SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not watched “Fairytale Wedding,” the Feb. 28 episode of NBC’s “The Endgame.”
NBC’s new high-octane crime drama “The Endgame” aired its second episode Monday, revealing many more compelling details about its leading ladies — Morena Baccarin’s international arms dealer/crime boss Elena Federova and Ryan Michelle Bathé’s FBI agent Val Turner — than it did in its week-ago series premiere.
In the episode, “Fairytale Wedding,” we saw the titular nuptials go up in flames when the church where Elena and her now-husband Sergey Vodianov (Costa Ronin) were to be wed was blown up with everyone they loved inside. This was our first peek into Elena’s life with Sergey, who is currently presumed dead by Val and the rest of the world — but is actually in an upstate New York prison with Val’s husband, Owen (Kamal Bolden).
“What the wedding represents to Elena and to Sergey is this idea that, no matter how strong their love is for each other, they will never truly be safe in this world,” “The Endgame” executive producer Julie Plec told Variety. “They have too many enemies, good and bad, who are not ever going to let them have peace. So really, Elena’s endgame is about needing to find a way for them to be able to kind of get all of the pressure off of them and get everyone off their backs so that the happily ever after that they found with each other, amidst really terrible circumstances in their childhood, can be attainable for them.”
The premiere revealed that, as a child, Elena’s father was killed, and she then had to kill the young girl who had done it in self-defense. Baccarin told Variety that showing more of Elena’s dark past in this episode really allowed her to connect with the mysterious, present-day Elena, “The Queen” who runs a crime organization known as Snow White. Elena is currently in extreme FBI custody at Fort Totten, but still managing to execute a complicated grand plan of connected bank robberies through Snow White, while Val attempts to figure out how — and why.
“She has something very tragic happen to her,” Baccarin said. “And she’s already born into this crime family, but then finds true love through tragedy, through both her parents dying and being raised by this other family and falling in love with Sergey. And then when all of that is taken from her, it really draws a hard line in the sand. And they are very passionate people, but she’s also very calculating. One of my favorite moments in Episode 2 is he’s devastated and she’s like, ‘OK, I know exactly what we need to do, and I’m going to help us get there.’ And that’s where you see the rise of The Queen, of the person that is able to run a business and get revenge and all of that, in a very incredibly calculating and smart way.”
Morena Baccarin as Elena Federova and Costa Ronin as Sergey Vodianov in “The Endgame” (Photo by: NBC)
NBC
For Val, much of the hour is spent driving all over New York City to find out more about Elena and her master plan, and how Val herself is connected to it. In “The Endgame” premiere, it was revealed Elena is responsible for Val’s FBI agent husband Owen being sent to prison for criminal activities. Now, she doesn’t even had time to sort out exactly what happened, and is focused on stopping Elena and fighting Owen’s attempt to divorce her and distance himself from her for her own good in the FBI, a year after Val herself was the one to turn him in.
“How Val sees it is, ‘I don’t know why you popped up on my wire, but I’m going to do exactly what I’m supposed to do as an FBI agent, because we all took the same oaths, we all made the same agreements,’” Bathé said in an interview. “You know what I have to do. And if in fact, you lost your way, we can work through that, that’s something separate. I have to, as an FBI agent, do my job at all times. Even if that means taking you down.’ I think Val feels it’s for his own good anyway.’”
She continued: “When you talk to law enforcement, they believe 1000% that the best thing for a criminal is to be taken off the street, for their own good, as well as for society. So I think in some ways, she feels like she is doing the marriage and Owen a favor by being like, ‘No, dude, I’m saving you from a life of crime. Go rehabilitate yourself or whatever it is, but this isn’t it.’ So I think that’s probably how she works her way through it.”
“The Endgame” co-creators Nicholas Wootton and Jake Coburn assure us there is a method to Elena’s madness here and how it’s affected Val and Owen, a couple that has no apparent stake in Elena and Sergey’s battle.
“There’s definitely a very specific reason why the Owen character is involved in this entire plan and why he’s been a part of it all along,” Wootton said. “And then at the end, how this is reconciled for for Val is part of the storytelling and a throw to what we pray will be our Season 2… As you get into Episodes 8, 9 and 10, it starts to reveal itself what all that is building to.”
Coburn says wondering why Owen is involved is “a question you could ask of every member of the Snow White organization — because they’re all taking huge risks.”
“And they’re all making huge sacrifices. So it sort of speaks to the cause and the quality of leadership and the vision and all of these things.”
Jordan Johnson-Hinds as Anthony Flowers and Ryan Michelle Bathé as Val Turner in “The Endgame” (Photo by: Scott Gries/NBC)
Scott Gries/NBC
One major piece of the Val-Elena puzzle that’s dropped during Monday’s “The Endgame” is the story of a presumed-dead man named Isaac Bigby, who is responsible for the death of Val’s mother, is somehow a big part of Elena’s “endgame” and connects her and Val in a way that she isn’t yet ready to reveal to Val — or to the audience.
“I know that the Isaac Bigby thing percolates. To how deeply we find out they’re connected, that part still remains a mystery,” Bathé said. “But there is a percolation and it’s being laid in for a very specific reason.”
Baccarin says the reason Elena won’t reveal the reason right away is that it would get in the way of the relationship she is trying to build with Val throughout their back-and-forth interrogations in the bunker at Fort Totten, which come in between Val’s mad dashes around the city and the flashbacks to Elena’s past.
“Part of gaining Val’s trust is to tell her the truth constantly, always,” Baccarin said. “And to slowly unravel things and show her, because I think if I dumped all of it at once when I first met her and told her exactly what was going on, she would look at me like I was insane. So she needs to also discover for herself what has happened and what I’m playing at, that my endgame and her endgame align.”
She continued: “I think Isaac Bigby is obviously a really big part of that showing her — and we have a lot going on with that storyline — that we come from a place of loss, that we share that. And that family was, and is, very important to us and that we’ve both been manipulated by the system because of our loss and been wronged by the system. And if she does it slowly, if she slowly brings Val in, it’s a stronger bond and a stronger connection between them.”