As a reminder, my recaps are a little stream of consciousness, as I’m writing while I watch. Sometimes I might posit a theory that’s confirmed or disproven a few sentences later. Sometimes I’m guessing at what’s going on. I also take a “you’re sitting next to me on my couch while I watch” approach. That means you also get all my snarky comments as I watch. It’s part and parcel of watching TV with me.
For episode 2, we shift at first to the generic American heartland. A dust bowl, tumbleweed ridden small southern town where a local preacher returns home to find his surprised wife day drinking after fretting over their failing finances. A quick look at her spreadsheet shows church income nosediving, with collections, tithes and other traditional income cratering, and the church on the edge of failing. She manages to hide the drinking, but message received: Christians in rural America are suffering. Add to this their troubled daughter. We see her out in the scrubland taking Instagram photos of dead birds before she collapses in what looks like a seizure. When she gets home, her father, the preacher, asks her to “turn out her pockets,” which makes me wonder if the dialogue writer for this episode thinks people actually talk that way, or if the American South is more Dickensian than I ever realized. I’m guessing we’re in Texas here, not sure yet. The preacher’s daughter has a dream (a prophecy? A vision?) that her home town was destroyed, killing everyone. She describes the destruction as a relief, as beautiful. I have a feeling real estate prices are about to take a tumble. She breaks up with her boyfriend and walks off. We then cut to her father in town staring at a sign telling us that gas is flammable. Does Texas also have signs letting us know ice is cold and water is wet? He has a large tanker of gas in the trunk of his car. Uh oh. Later in the episode, we return to Texas to see that the preacher’s wife apparently has a powerful (rich) father who is some sort of televangelist. Rebecca (Stefania LaVie Owen), the daughter, still hates the world, or at least her local world, and wants to get out.
Eva Geller, our CIA agent, arrives in Tel Aviv looking for New Jesus. Israel is on high alert with the escape. Apparently the whole region is a tinderbox now. Her endearing personality wins her a lot of eyerolls and glares because she’s kind of a jerk and no one seems to like her. They accuse Aviram of orchestrating the breakout. Looks like it wasn’t a magical disappearance, the cameras were turned off for 12 minutes. Aviram gives us a lesson in distracted driving when he almost runs off the road and hits a car while on the phone. Put your phones down and pay attention to the road! He picks up (kidnaps?) his daughter from daycare and takes her on a Daddy-Daughter day out that includes leaving her alone in the car to chase after a man with long hair, presumably Al-Masih. Father of the Year Award, incoming! How many long-haired olive-skinned men can there be in Israel? At least two, as it turns out! All I want to know is what hair products all these guys are using. Israel looks like a Pantene commercial.
Quick cut over to Al-Masih walking up the steps to what I’m assuming is the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest sites in all three major religions, but also a major cultural site of importance for Muslims due to the thousand-year-old shrine built there. Al-Masih approaches the top of the steps and declares the end of history (someone has been reading his Fukuyama), and an end to the violence that has stained those steps with blood for generations. Of course he’s on like a million cameras, and probably being live streamed on just about everything, so just as he calls for people to step forward to be judged for their sins, and a young boy steps forward, the Israeli police show up. A shot rings out and the boy is killed. The police chief shouts “who fired?” and it’s not immediately clear if anyone fired at all. But the blood covered boy appears dead until Al-Masih puts his hands on him and he miraculously awakens, just as the crowd is about to descend on the police for the killing. The crowd rejoices in the miracle as the boy holds aloft the bullet that supposedly killed him and shouts “I’m alive!” in Arabic. Al-Masih slips away. News reports show the riots that follow, and an Intifada is called by the Palestinian leadership in response. There have been several Intifadas since Israel’s occupation of Palestinians began in the second half of the 20th century, though none since 2000. To Palestinians it means rising up against an oppressor. To Israelis it usually means terrorist car bombings and night clubs blowing up. Not a good time for anyone. It literally means “tremor” or “shudder,” hence the name of the episode.
Back at Langley, the top brass remark that Al-Masih is trying to start another war, which is contrasted nicely with the fact that anyone who has actually heard him hears him speaking peace. As the impact of Al-Masih’s action at the Dome of the Rock reverberates throughout the world, we see a small gathering of leaders at a Mosque around a wise old Imam who labels Al-Masih a heretic who misquotes Muhammad and dresses up to pretend fulfill prophesies. The group appears mostly to agree, but there are murmurings that Al-Masih is tapping into something bigger.
