[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Old Man Season 2, Episode 5, “XII.”]
The Old Man continues to ramp up the stakes as Dan Chase (Jeff Bridges) seeks answers surrounding Morgan Boat’s (Joel Grey) untimely demise at the end of Episode 4.
The situation was even more intense as it unfolded in tandem with Dan’s daughter Emily (Alia Shawkat) facing an attack in Afghanistan. Listening over the phone helplessly as the village was infiltrated by a threatening force, the former CIA agent was rendered even more useless without Boat’s ability to assist in sticky situations. When it sounds as if Emily has met her demise, Dan is pushed to extreme measures of torture to pull answers out of one of Boat’s hitmen.
Chuck Hodes/FX
Hiding out in Harold Harper’s (John Lithgow) home, Dan and his former colleague are forced to carry out the torture while occupying the space with Harold’s wife and Zoe (Amy Brenneman), who had been living with Boat when Dan returned stateside. Believing Emily is dead definitely marks a shift in Dan, but could we see things go even further than basement torture as the season unfolds?
“He’s a big revengeful person,” Bridges tells TV Insider. There is “a vengeance coursing through his body. He’s been trying to shun that aspect of himself for 30 years. And here it is again, this rich thing. I don’t think he really knows what he’s capable of or what he might do at this point,” the actor adds.
When it comes to Dan’s daughter, who viewers learned wasn’t his biological child, but rather the daughter of his late wife Abbey (Hiam Abbass) and her first husband Faraz Hamzad (Navid Negahban), the man does not play around. Emily may not be blood, but he’d move heaven and earth to make sure she was okay, and this latest installment, “XII,” saw how that effort to help was unsuccessful.
“Working with Alia, she’s just a great actress,” Bridges adds. “And it’s [like] putting myself in my character’s shoes of ‘I want you as my kid. You’re not my kid.’ Which in a sense is the essence of the whole show—exactly what we are willing to do for ours and what we call ours, and we can do some incredible things and some terrible things.”
As for where the story is heading next, Brenneman teases, “At the end of [Episode 5], I say, let’s go to London. So that’s the next thing that happens, is Dan and Zoe go to London as Marcia and Henry,” the aliases fans were introduced to in Season 1 when Dan originally took Zoe on the run. Together, Brenneman says Zoe and Dan will “start trying to find [Suleyman] Pavlovich (Rade Serbedzija),” the man who has had more direct ties to the conflict Dan has been embroiled in for decades than previously believed.
Can Dan and Zoe find the answers they seek? Stay tuned as Season 2 continues on FX.
The Old Man, Season 2, Thursdays, 10/9c, FX (Next day on Hulu)
