doesn’t make sense. We know that Roger and Alex are together. What is new about their dynamic is that it suddenly seems warm and affectionate. Only half in jest, Roger suggests they flee the country and leave this mess behind. It would’ve been a sweet moment if we didn’t know that he’s likely entertaining such thoughts because the walls are closing in on him.

Briefly, they touch on the fact that George hasn’t seemed like himself, something Carl also notices as they try, once again, to get something out of Evan Green, whose texts with various members of the Reapers prove his involvement with them. George asks about the malware, about Leon, and about … Anna Sindler. Carl later tells Valerie about this, which is one of the reasons why she comes to the conclusion George might be a Proteus target. Meanwhile, the strength with which Evan Green holds on to the delusion that nothing can happen to him is almost touching. He’s the first to admit that his arrest is great for his ratings, but he doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of his situation until his lawyer comes to talk to him. His lawyer, by the way, is there in an unofficial capacity since apparently detainees of the commission are not entitled to legal counsel — a sign of just how close to full-on autocracy this government has become. His lawyer advises that Evan had better talk: there’s nothing protecting him if he doesn’t.

Around the isolated halls of the commission’s headquarters, society has pretty much collapsed. Protestors take to the streets and the front of George’s house, where he hasn’t been in days. Monica Kidder, whom we only saw briefly in episode two, rallies the people to stand up for their rights, still bitter that she wasn’t “invited” to be part of the commission as if she’d been left out of a birthday party. The ideas around Kidder seem nebulous at this point — what is her agenda? Melissa, the commission’s communications director, convinces George to meet with her since they are in desperate need of rehabilitating his image, and Kidder’s remarks have boosted her popularity. But their meeting leads nowhere; they just butt heads for fifteen minutes.

If, for the first couple of episodes, it seemed like George’s image as the Last Good President was indestructible, by now it has completely shattered. He’s gone from the symbol of all things sane and benevolent to a violent dictator in the course of a month.Sheila is not the only person who thinks he should resign; Richard Dreyer thinks so, too, and he tries to convince Mitchell as much. He brings up the fact that he has “quit” before when he walked out on re-election. Even better than resigning would be for him to testify to the House Oversight Committee, which would demonstrate he has nothing to hide — that’s what Melissa thinks, but George won’t hear of it.

Not only that, he wants to extend the financial freeze. President Mitchell tells him in no uncertain terms that it’s out of the question: the country won’t survive one more minute of this madness. George wants more time to get something out of Green. So far, all they have are some Reaper names, given after Green directed increasingly racist remarks toward Carl and was swiftly, efficiently, and satisfyingly put in his place. Mitchell tells George that she heard that American Homestead Bank had been the target of an identical ransomware attack the previous year, but the bank had paid up and neglected to report it. None of that convinces George that Evan Green has nothing to do with Zero Day or the Homestead scheme, but it does convince him to shed whatever remains of his morals. He gives Carl his go-ahead on the “enhanced interrogation” tactics. And he doesn’t shy away from the decision: George is there as the torturers tie up and put a bag over Green’s head. He never even breaks eye contact with Green.

But the episode’s climax, and its most surprising turn, is Roger’s death. Earlier, when the commission went over the scant evidence seized at the Idaho farm — by the time they got there, much had been destroyed — he remembered something he’d seen on Lyndon’s yacht. The memory leads him to one of the radios seized at the farm. Taking note of the frequency to which it was tuned, he gets his own radio and tunes it identically: he hears Leon on the other end of it, giving information in code, which he takes down. Later, he’s waiting for Alex at a bar when he is approached by a suspicious element whom he assumes to be one of Lyndon’s cronies. It’s now in their interest for George to resign, so they are looking for proof that he is sick, or they’ll tell Alex about Roger’s wrongdoings. Roger says he may have something, and for a moment, he actually considers swiping George’s notebook, which he knows is filled with nonsensical who-killed-Bambi notes. But it’s too much, even for Roger. He decides to come clean to Alex before Lyndon’s gang has the chance to do it. He begins drinking before he confesses and continues long after. By the time the man who’d approached him at the bar, along with a few others, finds him in his apartment, Roger was already deep in the spiral. He has almost no time to react as they inject him with heroin and drown him in his tub, framing his death as an overdose.

Upon receiving the news of Roger’s death, George flashes back to his own son Nick’s death by heroin overdose. We’d learned earlier, through Roger’s relationship with Alex, that they’d been close, and that it was through his friendship with Nick and Alex that Roger came to work for George. We don’t get much of Alex’s reaction just yet, apart from her disbelief at a phone call which stops her in tracks in the halls of Congress.

The other important piece of news that morning is that the F.B.I. has concluded that the attack on the American Homestead Bank didn’t have anything to do with the Reapers or Zero Day after all –– it was caused by a group called Sinecure and has already been resolved. However, the House Oversight Committee, having discovered that Sheila Mullen has reason to doubt her husband’s decision-making process, is subpoenaing the former first lady to learn more. Sheila had threatened to go public if George didn’t prove his sanity, but he did prove it to her through psychological evaluations. She even said a deal is a deal! Does this mean someone talked? We have reached the end of the second act: it’s impossible to see how George is going to make it out of this.

• I really wasn’t expecting Roger’s death, so I’m curious to see what narrative possibilities it will open for the series’ remaining two episodes. I’m especially interested to see how the Lyndon subplot will thicken in his absence, how the information he got from Leon through the radio will reemerge, and how his death will influence the relationship between Alex and her father. It could be a moment for them to strengthen their bond or, more likely, hurl blame at one another. I do think that his semi-redemption throughout this episode — enjoying a warmer relationship with Alex, deciding at the last minute not to betray George, and reminiscing about the early stages of his career — seemed manufactured to make us feel the shock of his death more completely … but it did help raise the sense that the conspiracy has already closed in on George beyond possibility of escape.