What do I know about this series going into it?
Never heard of it. According to the blurbs, something about a special forces team looking for a nuclear bomb in Vegas.
Recap
We open on a montage in a casino. Outside the casino, a blonde woman drives up on a motorcycle. She’s sobbing, with a brief flashback to a prisoner who got shot.
She (Anastasia) calls a woman named Ava. The prisoner was her brother, Ivan. Anastasia’s the bad guy, and she’s the one with the nuke and nothing to live for anymore. Anastasia’s Russian henchmen arrive. They discuss their evac plan, and it sounds like they’re state-sponsored.
Back to the good guys: there are eight people on the team, and they do a cliched dramatic walk into a casino.
Ava’s voiceover gives me the mission briefing: There’s only an hour left to detonation, and it’s starting to leak out that there’s a bomb in the city. Washington has abandoned us. We need to do this on our own. So we’re going to access the city-wide camera network to find Anastasia. How do we sneak in? Screw it, we’re Navy SEALs, we’re going to just punch our way in.
They approach the security camera network room. The head of security is expecting them… and lets them in immediately. Turns out the CIA director, a Lance Reddick lookalike, has ordered the Vegas people to give them all the information at their disposal. Lance has been disowned by the White House just as much as they have, so he might as well throw all his chips in.
During the discussion, I slowly learn about the other characters on the team, who are appropriately multiracial:
Maya Lerner, glasses, is the computer person. She immediately sits down and scans the camera network with facial recognition, trying to find Anastasia.
The secondary lead looks like Chris Hemsworth. Chris calls Anastasia “Lanastasia”, don’t know why.
There’s another person on their team named Hagerty, who isn’t here. He’s the bomb defuser. Lerner will also be scanning for him.
Paul, an Asian, says he’ll handle the nuke if Hagerty can’t.
Hispanic woman with purple hair tells him that the only reason he thinks he can disarm a nuke is because he’s high. He responds that he isn’t high; he’s a helicopter pilot, and he’ll fly the nuke out into the desert to save the city, sacrificing himself, if they can’t disarm it.
Maya finds (L)Anastasia, who is in a casino elevator with her Russian henchmen. (L)Anastasia isn’t even trying to hide; she’s looking directly into a camera, daring them to locate her and find her in time. (54 minutes left.) They reach the top floor of the hotel, dragging a very obvious, attention-grabbing, beeping and flashing suitcase behind her.
This is obviously going to end up being a decoy.
The team splits up: Maya stays in the control room; Chris, Ava, and the token black team member go to (L)Anastasia’s hotel; Hispanic purple woman goes to the top of the next building over to cover them with her sniper rifle; and Paul goes to get a helicopter for their backup plan. There are 49 minutes left, which means they took only five minutes to get to the hotel; I guess in midday everyone’s too hung over in Las Vegas to cause traffic jams.
Elsewhere, there’s an old guy dressed in white, who is counting a lot of money he won. He gets a phone notification of pictures from the drunken wedding he doesn’t remember having last night. Pissed off, he tosses his phone into a fountain. This might be Hagerty?
Chris, Ava, and the team’s “big motherfucker” named Trunky enter the casino. Trunky is massively tired and/or hungover and/or has been in a lot of fights over the last few hours, but that doesn’t stop him from noticing the ten hired goons in the lobby. He’ll draw them away so that Chris and Ava can get to the elevator.
Meanwhile, Paul steals a helicopter belonging to a news channel.
Seven of the goons go after Trunk. Ava and Chris Hemsworth approach the other three, who are guarding the elevator. She intimidates them: you’re hired muscle and you’ve broken thumbs, but you’ve never killed anyone. We have. Move out of the way.
They move out of the way.
Trunk is followed into a room with no security cameras and the beatdown begins. He takes out two of them before the exhaustion gets to him. They get his gun from him and he goes down.
Meanwhile, (L)Anastasia cuts the power to the elevator, trapping Ava and Chris Hemsworth inside. She calls Ava and taunts: “Don’t give up!” And she also calls a sniper of her own, telling him to find and take down Ava’s sniper.
Trunk is on the ground. The goons take their time discussing how they’re going to kill him and dispose of the body. But luckily, this room is a kitchen (why are there no cameras in the kitchen?) and a chocolate fountain on one of the tables got knocked over during the fight. It drips chocolate into Trunk’s open mouth, which is apparently magic chocolate. It heals all of his hit points, and he jumps up and beats the crap out of everybody. Was all of his exhaustion just hunger? Couldn’t they have sent someone to grab a candy bar for him while Lerner was doing the scanning?
