BrainDead: Season 1, Episode 9 – “Taking on Water …”

“What is the point?”

Really, though, Ella (Jan Maxwell). What is the point?

The point of this series, perhaps, but more pressing, how about the point of “Taking on Water: How Leaks in D.C. are Discovered and Patched”? BrainDead‘s ninth episode gives us no ants, no Gustav (Johnny Ray Gill), no head explosions, and, more importantly after last week, no Dean Healy (Zach Grenier). I mean, how are you gonna set things up between him and Laurel (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) like you did in episode eight, only to come back and pretend … like they didn’t happen?

A curious question, indeed, but one that warrants asking. Sure, it’s been a wildly up-and-down ride, but we’re almost ten episodes into this thing by now. Why is this a series that feels like it’s still feeling its way through? Why give so much focus to how many people our lead protagonist has slept with since she finished college? Why immediately kill off a character who represented a vice aimed at providing the narrative an interesting twist and a compelling direction?

Or, again, as Ella so gracefully proclaimed early in this week’s episode: what’s the point?

“Taking On Water” is marred by questions that don’t need answered. The hour centers around a leak that trickled out from what happened last week — the CIA told Luke (Danny Pino), Ella, and Red (Tony Shalhoub) that there was no reason to think the US should go to war with Syria — and while the CIA insisted this information remain classified, the ants think otherwise. As we learned, Team Alien Ant believes that if politicians can focus all their energy on going to war with another country, the United States won’t be able to even really notice that these creatures from another planet are secretly taking over the world. The leak is discovered when a television political commentator named Not Rachel Maddow discusses it on her show.

Who leaked it? Red and everyone else is pinning it on Luke or Laurel (spoiler alert: it’s not either of them, but if you want to find out who it actually was, you’re going to have to live through these 43 minutes of TV, just like I had to, on your own). Red wants a Special Prosecutor on the case to investigate Luke and Laurel because of this, and pretty much every other politician, regardless of ideology, agrees. This is this crux of the story this week, and it does three things.

1. It reminds us that … damn it, “Special Prosecutor” makes me long for The Good Wife.

2. It introduces said Special Prosecutor, Lawrence Boch (Michael Gaston), who ends up being a pretty fine character. Everything he says is with a smile, but everything he says is also somewhat dire. It’s fun. And after Luke convinces him to expand his investigation beyond this mere leak and into the Super Secret Room we found out existed last week, we begin to believe that business is about to pick up. The problem with that? Red shoots him. And then eats his brain. So, there’s that.

3. It launches a dirt-digging expedition into the lives of Laurel and Luke. This leads to Laurel’s Object Of Affection, Gareth (Aaron Tveit), finding out about her past sexual exploits, which may or may not include sleeping with a professor, an abortion, and banging Michael Moore. You think I’m making that up. I’m not. It spawns arguments and exposed insecurities and before you know it, the episode ends with Laurel calling the whole romantic thing off with the one guy we all thought she was ultimately going to marry somewhere down the road.

Everything else about the episode seems secondary. Well, everything else, except for this ominous clock that we find out is counting down somewhere in the depths of this Super Secret Room that Gareth receives access to after shutting off its wi-fi. I suppose that’s relevant, considering how the rest of the characters seem to think the people in that room are designing internment camps. And, well, when Mr. Boch confronts Red about said internment camps, Red shoots him dead. So, that’s probably important, too.

But I’m not supposed to use words like “perhaps” and “probably”, now, am I? See my point? When you whine each week about how increasingly hard it is to care about these people and this story, you can only invest in so many ebbs before you begin to ignore the flows. Each time this series picks up momentum, it whiffs on a slow pitch that it should have knocked out of the park. Or, shoot, a slow pitch that at least should have allowed it to get on base.

