If you were a former superspy unable to access memories of everything you’ve done, said, and experienced prior to eight years ago, how likely would you be to trust other spies? If your long-lost colleague asks you to fill in massive blanks, how much do you tell him? Is it better to know it all, or can ignorance be bliss when your job used to be not-quite-state-sanctioned murder in glamorous locales? If you’re torturing intel out of another operative, how do you verify the information they share? If the zip ties were on the other wrists and you were being held captive, what would you do? What lies would you tell to escape being tortured? In one way or another, everyone is grappling with these questions in “Infinite Shadows.”
Espionage is built on an odd little paradox: Spies have no choice but to trust others while doing trust-ruining things to them. Agents are in the field seeking out information others want to keep from them while hoarding information others want to extract. No wonder the opening and closing moments of each episode take us on a little visual spin wheel — the moment any of them thinks they’ve got a handle on what’s happening in their strand of the plot, everything gets thrown into chaos once more.
At the heart of this cognitive dissonance is the issue of trust, and moving from memory-wiped cluelessness to anything more knowledgeable must be quite a daunting process. Mason and Nadia are on the run, hunkered down in a safe house elsewhere in Spain after narrowly escaping Dahlia Archer’s Manticore henchmen in Valencia, and he’s wondering whom he can trust to guide him through this weird, in-between phase of his life.
Right now, the only two candidates are Bernard and Nadia. Mason thinks Bernard is dead, but before Manticore kidnapped him, Bernard had some very indignant words for Mason on the subject of trust: “Why would you trust me? I gassed you and your family in a fucking car! I’m exceedingly untrustworthy. I’m a spy!”
In both the past and the present, Mason asks Nadia if he can trust her. In the past, in the context of pillow talk, Nadia’s answer was “Always.” In the present, it’s “That’s not the first time you’ve asked me that.” That’s a response, but it’s not an answer to Mason’s question. It’s also not a lie. I continue to think Nadia is walking a very fine and tricky line with him.
It’s not just Nadia’s weird rhetorical tap dance making me think she’s had her memories all along (or had them restored earlier than what was shown). At one point, she contacts a person as yet unknown to us using the encrypted Gchat at the safe house. When she inquires about the status of “the package,” the other person responds that it’s “waiting for you.” Why do I get the feeling that said package is a child? Whatever or whoever the package turns out to be, Nadia is up to something, and it seems to involve choosing to tell less-harmful lies of omission in response to questions she has resolved not to answer honestly.
The contrast between Nadia and Mason’s current dynamic and their rapport pre-backstop is equally significant. Now she’s keeping him at arm’s length and even tries to shoo him away entirely with repeated brush-offs of his questions about their past. But ten years ago, immediately after their first mission together, the competitive flirtatiousness that marked their interactions in the premiere’s opening set piece is already there in abundance. Citadel’s idea of a meet-cute is an undercover Nadia holding a gun to Mason’s head, and from Nadia’s perspective, Mason nearly ruined their first mission (date?) entirely. If anything, she rescued him and prevented the release of a worse-than-Ebola virus. That moment also establishes Nadia’s bona fides; she’s not a rookie agent, her mom was a Citadel agent, and she came up through Bravo Team before being begged to join First Tier, thank you very much. Cheeky banter and professional competence? Who could resist? Two weeks after that meet-cute, they’re falling into bed together — in Paris, no less! It’s good to be reminded that subtlety is not really a spy thriller’s forte.
Compartmentalizing feelings and moving heaven and earth to rescue a colleague is just the ticket for squashing down inconveniently mixed feelings, so it’s time to embark on a dangerous plan to save Agent Carter Spence from Manticore! If that name sounds familiar, it should: Dahlia mentioned him to Bernard as a Citadel agent she broke some time ago. She could be lying to get under Bernard’s skin, but if she did break Carter, Nadia and Mason are walking into an even more dangerous situation than they realize, which is saying something because Nadia has already recognized where he’s being held as a black site outside of Fes, Morocco.
In pursuit of the information he and Nadia need to gain access to the black site, Mason is once again on the trustworthiness roller coaster. He must trust her to get him out of his meeting with a dangerous source, but said source taunts him about continuing to ally himself with the memory of “a woman who sold you out.” Word on the bad-guy grapevine is that she was working for Manticore before the train derailment.
With truth or expedience, Nadia bats away Mason’s concerns, noting that she would hardly be likely to try to rescue Carter or keep Mason alive if she were a double agent. But wouldn’t both of those things be tactically and temporarily advantageous to her if she were? No matter. When Mason presses her on why she lied about their past relationship, Nadia refuses to discuss it further because “what happened between me and Mason is between me and Mason.” Oh sure, end the conversation with rambling nonsense; he’ll definitely never ask about it again.
That’s not to say Citadel has left its snappy banter aside. Like James Bond before him, Bernard does the logical thing while being held captive and tortured at Dahlia Archer’s, looking for ways to entertain himself and needle his captors during what could be his final, agonizing moments of existence. Dahlia’s choice to enjoy a nice slice of cake and glass of wine while one of her henchmen repeatedly gets this close to choking Bernard to death conveys both cool nonchalance at the prospect of dinner-table murder and an understanding that it’s her responsibility to provide Bernard with quip fodder once he regains his ability to speak.
From Bernard’s rejection of her note of welcome (“It’s horrifically fucking terrible to see you, Dahlia!”) to his mocking fake capitulation when she again demands the password to the nuclear codes she wants, this immediate blue material is a funny act of defiance. They’re nowhere close to breaking him until he’s threatened with a nasty little brain-invading drill, prompting him to reveal to Anders that his long-lost love, Brielle, is alive and well and … married to Mason Kane?!
At first, Anders refuses to believe this potentially life-changing piece of information, but when Bernard shows him a photo of Brielle with the Conroy family, we have to wonder what this means for the mission, for Mason, and for Brielle herself.
Mason’s entire life since being backstopped is based on trust with Abby. If she really is Brielle, what effect will that have on Mr. I Need to Know I Can Trust People? As for Brielle, does she know she is Brielle? Is she a Citadel contractor wife-for-hire for Mason, who reports periodically to Bernard? Or has she too been backstopped and now genuinely believes she’s Abby Conroy? Who knows? But we won’t be getting answers this week!
Fun With Bullet Points
• What’s the biggest reveal of the episode: Brielle/Abby or Dahlia and Bernard having been co-workers at the U.N.?! I would absolutely watch a three-episode arc about that chapter of their lives.
• Nadia’s mother was a Citadel agent too. Could she be any of the following: the person Nadia surreptitiously gets in touch with at the Spain safe house, another double or triple agent working with Manticore, or dead owing to something Citadel did or failed to do?
• Leave it to Bernard to find a way to turn a torture session into a moment to cement a bond between himself and Anders. Is he playing Anders in some way? Quite possibly, and all’s fair in spy vs. spy. But if he’s telling the truth, Anders owes him an enormous favor, and Bernard will make the most of it.
• No Hendrix needle-drops yet, but it’s worth noting that the breezy, chipper song playing under Bernard’s first torture session is “Everything’s Alright” from Jesus Christ Superstar. A twisted choice that would also find a happy home on a compilation titled Songs to Dissociate To.
