The Outsider

This is a stellar one-and-done episode. Very little conspiracy stuff here - this is about the members of API doing some actual analysis of military intelligence, while Will joins the totally weird director of the American Policy Institute, Truxton Spangler, in D.C. to drum up some funding.

Some fantastic character work here from Michael Cristofer, who plays Spangler. The character is such a bizarre, lonely, cigarette-addicted kook, with a very distinct speech pattern that often makes him come across as aloof and a little spaced-out. But he's also unsettling and intelligent. In an early scene he stresses how he wants API to be independent from the intelligence community:

"Make sure they remember the information they gather is useless unless they have us to make sense of it," he tells Will.

The rest of the episode involves Will and Spangler making their case on behalf of API to unnamed men in blue suits and a variety of military and political higher-ups. Great dialogue abounds as Will is stuck with Spangler's eccentricities in halls of great power and influence, trying to assume his dead mentor's position the best he can.

Meanwhile, the three members of Will's team are given a separate case: a bevy of fresh intel from the CIA on a member of Jemaah Islamiyah; the NSC wants to know whether or not initiate a missile strike on a building the target may or may not be arriving at soon. While the analysts can't tie him directly to any imminent threats against the U.S. and they question the accuracy of the intel, they have to grapple with the fact that he is a known terrorist, an "Al-Qaeda rockstar." But another complication comes when drone images show 10-100 civilians in the target zone, including many children. When it comes to analyzing data, do ethics come into play? And is it worth taking out some civilians just to get at a terrorist?

The beauty of this episode is that the analysts are a world away, unconnected to the events on the ground where the strike may take place... isolated and apart, exactly as Spangler said API should always be. It makes for a riveting episode filled with first-class writing. The screenplay for this one is floating around the net, and aspiring writers would be wise to read it. My favorite episode so far.