Meanwhile, two people I haven’t seen yet are making out on a bed of money and getting ready to have sex. Suddenly Paul’s helicopter flies up to the window. He shouts over a megaphone: “Jen, it’s your dad.” She starts out with “Are you fucking serious?” but they have an emotional moment where he apologizes for being absent while she was growing up (Hilda did this conversation better by not doing this conversation) and she apologizes for being difficult towards him. He tells her and her boyfriend, appropriately named “Blast”, to get out of the city.
Back to the hotel. On the nearby rooftop, a henchman is sneaking up behind purple sniper woman. She hears him coming and tackles him to the ground. But he’s not a henchman, he’s “Billy, Sarah’s fiancée”, who found purple sniper woman thanks to location sharing, because she for some reason has Sarah’s phone. Purple sniper woman hooked up with Sarah last night and Billy’s jealous. They scuffle, during which (L)Anastasia’s sniper locates them and shoots – hitting Billy instead of purple sniper woman, and giving away that he’s there.
With this bigger threat, purple sniper woman manipulates Billy a bit to convince him to work with her to survive: she apologizes, tells him he’s a fucking hero, calls him Willy for some reason, and brings him around to the plan. She’ll reposition, he’ll hold up his watch to catch the sunlight and fool the other sniper into thinking it’s the scope, the other sniper will shoot, and that will tell purple sniper woman where he is.
B(W)illy gets shot in the hand, and purple sniper shoots (L)Anastasia’s sniper dead.
While Ava and Chris Hemsworth are climbing the elevator shaft, the Russians use an axe to open the doors to the shaft and shoot at them from above. Ava and Chris manage to shoot one of them; the other jumps into the shaft, knocks away Chris’s gun, and tries to pull Ava off the ladder to her death. Chris grabs him from behind, pulls him off the rope, and they both fall to their seeming deaths.
I finally learn that Chris’s name is McKnight or Mac, and that purple sniper woman is named Gomez.
Ava reaches the top of the tower. She has an axe. They have a half-dozen goons and guns. Ava loses. (L)Anastasia removes Ava’s earpiece and sits her down to talk.
Meanwhile, white-suited guy is in a limo. I was right, he’s Hagerty. For some reason he believes he’s already taken care of the bomb. He’s on his way to the airport. There are 32 minutes remaining.
“The nuke won’t bring back Ivan,” Ava says. “Stopping the nuke won’t bring back McKnight,” (L)Anastasia answers, which it obviously will because I bet he’s not dead.
Cut to McKnight. He’s not dead. Turns out he landed on the Russian guy, who broke his fall. His earpiece is busted, and he’s hurting and bleeding, but the soft landing saved him. He slowly and painfully stands up.
“We just fell 20 fucking stories,” McKnight lampshades. They punch each other a few times, but just then Maya finishes resetting the power and the elevator resumes its ride to the roof. At the last second, McKnight jumps into the elevator’s roof hatch while the Russian guy gets squashed against the spikes that are naturally at the top of every elevator shaft.
Ava reveals to the Russian henchmen that the supposed evac (L)Anastasia has been promising them doesn’t exist; (L)Anastasia is planning on dying in the blast and killing them too. One would think this would change their allegiance. It doesn’t.
Well, maybe they would have changed their minds if they had a bit more time to mull it over. But before they can, Paul arrives with the helicopter and Gomez begins sniping the Russians. There’s a firefight, and one Russian for some reason has a rocket launcher. There are 25 minutes remaining. (Given the 20-minute reset timer on the elevator, that means there were only four minutes between arrival at the hotel and when the elevator stopped. Yeah right.)
Meanwhile, Trunk has apparently been in a different elevator and arrives on the roof. So does McKnight. Between the two of them and Gomez sniping from the helicopter they kill all the Russians but (L)Anastasia. And now they have the suitcase. But they don’t have Hagerty to disarm it. So they’re going to use Paul’s backup self-sacrifice plan.
Ava tells (L)Anastasia this explicitly: You lost now. The nuke is going to go to the middle of the desert, and it’ll just kill Paul. You won’t get your promised revenge on me or on the million hedonists in Las Vegas. Your choices are kill Paul for no reason or tell us how to disarm it. Why not tell us how to disarm it? But (L)Anastasia says she says she can’t even if she wanted to: The beeping suitcase is empty.
