The Box Set: "Collateral."

Quick note to Box Set viewers: While it won’t concern those who are only currently watching (and commenting on) “Collateral,” because there’s only one episode left, I wanted to point out to those who may not be following “Station Eleven” where the longer announcement was made, that in the future for Box Set shows we will primarily be watching in two-episode per week patterns. That allows a deeper dive into character and plotting. Well, that’s better. I pretty clearly wasn’t enthralled with last week’s episode, but I did point out what is more clear now: That episode was just moving the pieces around for this endgame that is developed in Ep. 3. In turn, Ep. 3 was allowed to have less housekeeping duties and to just tell its story. And there was a bit of a surprise here as Berna, an undercover MI5 agent comes out of the shadows as someone who is A) In play thanks to Sam Spence, the other MI5 agent everyone loves to hate and B) She’s close to nailing Westbourne, the Pimlico Travel head who is clearly now at the forefront of this smuggling operation. If you pause to think, of course, you can see some problematic issues ahead in this turn of events (and I don’t mean negative storytelling problems; I mean, can the center hold and what are the motivations, which are good things to consider as a viewer). We also know more now about Sandrine and her issues, which I think are at least partly cleverly presented as mental health issues (she’s seeing the Golfing Shrink, after all), but are probably closer to this: She’s a xenophobe, straight up. And, at this juncture (in fairness I’ll say I can’t recall the finale clearly enough to pretend to be prescient), I would say the motivation for the sexual harassment storyline seems to be…to make viewers think that her issues are elsewhere. Rather than present her as a straight up racist/xenophobe. We also got to see more of Karen Mars, aka Mother of the Year, in a storyline that MUST have something truly dynamic coming because, well, it would just be ponderous without it. I mean, she’s a terrible mom and he’s ALSO a terrible dad and the girl is unloved and it’s a mystery why the French au pair is even still hanging about. At this point, this storyline is only giving me humor. But I think we can all agree that’s a distraction before something bigger. OK, have at it in the comments. I do think the episode was more propulsive and, even then, I thought, “well, there’s quite a LOT to wrap up in the finale.” Right? There’s a number of dangling threads. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit timgoodman.substack.com/subscribe