Editor’s note: The below recap contains spoilers for The Old Man Season 2 Episode 3.
After the Season 2 premiere of The Old Man ended with a gunshot — going out on a literal bang, if you will — it’s time to find out just who shot whom. The possible combinations are many, as after weeks of Dan Chase (Jeff Bridges) and Harold Harper (John Lithgow) searching for Emily Chase (Alia Shawkat) in Faraz Hamzad’s (Navid Negahban) camp, it’s Emily and Hamzad who wound up accidentally finding them instead. With everyone reunited, and the threat of the Taliban looming, let’s dive into Episode 3.
The episode opens with the three old men in the cave, and Hamzad ready to shoot Chase until a shot goes off without him pulling the trigger. In his single-minded trail towards the man who upended his entire life and stole his wife and daughter from him, Hamzad didn’t clock Harper waiting in the shadows. Looks like this fish out of water is learning how to walk after all. Despite the decades of animosity, Chase grabs a medical kit to help his friend-turned-enemy, until the three of them are joined by Emily.
Chase Reunites With His Daughter in ‘The Old Man’ Season 2 Episode 3
The heartwarming reunion is put on pause long enough for Emily to patch Hamzad up, much to Chase and Harper’s surprise, but once he’s in the clear, Chase and his daughter have a long overdue hug. Harper warns her about Chase’s injury, and explains how Marion (Janet McTeer) got them into Afghanistan, and how she’ll help them out as well. Despite the clear-cut escape plan, Emily is reluctant to leave Hamzad behind, explaining that the village depends on him, and he can’t make it back there by himself. Harper counters that he’s also needed at home, and Emily tells him off for coming to get her at all.
Chase tries to talk her down, explaining that Harper only came to help him get her back, but now that the high of their reunion is fading, Emily turns her line of questioning onto her dad, demanding whether Harper knows the truth about her. Learning that he knows everything only doubles her resolve to stay and help Hamzad, as she maintains they should both understand her reasoning, but Hamzad himself chimes in and urges her to take the offered escape route. See, the problem with each of your three identities — Parwana Hamzad, Emily Chase, and Angela Adams — having a corresponding father figure, is when you get them all in the same room, they’ll gang up on you for your own good.
Hamzad’s well-being aside, Emily feels responsible for the Taliban’s presence in Hamzad’s village, and asks Chase and Harper for their help in getting Hamzad home. Chase agrees to help at once and explains to a bewildered Harper that given Emily’s unexpected bond with her biological father, any refusal to help him would mean losing Emily completely. Harper doesn’t see it that way, but this shouldn’t really come as a surprise to him, given the way his protegée takes so strongly to the people in her life, people like Harper’s grandson Henry. I suppose the whole “Hamzad is a monster” thing has something to do with it, so it’s nice to see Chase’s earlier lack of perspective is contagious.
Khadija Gets Some Unexpected Help in ‘The Old Man’ Season 2 Episode 3
Back in the village, Khadija (Jacqueline Antarmian) is still squaring off with Omar (Artur Zai Barrera), who has come looking for Hamzad. She attempts to scare him off, promising that whatever she levels at him is far less dangerous than what her brother would do, but Omar calls her bluff. Before things can escalate any further, a mysterious helicopter arrives, not bearing more Taliban fighters — as Omar is thrown off by its arrival — but rather a lone man, packing light. He walks into the stand-off and engages Omar in English, claiming he plays a role in Hamzad’s dealings with Kabul, and further adding that Omar’s presence has complicated things. He pays Omar the missing Taliban bribe, telling him that the Taliban only sent him there to intimidate them into paying up, which he has. This is all a little too smooth to be anything but a bluff, but Omar seemingly buys it — at least for now — and leaves the village. The man, it turns out, is Khadija’s son (Amir Malaklou). He arrives to tell her they’ve now got bigger problems than the Taliban. The problem in question? Morgan Bote (Joel Grey), who froze the village’s assets in revenge for them taking Emily instead of Dan.
Outside the village gates, Omar and his men are leaving when they spy Farouk (Michael Sifain) watching them. Omar engages the boy in conversation, asking if he’s seen a strange woman in the village lately, to which Farouk replies that he has. He tries to get more information out of Farouk, but the boy instead responds by slapping Omar and making a run for it. This understandably terrifies his mother, Faruza (Sara Seyed), who breaks free from those holding her back and is shot in the street for her troubles. The standoff turns into an all-out gunfight, with even Khadija getting a few shots in before pulling Farouk back inside.
All things considered, Chase, Harper, Emily, and Hamzad are faring much better. It’s not easy, certainly, with half their party traveling with severe injuries, but they’re making the most of it. Chase tries to lighten the mood with Hanzad with a joke, but his former friend isn’t having it, and just tells him to ask whatever it is he wants to know. Chase asks him what it is he told Emily to cause this change of heart, and Hamzad tells Chase he can just go on wondering, as he’s not going to give any details. Hamzad does tell him that all he did was tell Emily his side of the story, so it’s not like Chase doesn’t have his answer, in a manner of speaking. Either Chase cannot fathom what that side might be, or he just doesn’t want to.
