The Endgame

2022 - 2 - 21

Post cover — Image courtesy of "Variety"

NBC's 'The Endgame' Depends Upon a Criminal Queen With Almost ... (Variety)

NBC's 'The Endgame' stars Morena Baccarin and Ryan Michelle Bathe as sparring adversaries, but the relationship is too imbalanced to work.

She’s so many steps ahead that there’s no possible way to know or understand how she got there, but “The Endgame” is more interested in throwing in as many cool shocks as possible than writing them in a way that makes much sense. From writer Nicholas Wootten, “The Endgame” sets up a high stakes game of cat and mouse between Elena and Val Turner ( Ryan Michelle Bathe), a once formidable FBI agent who’s been trying to claw her way back into the bureau’s good graces ever since her husband (Kamal Angelo Bolden) went to jail under mysterious circumstances. Say this for “ The Endgame”: It knows what it has in Morena Bacarrin, an actor so immediately telegenic that making sure she has everyone’s attention is as simple as her walking into a room.

<em>The Endgame</em> boss teases where Elena Federova's ... (EW.com)

Nicholas Wootton breaks down The Endgame's first episode and teases what's to come on the NBC thriller.

There's a whole storyline about who this person is and as the episode goes on hopefully we'll get to her in time. The twist was inspired by what we're going for thematically in terms of how the show is going to lay out going forward. In another episode, one of the hostages is put in an airtight bank vault which is slowly losing air and we get to know her better. We will come to understand the background of that and how her mother's murder becomes a big part of the story going forward. So it's recruitment, but also sort of an attempt at a philosophical shift in her viewpoint of the world. What the show is to her is coming to a different understanding about her position at work and the people around her. What is the format of The Endgame? It's not just baddies, they all did something very specific and it's part of the revelation of the series going forward. That twist is sort of the show in microcosm. In the pilot we see the Attorney General, Homeland Secretary and the head of the FBI. Elena says at the end of the pilot that the Homeland Secretary is next, and that's very true in the second episode as the next "case of the week." Her position at work, with her husband, her moral position is the journey Val goes on in the series. That is absolutely a big part of the show.

St. Louis native Ryan Michelle Bathe, Morena Baccarin square off in ... (STLtoday.com)

Ryan Michelle Bathe says it's fitting that her new series, “The Endgame,” is starting just as husband Sterling K. Brown's “This Is Us” is ending.

“I think I probably tried to submit my resume for ‘international woman of mystery,’ but it all comes back to the fact that I just like the idea of all these careers.” “It’s a show that is centered around these people who happen to be women who, ultimately, are after the same thing.” However, it also has to be grounded in reality and not get too broad and too crazy.” “It’s very much tunnel vision for Val in this area of her life,” she says. We are not sitting there going, ‘Oh, god, what are we going to do next?’ It’s really more like, ‘Oh, god, we have to lose that because it’s just too much.’” “It would be really difficult if we were both starting the same journey at the same time on different shows,” she says.

'The Endgame' review: Morena Baccarin stars in NBC's latest 'The ... (CNN)

Having enjoyed its share of success with "The Blacklist" and various imitators, NBC treads similar terrain with "The Endgame," whose major wrinkle and ...

While it doesn't tell you much about its endgame, as this sort of exercise goes, that's a good place to start. Created by Nicholas Wootton, this series might face similar hurdles over time, but it's highly creative in the early going, down to Elena negotiating, in the middle of everything else, to maintain her nicer-than-prison-orange wardrobe. One benefit here is that the conflict feels more focused, setting up a classic battle of wits between the central duo, with Elena having seemingly calculated each potential scenario and anticipated every eventuality.

NBC's The Endgame Premiere: Grade the Cat-and-Mouse Thriller (TVLine)

Read TVLine's recap of the 'Endgame' series premiere, then grade the new NBC drama starring Morena Baccarin and Ryan Michelle Bathé!

Elena then recounts a childhood story, and we learn about the day she was forced to grow up — and kill her attacker. Val knows how Elena operates — the two women go way back to when Elena tried to kill Val — and she correctly deduces Elena’s next bank target, which finally earns her a face-to-face with Elena. Elena questions Val’s blind faith in her job institution, even as her superiors suspect she’s a dirty agent. Elena explains that she took over seven banks — Snow White and the seven banks, get it? He hands her divorce papers, knowing that her bosses won’t believe she wasn’t involved as long as they’re married, but Val is reluctant to give up on him. “You’ve messed with the wrong woman,” she declares.

NBC's 'The Endgame': TV Review (Hollywood Reporter)

A Russian mercenary (Morena Baccarin) and an FBI agent (Ryan Michelle Bathé) engage in a game of cat-and-mouse in this new thriller.

Since the whole point of the Elena/Val dynamic is that they have Googled each other, the Endgame audience has to sit back in relative boredom watching them realize that the answers for things were things they already knew. In The Endgame, there isn’t a memorable set-piece or stunt in the pilot. Val knows that with Elena, every scheme has layers, a thing that we also get to know because Val says it to anybody who will listen a half-dozen times in the first couple of episodes. The Endgame pilot is bad and the second episode offers no evidence of course correction to make things better, so I’m prepared to move on, even if NBC wasn’t. We begin with mysteriously overdressed Russian mercenary Elena Federova (Baccarin) being delivered to a secure military facility in Long Island. The weird thing is that I’m not completely sure why they’ve brought her in or from where, but almost immediately after her arrival, everything starts going haywire. The plot has superficial similarities to shows like The Blacklist and Blindspot, which have been staples of NBC’s schedule for years.

Ryan Michelle Bathé is Ready to Save the World in New Thriller 'The ... (Observer)

Ryan Michelle Bathé and Morena Baccarin co-star in the NBC thriller 'The Endgame' as two women either saving or destroying the world.

So we’re grappling with that in real time, and we’re also grappling with the fact that there is, again, a casting director on the other side of that who sees something in you that you may not see in yourself. I’m in Williamsburg and I love that show Unorthodox—I’d love to be in Unorthodox, but that’s not my role. Or that you see, but you have to make peace with the fact that, yeah, I’m gonna be the girl that goes in and 9 times out of 10, I’m probably gonna book the job for a lawyer, smart, just graduated, ready to take on the world, sassy, 5’4”. I’m not gonna book the role of the ex-supermodel at 100 pounds who has a drinking problem. But Val grew up at a time when it looked really dangerous, and for her, it’s a very stark choice between doing good in the world and not doing good in the world. When you’re first starting out, you have this sense—particularly when you have a certain training, and particularly when you start becoming an actor—it’s like: “I can do anything; I’m gonna do anything! You don’t have to be here in New York. I would think D.C. would probably be where all the action is if you really want to move up in the ranks, right? I also try to find the ways in which Val chooses to be very different from that way. When they are talking to each other and being with each other, that really does anchor us and ground us in the world of the show. And a lot of times, in the business that she’s been in, there’s a certain predictability about the bad guy. She’s precise, insightful and surgical, and the dynamics that we are trying to come up with and explore are very much happening in the moment. So the idea of, “Oh, what’s the backstory?”—while I love all that homework, this is not that. Val and Elena have crossed paths before, five years earlier when Elena tried to kill Val for reasons that remain unknown in the pilot.