When we last saw Ellen and Brian Sanders, Brian was wrestling with Duncan Carlisle, attempting to poke him with a killer syringe. As Sonia pointed out last week, there was never any chance they would succeed at this, because Duncan is Dylan McDermott’s character, and is clearly in this for the duration, but you take cliffhangers where you can find them on Hostages. Picking up the drama where it left off, tonight’s episode resolves the situation by having Ellen run in, just as Brian is about to kill Duncan, and deliver a line that sums up Hostages’ narrative technique so perfectly that the writers ought to have it tattooed on their foreheads: “We can’t! I’ll explain later.” As it happens, Brian has managed to poke Duncan with the killer syringe, but he only poked him a little bit, so Ellen sticks Duncan in an ice-filled bathtub and prays that none of the fellow commandos stationed in the house get suspicious. The next morning, Duncan, who is just fine, thanks for asking, tells her that he’s glad she came to her senses in the nick of time, and, hey, no harm, no foul. He does not take a swig from his cup and add, “Honey, that’s great coffee,” but if he did, it would fit in as well as anything else.
Harold Pinter and Dennis Potter used to write plays in which mysterious, menacing figures on inexplicable errands barged into complacent, middle-class homes, taunted and tormented the families living there, exchanged bits of heavily weighted, surreal dialogue, and then took their leave, presumably to move on to the next lucky household. If the scripts for Hostages had been staged in the London West End or off-Broadway in the ‘50s or ‘60s, with Elaine Stritch, Arthur Hill, and Albert Finney as Toni Collette, Tate Donovan, and Dylan McDermott, they might be fondly remembered theatrical events, and Stanley Kauffmann or Susan Sontag might have used a lot of ink explaining how the mysterious events depicted onstage were a metaphor for man’s irrational response to the threat of the atomic bomb and guilt over the Holocaust. But Hostages is a TV series, in a season cobbled together by a bunch of people who are short on ideas and talent but who’ve taken a look at the ratings for Scandal and decided that, if you can’t make a show that’s any good, maybe you can shoot the works on unapologetic craziness and people will find the results addictive. What they’ve discovered is that making that kind of show works takes talent, too, certainly more talent than it takes to come up with, “We can’t. I’ll explain later.”
Hostages’ combination of star-spangled cray-cray and half-assed slackness is rough on its performers. Toni Collette is one of the most dependable actresses alive, and even she can only do so much with a meant-to-be-suspenseful scene where she walks down a hospital corridor, sees Dylan McDermott coming toward her, steps into a room, rolls her eyes while silently counting to 10, and then steps back into the corridor and goes on her way. “Silently counting to 10” is pretty much the subtext of every scene she has. It’s not very interesting, but save your pity for the poor bastards who don’t have her aplomb, audience rapport, and trouper’s spirit. The President has a scene with his Chief of Staff and the NSA chief in which they shovel exposition at each other—something about how the Prez has decided to cancel “Operation Total Information,” a massive spying program that has been used to foil “hundreds of terrorist attacks,” which is why his underlings are on board with having him killed.