Emily Works Through Her Complicated Past in ‘The Old Man’ Season 2 Episode 3
Chase and Emily head out from their hiding spot to try and recover the horses from under the eye of the few Taliban soldiers hanging around. Emily shuts down any attempts he makes at explaining himself, wanting to focus solely on getting Hamzad home. Now that the imminent danger has passed, and she’s reunited with Chase and Harper, Emily’s got the space to feel her full range of conflicted emotions regarding the lie she was sold about who she really is. Chase agrees to drop it as long as Emily follows his lead. Like Chase and Harper’s banter last week, Chase and Emily’s father-daughter dynamic in this episode is extremely compelling to watch and long overdue. Their interactions last season were limited to phone calls, and while a huge part of that was to preserve the mystery, now that it’s all out in the open, it’s great to watch them genuinely play off of each other. What Chase did was genuinely messed up, particularly in light of all of Emily’s repressed memories returning, but there’s no doubt in any of these scenes that he does genuinely love his daughter.
While the two of them try to get the horses, Harper and Hamzad are left alone on the ridge, with Hamzad still bleeding profusely, and Harper trying to coordinate their exit from Afghanistan. Marion tells him that a chopper will arrive to pick up the three of them, and when Harper wonders what this will cost him, she tells him all it will cost is dinner. He doesn’t seem to believe that this is all his ex-wife will want from him, but she neither confirms nor denies that fact, and now I am also left wondering what it is she’ll actually want from him.
Back in Hamzad’s village, Omar and his men have them surrounded. Khadija asks her son whether they can call the ministry for help, but he tells her they’re long past that, especially given that they engaged with his soldiers in a firefight. The bigger problem, he tells her, is that Bote has frozen all of their assets — in the U.S. and outside of it — as well as taking away access to the lithium deposit, leaving them with very few options. His real frustration is that all of this could have been avoided if Hamzad had asked him for help in retrieving Emily, instead of going about it in the underhanded way he did.
Omar Gives Hamzad an Ultimatum in ‘The Old Man’ Season 2 Episode 3
Meanwhile, down with the horses, Chase manages to take out one of the soldiers guarding the horses, taking out the second with Emily’s help. She arrives just in time, too, as the adrenaline wears off, and he actually remembers he’s gravely inured. The dead soldier’s satellite phone, however, is still connected, and Omar demands that he report in. Rather than the response he expected, Hamzad instead answers the call, and Omar issues an ultimatum: either he return to the village to accompany Omar to Kabul where he can explain who Emily is and why Chase and Harper came looking for her, or he can do nothing and let the situation in the village escalate.
Hamzad tells the group at once that he’s decided to comply and go to Kabul. Emily points out that this isn’t safe, and Chase agrees, adding that Omar is likely to just kill him anyway. Hamzad is furious that Chase would overstep like this, and soundly puts his old friend in his place, telling him he is in no position to tell him what to do, and a half-hearted attempt to get him home alive now does nothing to make up for the decades of damage he’s done. There’s a real weight to every single one of their conversations, recalling how close they used to be, and how much the two of them used to depend on each other, and while yes, this is obviously the intention of the scene, it’s always particularly narratively satisfying when the performances can really drive that feeling home, as they do here.
Emily offers to accompany Hamzad to the village to explain the truth to Omar, saying she can diffuse the whole thing by revealing the truth, that this isn’t some convoluted political mess involving a kidnapped FBI agent, but rather a decades-old family drama reaching its natural conclusion. Then, she reasons, it would weaken whatever strategic position he believes himself to be in. Harper and Chase tell Emily that Omar would more likely kill her than listen to or believe anything she has to say, and Hamzad agrees with them — they might all gang up on her, but they really do all love her too — and says that solving this problem falls to him alone.
While the family drama has been playing out between Chase, Hamzad, and Emily, the one person left on the outskirts of all this is Harper. On the ride back to the village, he confesses that the whole ordeal has left him reeling, specifically as it pertains to “Angela Adams” no longer existing. Losing the side of Emily that he knew best, to him, feels personal, even as Chase tries to assure Harper it’s not about him. Harper does seem to believe this, even as he’s not sure how to process his own feelings about it, and even as he admits that knowing she’d turn her back on the identity she created would not have stopped him from saving her anyway. I’m glad we got this little moment for Harper to talk through his feelings, as of all the relationships we saw play out in Season 1, Harper and Emily’s was the one of those that got the most dedicated screen time. Lithgow and Shawkat don’t get any one-on-one time in this episode, and understandably so given how much else is happening, but I can’t help but hope that they do get some sort of resolution before the season ends.
The group arrives at the village, and Hamzad shoots down Chase’s suggestion that he sneak into the village, saying that instead, he will meet the Taliban at the front gates. He bids Emily farewell and rides down, and Chase tells Harper to contact the chopper and tell it where to meet the three of them. Hamzad arrives at the gates to meet Omar, but doesn’t make it more than a few steps before stumbling. Witnessing this, Emily rides down to the village before either Chase or Harper can stop her. Now it’s her turn to face Omar, who demands to know who she is. He tells her he’s taking Hamzad to Kabul anyway, as part of a deal to leave the village alone, and asks her if she’s the abducted American FBI agent.
She doesn’t confirm any of this, but faced with his claims that none of this fight concerns her, Emily introduces herself to him as Parwana Hamzad, and if he wasn’t expecting that, then he was expecting a knife to the neck even less. A gunfight breaks out, with Chase firing to protect Emily and Hamzad as they head towards the village, and Harper sheltered off to the side trying to rearrange their chopper trip home. The chopper does arrive shortly after, guns blazing, which takes care of the Taliban problem, at least for now. Omar, somehow still alive, tries to crawl away, but like the first two episodes of the season, this one ends with a gunshot. Unlike the first two episodes, however, there’s no doubt about who shot whom.
The first three episodes of The Old Man Season 2 are out now. New episodes air on FX every Thursday and are available to stream next day on Hulu.
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