Covert Affairs: Fool in the Rain

At the annual assembly of the World Trade Organization in Toronto, an amiable Persian man named Yahya (Mousa Kraish, who, by the way, has a totally adorable personal website, which makes me suspect he might be chock-full of personality) slips away from the rest of the Iranian delegation and pops into a taxi, instructing the driver to take him as close to the United States as his limited funds will allow. Next stop: the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.

To distract herself from thoughts of Ben, Annie stays late at the office, steeped in unnecessary busywork. Joan convinces her to take a few days off to clear her head. Back at home, Hurricane Danielle bursts in on Annie while she’s taking a relaxing soak in a sudsy bath to rant incoherently about how Michael’s brand-new job is conflicting with their planned anniversary getaway. Note to Annie: Find another place to live, stat. Danielle goes on at some length about Michael’s utter selfishness, while the brief spurt of bonhomie I felt last week when she was gushing about Jai’s fabulous bone structure evaporates into acrid vapors. At least it’s now clear we’re supposed to find Danielle ridiculous and childish, but that doesn’t make her character especially less exasperating.

Determined not to waste the hotel reservation, Danielle drags Annie along with her to -- wait for it -- Niagara Falls.

Yahya contacts the CIA, wanting to defect to the United States in exchange for giving them intelligence about the Iranian government’s sanction-violating arms deals. Since Annie is already on the scene, Joan and Arthur ask her to meet with Yahya to assess the quality of his information. Annie, who is pretty good-natured about having her work life collide with her vacation in this manner, slips away from Danielle and meets secretly with Yahya. They chat in Farsi. Yahya is cute and likeable, and this is an agreeable enough episode, but I’m not going to expend much energy recounting these scenes in loving detail, because there’s nothing fresh or significant about any of this. We’ve seen this defection plotline many times before (general rule of thumb: if your plot idea has ever been the basis of a 21 Jump Street episode, it’s time to look for less-trampled ground), and Covert Affairs doesn’t make much of an attempt to put a fresh spin on it.

Annie explains away Yahya’s presence to Danielle by claiming he’s helping the Smithsonian recover some art looted from museums in Tehran. While Danielle and Yahya go off sightseeing together, Annie purchases a fax machine, hooks it up in her hotel suite, and faxes pages and pages of Yahya’s top-secret information to Langley. A fax machine? Really? Since we’ve already seen that Annie carries a souped-up, mega-encrypted phone, it seems like it would have been far faster and simpler and safer for her to photograph the documents and email them to Joan.

Yahya and Danielle hang out and bond and play skeeball and have a marvelous time together. Yahya confides in Danielle: He wants to go to the United States to find his childhood love, Roudibah, who currently lives in New Jersey.

Joan gives Annie the bad news: Yahya’s information, which involves a simple bootlegging scheme instead of the promised weapons deal, isn’t important enough to earn him asylum. The CIA thinks he might be more valuable serving as an asset back in Tehran. Upset, Yahya claims he’ll get to the United States on his own and flees from Annie.

Meanwhile, Auggie continues his unscrupulous affair with journalist Liza Hearn. Liza, who openly disapproves of Auggie’s CIA work, begins pressing him for information about a London-based shipping company called the Albion Group, which, we know from “Into the Light,” is something Henry Wilcox was/is mixed up with. Arthur calls Auggie into his office and confronts him with incriminating photos of him with Liza. Arthur is monstrously unhappy about this explicit evidence of Auggie’s treachery, and great merciful Zeus, Auggie, did you honestly expect this to turn out any other way? He had to know the CIA would be keeping close tabs on Liza. This whole business is not Auggie’s finest hour.

Auggie insists he’s been using Liza as part of his (incredibly reckless and idiotic and self-serving) non-CIA-sanctioned mission to find the source of the leaked information, though the only useful tidbit he’s unearthed thus far has been Liza’s mention of the Albion Group. Arthur orders Auggie to feed Liza misinformation about Albion, in the hopes of ferreting out the leak that way. Auggie meets with Liza and dutifully feeds her Arthur’s bogus story. To her credit, it doesn’t take Liza long to figure out that Auggie is just yanking her along.

Danielle fills Annie in on Yahya’s plans to meet Roudibah. In fact, Danielle has already tracked Roudibah down; Roudibah has agreed to come up to Niagara and meet Yahya by the falls. Ah, Danielle: Infuriating, but occasionally helpful in moving the plot along.

Annie stakes out the meeting spot while flashing back yet again to her affair with Ben on that beach in Sri Lanka: It’s the last day of Annie’s visit, but Ben convinces her to extend her ticket so she can spend more time with him. Ever mysterious, Ben then slips off by himself; Annie spots him on the beach in the rain, arguing with a mysterious figure. The figure has his back to Annie, but he almost looks like Jai, except he’s wearing an awful baseball cap. Impeccably-dressed fashion-plate Jai is surely not the type of man who goes around wearing silly hats. In the morning, Ben has vanished, leaving only the enigmatic note on Annie’s pillow, and is it wrong that my very first thought was to hope the airline wouldn’t hit her up with huge fees for changing her return ticket yet again?

Annie spots a mysterious woman approaching Yahya. On the phone from Langley, Jai tells Annie the woman isn’t Roudibah -- the CIA already contacted her, and she told them she decided against meeting Yahya. The woman pulls a gun on Yahya and, with the help of an armed henchman, marches him away from the crowd.

Annie trails Yahya and his captors into the tunnels leading to the observation decks. The woman attacks her. A not-bad scuffle ensues. When the henchman tries to shoot Annie, Yahya fends him off. They both topple over the edge of the observation deck; the man tumbles to his presumed death, but Yahya clings to the edge of the platform for dear life. Annie overpowers her attacker and hauls Yahya to safety.

Annie announces that NROC -- the National Resettlement Operations Center -- has decided to help Yahya defect to the United States after all. When she returns to the hotel suite, she finds Danielle shacking up with surprise visitor Michael. Feeling like a third wheel, Annie heads back to DC.

Annie, Auggie and Jai go out and swill some more conspicuously-displayed bottles of Bud Light together. In what is perhaps a (futile) attempt to temper his astonishing beauty, Jai is wearing, yep, a stupid baseball cap. Oh, Jai. I’m so very disappointed in you. Annie looks at him and realizes he was the man with whom Ben was arguing on the beach in Sri Lanka.

Okay! Mostly a filler episode, and, as I’ve said before, in such a short season, there shouldn’t be any room for unnecessary padding, but it was mostly enjoyable. Plus, more progress was made on the leak storyline, with a tantalizing implication that it somehow involves Henry Wilcox. Most vitally, the episode finally established some kind of concrete connection between Jai and Ben, which has great potential for future fireworks. The two-hour finale airs next week.