‘The Old Man’ Season 2 Episode 3 Recap: Once Upon a Time in Afghanistan

Reunited, and it feels so good. After spending the first two episodes of Season 2 apart, both sides of The Old Man’s story come together in this episode. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Shot by director Steve Boyum with an eye for thoughtful closeups, intense action, and sweeping vistas of the wilderness alike, it’s a Central Asian neo-Western par excellence.

It really does have all the hallmarks of the genre. A remote village in a rugged desert land. A capable young woman in terrible peril. Two old gunslingers taking one last ride to find her. A powerful, dangerous man in control of valuable land. A brash young bandit come to take it all. A gunfight at the gates of town. A rescue by the cavalry. A white hat turning, if not black, then at least shades of grey. 

As is custom so far this season, the plot is simple. At Faraz Hamzad’s compound, his consigliere Khadija’s cosmopolitan son Tarik (Amir Malakou) arrives via chopper with a duffel full of cash intended to placate Omar and his Taliban soldiers. But the ploy fails when Omar gets the truth out of Farouk, the little boy who befriend Angela: There’s an American woman in the compound. A firefight breaks out, with Farouk’s mom Faruza shot dead before his eyes as the first casualty. 

In that cave nearby, Angela faces all three of her fathers: Hamzad, the biological father from whom she was kidnapped by Dan Chase, the man who raised her, and who came to rescue her alongside Harold Harper, the mentor who made her the person she is today. Or was: She convinces the two men to help her save the life of the wounded Hamzad, whom Harper shot to save Chase, but says “Angela Adams,” FBI agent, no longer exists. 

Their journey back to Hamzad’s village for medical help is the stuff of an epic adventure. In another drum-tight fight scene, Dan stabs a Taliban scout to death and strangles another — with the help of Angela, who pins the man’s arm to the ground to prevent him from reaching his gun. This has such bizarrely intimate, even incestuous energy I barely even know where to begin, except to say kudos to writers Joseph E. Steinberg and Hennah Sekander for coming up with something this intense. Later, the foursome ride across the barren rocky landscape on horseback, an image out of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. All of this is great stuff. You absolutely want your smart genre show to go as heavy on the genre end as it does on the smarts.

The two ends meet when Hamzad turns himself in to avoid further bloodshed to either his people or his daughter…who immediately follows behind him and chooses to stab Omar rather than broker a deal at the expense of her cover and her father’s life. A whole lot of people die as a result in the truly massive battle that follows. Chase bloodily blows away soldiers and tank gunners with a sniper rifle, with Jeff Bridges displaying a lion-in-winter mercilessness akin to Sylvester Stallone’s work in the brutal fourth Rambo film. Both Harper and Khadija both realize they’ve been abandoned by their benefactors (unseen eminence grise Morgan Bote, played by Joel Grey, has cut Hamzad off) and are now on their own. And Angela strolls up to the still-struggling Omar and executes him at point-blank range. Angela Adams is dead alright. Long live Parwana Hamzad.

In case it wasn’t clear, this is tremendous television. Getting the three protagonists together in the same place at the same time for the first time is worth the price of admission alone, simply because it allows us to watch Alia Shawkat, Jeff Bridges, and John Lithgow react to one another reacting to one another. It’s a pleasure to watch three such immensely watchable, likeable leads work in the lingering closeups that are the show’s stock in trade. 

And the vibes, man, the vibes! You can all but hear the sweeping Magnificent Seven theme music playing at times, or the coiled-snake sounds of Ennio Morricone. Navid Negahban, Jacqueline Antaramian, and Artur Zai Barrera play their archetypal roles expertly; you could transplant these characters and this dynamic not only to a Western setting, but to the feudal Japan of Shōgun or the dangerous Star Wars galaxy of Andor, and they’d work just as well. 

But as those comparisons might indicate, there’s a dark edge to the proceedings here. The best way I can sum up that particular vibe is this: One child watches his parent die, while another child helps her parent kill. That’s the world the old men of The Old Man have created, and for all its genre excitement, the show never loses sight of that.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.