Outside the introduction of a really large digital clock, “Taking On Water” doesn’t move anything forward. Even worse, the whole ant invasion thing weirdly takes a back seat to where our attention is asked to be throughout this hour of television. We still don’t know exactly what the ants want. We still don’t know exactly how they plan to do it. We still don’t know if they can even be beaten. We still don’t know who’s really winning. And we still don’t know what the prize is.

It’s odd because every week, you kind of hope to turn the television to this series and walk away feeling like you have a better grasp of what’s going on, and every week, BrainDead finds another way to not only ignore that desire, but convolute it with needless detours. In a lot of ways, it contradicts what made The Good Wife so great for so long — and yes, this series will be held next to The Good Wife until it finds its own identity, so deal with it — because The Good Wife found the no-bullshit line and played with it brilliantly and consistently. If something needed to happen, it happened. More often than not, plot twists maintained their level of intrigue because the payoffs were worth it.

That’s not happening with BrainDead. Instead, the focus wanders on a week-to-week basis and if you’re going to have a premise that’s so wild and so unbelievable, you need to, on a base level, embrace your absurdities with more absurdities. Don’t try to sell me a 43-minute dissolution of the series’ only romantic element because of someone having sex with Michael Moore. If you’re playing it for laughs, center six minutes on that development and move on. Cut to the next scene, which should be Gareth boinking Megyn Kelly, and lay it to rest. Don’t turn on the melodrama when this is so clearly a series that works best when it’s allergic to … well … melodrama.

Instead, here we are. Wondering what the clock means. Wondering where Dean is. Wondering where Gustav is. Wondering what’s going on in that room. Wondering why the murder of a Special Prosecutor will most likely go unnoticed by the public. Wondering where the ants are marching.

And wondering, exactly, what is the point.

You Might Think

Y’all knew Laurel never slept with Michael Moore and that she was just playing Gareth to see how he’d react, right? You knew how that would eventually come to light, correct? OK, good.

So, if you know that, you also know that this isn’t the end for Gareth and Laurel, right? OK. Again. Good.

Also: there isn’t a single thing I believe about that entire arc. Because Laurel supposedly sleeps with Michael Moore, we had to take it this far? Gareth would react that poorly because of it? The two would break everything off? Honestly? It had to go that far? Everything surrounding that story turns me off and away on so many levels. And that’s a shame because the Gareth/Laurel romance was one of the few things I began to really enjoy about this series. So, not only is it now “over”, but the way it became “over” was poorly conceived.

“You know that for a fact? You know that for not a fact?” That combined with Red outlining his “favorite African-American person” makes me say that Tony Shalhoub is winning me over a little more each week.

The intern gag is kind of funny. The whole Red never remembering Laurel’s name makes me chuckle sometimes, too.

The only thing Laurel knows how to cook is quesadillas? Cute.

Honestly. I really thought the Special Prosecutor angle would’ve worked well. We need to know what’s going on in that room, and God knows it’s going to be imperative that the deal with the clock will be revealed sometime in the next few weeks. Boch could have worked as a fun device to get us there. His whole smiling, “You’ll need a lawyer” act was a fun play on how ludicrous the notion of a Special Prosecutor can be. Gaston, the actor, played Boch, the character, to perfection and it’s such a shame that the character was just another red herring, in a series that’s beginning to have too many of those.

Not a damn good reason in the world to leave Gustav off an entire episode of BrainDead. Not one damn good reason.

Things I’m interested in: Dean (come back!). Gustav (ditto!). That clock (I guess). That Super Secret Room, SRB-54 (I kind of guess). The new intern. A Lawrence Boch spin-off. How this series gets around explaining Boch’s death to the public. What Red usually brings for lunch. What’s up with J.K. Cornish (Kurt Fuller). The future of the musical recaps after this week’s musical recap.

Things I’m not interested in: Leaks. Laurel’s sexual past. Luke’s sexual past. Michael Moore. Don Pickle (Jacob Pitts). Fake Rachel Maddow being in jail. Committees. Blueprints. What Laurel and Gareth do in a planetarium. September 12.