Covert Affairs: Back to Business

What's my line, again?

I suppose when your show is about a bunch of spies who spy on people, you shouldn’t be surprised when everything’s a conspiracy. So the season opener of Covert Affairs didn’t reveal any new secrets or resolve much from last year’s big cliffhanger, and instead threw Annie Walker right back into another day at the office. C’est la vie, I suppose.

“Begin the Begin” begins with a silly fake-out before revealing that Ben survived his last-second gunshot wound and is now recuperating at a military hospital in Guam. Annie gives him a semi-professional debriefing in which she needles him about how she saved his life while he was trying to protect her, but then a couple assassins show up to make things interesting. Then the assassins learn why not to try that crap in a military hospital, Ben gets transferred stateside and Annie goes back to work.

Her job is to make contact with an Estonian tennis star, Nadia, who’s also a CIA informant who hasn’t been checking in lately. Annie makes contact but gets warned away, repeatedly, which makes her think that the Estonian mobster whom Nadia’s having an affair with might be threatening her. Also, Annie’s guest house got broken into while she was away, leading her to worry that her home has been compromised as well.

Joan tells her to back off, but Annie ignores her and accidentally busts in on Nadia’s birthday party, nearly blowing both of their covers, which leads Auggie to give her a talking-to about how not everything is a sinister conspiracy. (He tracks down Annie’s burglars, who are apparently just a couple of clueless kids.) Annie takes that lesson to heart just long enough to discover that Ben has disappeared from the hospital.

When she asks Joan, though, Annie deduces that Ben’s disappearance is actually part of the normal kind of conspiracy so she doesn’t need to worry. She does need to worry about Nadia, though, as she deduces that she isn’t being threatened by her mobster boyfriend so much as planning to kill him because the Russians have gotten to her. Annie and Auggie team up to save the mobster and recruit him as a CIA asset, while they get Nadia a new identity. Nadia gives Annie a lesson about fatalism and how Americans need to learn to deal with the idea that stuff doesn’t always work out. And then we learn that Arthur has recruited Ben to keep doing his lone-wolf act with CIA resources for a change, which Ben thinks is cool even after Arthur tells him to leave Annie out of it.

This would probably have been a somewhat tragic story if the show had managed to get me invested in Annie and Ben, or if I thought he’d really be able to stay away this time. The show seems to be signaling that Annie and Ben have both chosen lives that mean they can’t be together, and Annie does seem a bit more willing to move on, but I guess we’ll see how the season plays out. We also got some hints that the fallout from all those leaks to Liza Hearn might come down on Arthur’s head at some point, but that’s another shoe that doesn’t seem ready to drop yet. So “Begin the Begin” basically does what you’d want from a season premiere — play out the themes from last season in a way that’ll keep you watching through the summer. And mission accomplished, as far as that goes.

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