Q (Assaad Bouab) reveals himself to be one of the Mossad members. Still not sure what his real full name is, but it’s NOT Queen Latifah. Huge letdown. It looks like he’s an old friend of Geller’s. Judging from this and all the looks she gets within Israeli intelligence HQ, it appears clear that Geller has a long history in Israel. As she works with Q and the rest of the team at Mossad, they review the tapes and she strikes upon the idea that the whole thing might have been a setup. Geller and Q attempt to find the boy from the tape, figuring if this was a setup, the boy would have to be in on it. But the family has vanished.
Back at the refugee camp, relief workers arrive with food and water, but it’s actually just Mossad infiltrating the camp to look for Al-Masih. The refugees learn that he escaped. As we return to them later, they’re wondering why Al-Masih hasn’t returned to help them. They’re still living just outside the border in an open-air prison camp. I’d probably be a little bummed by the letdown too. Jibril looks out into the night and sees a light in the distance. He goes to the fence line where a woman offers him bread, but it’s a trap, and he’s soon taken by Aviram.
Let’s check in on my theories from the first episode:
- He really is the Messiah, the second coming, and God has a message that he’s not pleased, and folks have been misinterpreting his vision for mankind for a couple thousand years, so he sent this dude to correct the record.
What do I think of this theory? Looking weaker and weaker really. The 12 minute gap in the cameras seems more likely to be a conventional breakout. And the stunt with the boy he supposedly heals was super unconvincing. At this point the shocker would be that the boy actually was shot and Al-Masih really did heal him, but looked pretty pointedly like a stunt to further burnish Al-Masih’s credibility as The Messiah.
- He’s a delusional cult leader.
What do I think of this theory? This episode did nothing to advance this theory, and at this point, it doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
- It’s a government conspiracy / It’s someone else’s conspiracy (NEW)
What do I think of this theory? More convinced of this than ever. Geller was right to be skeptical of the gunshot, not just because Occam’s Razor suggest “stunt” is more likely than “miracle.” The look from the police was one of genuine surprise. They didn’t know who shot because it genuinely didn’t seem to come from them. It’s also a little suspicious that the same boy who came forward during the judgment time thing was the one who was shot. It’s especially odd considering he’s two feet shorter than the crowd of people around him, and he’s up a tall flight of stairs from where the police guns are. Al-Masih got there so fast, no one really had time to examine the boy, and they never return to him during the episode. Once his mother, likely also in on the act, proclaimed him dead, the crowd turned into a mob.
General thoughts so far: I’m starting to come around to the idea of this being an elaborate conspiracy, and I’m less disappointed with it than I thought I’d be. Perhaps that’s because it’s actually pretty plausible. I really believe the events, as transpired thus far, could happen, and that folks would react the way they are. The real mystery, assuming this is a manipulation, is who is doing it, and to what end? He is using a gentler form of Islam as a ploy to gain power, and then he’ll go all ISIS on them? Or is the plan really to moderate Islam, Israel and others to stop using religion as a pretext to hate? That seems simplistic on its face, but if you look at the way he’s going about it, and the energy he’s tapping into, it starts to look a little more plausible.
But the most disappointing part of this is the government storyline. They’re just so lifeless. They hustle around making grim-faced pronouncements about how evil this whole plot must be, making huge, huge assumptions with no more than a few seconds of reasoning, and in general are just very uninteresting, simplistic boring characters. I really hope there’s something more interesting to them in the coming episodes.
One of the intiguing things to me here was how threatened everyone in the establishment is by Al-Masih. It’s not just governments in the West that are threatened. The power structure in the Islamic church is threatened as well. The West can’t conceive of a MLK type figure coming out of the woodworks, so he must be a threat. And anyone preaching something that might bring down the power structure of the Mullahs and the Imams propped up not just by anti-Western hatred but also the intramural Sunni-Shiite fight is a similar threat to their way of life. Al-Masih represents a possible schism to them, or worse, reunion.
Maybe I’m just forcing myself to find this more interesting because I’m spending more time writing about it, but I’m finding the possibilities of what this could be very intriguing!
Episode grade: B (Interesting development of the mystery, but the entire government storyline is a snoozefest).
