Designated Survivor

‘Designated Survivor’ Season 1, Episode 4: A Way Forward

Kiefer Sutherland in “Designated Survivor.”CreditCreditBen Mark Holzberg/ABC

“When a snake’s in your kitchen, you don’t invite it to dinner; you cut off its head,” General Cochrane snarls at Tom Kirkman in this week’s episode of “Designated Survivor.” Until this point, the show’s myriad flaws didn’t resemble one snake so much as the many heads of a hydra, threatening the show from all angles.

This week’s engrossing hour takes a knife to each one. In its pace, tone and improved dialogue, it provides a way forward that allows for intrigue and ambiguity without turning Kirkman into an antihero. Here’s how the episode deals with each of the show’s shortcomings thus far.

The plodding pace does not match the show’s catastrophic premise.

This episode speeds along, from the Middle East back to Michigan and Washington, D.C., into law offices, homes and holding cells. You see protests and standoffs, mutinies and firings, characters wielding weapons and throwing punches. You feel overwhelmed, like a newly sworn-in president, but never completely.

Kal Penn is on the wrong show.

There wasn’t really enough justification for the president to spend so much time with this droll speechwriter, or to put so much trust in him. So it makes too much sense that he is elevated to press secretary, where he can appropriately deploy his genial sarcasm and still be closely involved in the nation’s day-to-day crises. (Side note, can we get a C. J.-and-Danny-like sexual tension going between Seth and one of those reporters?)

Kirkman’s family drama is saccharine.

After being dangled like flimsy, adorable props in previous episodes, the children were dispensed with entirely this week. (One can only assume Leo is still out there at his dubstep raves.) Alex finally gets her own meaty subplot, using her constitutional law expertise to advise Kirkman in a key moment and going to bat for a Honduran family threatened with deportation. She now owes Kimble Hookstraten a favor, meaning she might have to do something that hurts her husband down the line.

Too much Aaron and Emily bickering in White House rooms.

Both issues are solved with one plane ride to Michigan. It was getting tiring to see Aaron and Emily pulling on Kirkman from opposite directions, making eyes at each other all the while. Instead, Emily is sent out into the field, where she can put her empathy and idealism to better use.

General Cochrane is a cookie-cutter villain.

The one-note hawk becomes the first casualty of the Kirkman administration after the president fires him dramatically in front of the whole defense team. The pilot had hinted that Cochrane might start a military coup and become a recurring nemesis, and if that had happened I might have stopped watching altogether. But Cochrane is such a “bad” character and a bad character that when Kirkman fires him, it feels like a double victory for the viewer.

The show lacks complex, ambiguous characters.

Both Virginia Madsen and Maggie Q do nice work in this episode as Hookstraten and Hannah Wells. As the other designated survivor, Hookstraten is perfectly set up to be Kirkman’s season-long frenemy, offering support and dissent according to her long-term political purposes. She’s slimy, but her concerns about Kirkman’s indecisiveness are legitimate. Wells had thus far possessed a kind of facile “I’m always one step ahead of you” shrewdness as she uncovered one piece of perfect evidence per episode; like with Jack Bauer, it was part mesmerizing and part predictable. But in this episode her lead falls flat, and she crumbles with fury and exhaustion.

But the most intriguingly ambiguous character of the episode is Kirkman himself. After playing an excruciatingly long waiting game, he pulls a stunning about-face on his moral absolutism, quickly firing his general and arresting the governor of Michigan. Remember in the first episode when he said he couldn’t stay in Washington because he refused to play games? Well, buckle up, because the games have started. He flexed his presidential muscle, and he liked it.

Will he go full Jack Bauer? I still don’t quite have a beat on what Kiefer Sutherland is going for here, but that’s O.K. As the show told us in no uncertain terms this week, the presidency turns you into a different person.