But that’s okay, because Ava pulls a contingency plan out of her ass that was never hinted to: She knew (L)Anastasia might be bluffing, so she secretly had Lerner tracking down everywhere (L)Anastasia went with the nuke in the last hour. There was only one place along the entire route that (L)Anastasia was out of camera coverage.
Meanwhile, Hagerty stops the limo: he sees a camel he knows. (I am very curious about what this means.) But he starts to suspect something is wrong when he sees people looking at their phones talking about the bomb rumors.
The good guys track the bomb to the Plaza Hotel. Maya makes all the slot machines hit the jackpot at once, so they can find the one machine that isn’t paying out. They find it, remove the bomb, and give it to Paul to make his big sacrifice. But then Hagerty shows up riding on a camel.
Apparently Hagerty can’t disarm a bomb without Michael Bublé music, but nobody on the team knows how to put the accent over the e, so they can’t search for it and play it for him (that’s not how searching works). They recommend other random singers but “I can’t work like this!” Until a woman approaches from the crowd and begins singing, I assume, a Bublé song.
This calms Hagerty down and he starts working on the nuke, during which the woman disappears from the background of the shot, so she may have been a hallucination.
He cuts the wire with one second remaining. There is jubilation and hugging all around; Hagerty hugs the random woman, so maybe she’s a known character from an earlier episode.
A drinking montage to close out the series: Maya brags to people about the awesome things she’s done, supported by her wingman Ava. Gomez salutes Billy and Sarah, who hold up their ring fingers (hers with a ring, his without a finger). Trunk talks about marijuana, which I guess explains how he gets super strength from eating (well, it doesn’t really, but let’s just go with it). Hagerty is confronted by a demon puppet who says he owes him money, and Paul is shocked that he’s not the only one who can see it. McKnight’s first name turns out to be Chad, and he and Ava have sex.
Unresolved questions
Is the bad guy’s name Anastasia or Lanastasia? Why the confusion?
Throughout the episode (L)anastasia wants to set off the bomb because Ava killed her brother. Why before this episode did she want to set off the bomb? Is her brother just her latest excuse? Why does she want to die?
What’s with the demon puppet?
Who did Hagerty marry? It kind of looked like Ava but I wasn’t sure. Was it the random woman he hugged at the end? If so, how did she just happen to be where the bomb was?
Ratings
Story: 6/10. A standard find-the-bomb plot with a fairly thin motivation for the bad guy, and predictable twists – but elevated by the specific nature of the complications introduced. They could’ve done more with the whole “being hung over and coming off of drugs” aspect, but I’m guessing they covered that ground in previous episodes and now we’re just focused on the climax.
For example, it’s only after this scene, when the demon puppet shows up, that I understand why Paul is the one asking this question:
Writing: 7/10. I liked this. It has a guilty-pleasure sort of vibe and knew not to take itself too seriously. Of course the Russian has a rocket launcher. Of course he has a second rocket that’s heat-seeking (as opposed to the first one, which wasn’t?). Of course McKnight will survive falling down 20 flights in an elevator shaft by landing on the bad guy’s corpse, and of course the bad guy isn’t dead either. Of course the top of the elevator shaft has spikes on it.
The show positively reveled in how ridiculous it was, and executed its concept very well.
Production: 7/10. Better-than-average fight scenes that weren’t cut to death like so many are these days (I’m looking at you, Magnum P.I.). Good acting and good comedic timing all around.
Characterization: 6/10. Ava and Chris, I mean Chad, were paper-thin characters. What I saw of (L)Anastasia didn’t impress me. The rest of the team had hints at depth that were probably fleshed out more in previous episodes – there was less time to deal with that sort of thing with the one-hour ticking clock, and I’d have gotten annoyed at the characters if they did.
Clarity: 9/10. There were a few confusing moments (is [L]Anastasia state-sponsored or not? What’s with the demon puppet?) but for the most part I was brought very quickly into the thick of things and understood what was going on.
Closure: 10/10. Everything was nicely wrapped up in the end, to the extent that I don’t think the series ever intended to have a season two.
Do I want to watch the series now?
Sometimes the last episode of a series feels so much like a full story that you wonder what the other episodes could possibly have been about. This is one of those times.
There is one exception: the hints dropped throughout of how the team thought they already disabled the nuclear bomb and have to now find the real one. Which piques my curiosity. I want to see how that was handled, why Trunky was so tired, what’s up with Paul and Hagerty and that demon puppet, who Billy was and why he’s so pissed off at Gomez…
It’s not on the top of my list, but if the rest of the series was handled as well as this episode I want to see how it was done.