McCall is persuaded into helping the CIA locate a missing British scientist.

This is an episode all about truth and lies. It starts with the episode title being an untruth the audience will know to be such having watched up until now. McCall’s professional life flirts dangerously with being found out by her personal life, and The Great Game never ends, even if the rules change over time. An opportunity to be free of obligations from McCall’s previous employers and most regular non-paying client, ‘The Company’, drives this week’s plot. Hence what should on paper be a simple assignment of course turns out to be nothing of the sort.

The change of mission parameters from simple to potentially world-changing threat almost jumps too far on the scale, and the reason for the escalation is one an audience of this genre will these days have seen many times before, but what makes this work is the execution, managing to pack what could easily have been a movie plot (and indeed has been elsewhere) into 45 incredibly fast minutes.

The beauty of the episode comes through a number of complex threads being weaved into an otherwise relatively simple plot, working on some very simple beats. For all of McCall’s exceptional intelligence, wit and judgement on the job, Dorian Lundy, played excellently by Christian Coulson, proves an excellent foil for the Equalizer throughout. He pulls off an incredibly difficult trick on account of being far too smart for his own good, yet not half as smart as he thinks he is. There are shades of Battlestar Galactica’s Gaius Baltar here, as Lundy presents as both insufferably arrogant and utterly slippery at first to such an extent we may well wonder if it is even possible to like him. Yet layers to the character are revealed as he does recognise his own limitations and the burden he has inadvertently placed upon himself. It is enough to turn him from a CIA asset into a genuine client for McCall, and a few plot twists operate around this dynamic. There’s a particularly slick scene which Casino Royale fans will like in terms of a witty cold read exchange, framed around in-car audio and playing well with the old trope of never touching the stereo.

The final episode twist is set up wonderfully and fits the episode shape perfectly, though it comes at personal cost for McCall. And though the secret of her professional life remains safe from Delilah for now, never has that status been more severely tested than at this time. McCall does not get a happy ending; and a near miss on her status being exposed has lowered the Sword of Damocles over her yet further.

The only complaint I had was that a leap from an unknown shooter to ‘Triad’ early on felt jarring and in desperate need of a step in between a reveal beyond mere appearance. Whilst Colson references McCall identifying a Russian intelligence agent on sight later in the episode, it is not enough to ease this bugbear for me.

Verdict: That aside, this was a fast-paced, clever episode which was very much the Equalizer content I was hoping we would see at this stage. 8/10.

Russell Smith