Covert Affairs: Houses of the Holy

Ah, Covert Affairs: Putting the “domestic” firmly into “Domestic Protection Division.”

Here’s what I’m looking for in a show about secret agents, and bear in mind that this list is by no means comprehensive: Memorable villains. Cool action scenes. Exotic locales. Sophisticated intrigue. Complex relationships. Sendhil Ramamurthy leaping wildly from the tops of shipping containers in pursuit of miscreants.

Sadly, Covert Affairs kind of fumbled the ball on all fronts this week.

I should be clear: This is not a bad episode by any stretch. It’s just not terribly interesting, or evocative, or exciting. In fact, if I’m judging it harshly, I’d have to say it’s… pretty dull. There’s a strong motif of crumbling marriages and cheating spouses running throughout this episode, most of it only peripherally linked to our major players, which is not what I’m looking for in an action-packed spy show; it’s difficult to become emotionally invested in anything that happens in this hour.

Crucial information about overseas missions is getting leaked to foreign powers, and the CIA has narrowed the culprit down to a member of the Senate’s Intelligence committee (smartypants Jai chimes in, “No member of the Senate has been convicted of treason since 1797!” -- that'd be Senator William Blount of Tennessee, for all those Congressional history buffs out there). Joan summons a bunch of junior-level operatives, Annie amongst them, and directs them to cozy up to various senators to pinpoint the leak. Annie is assigned the task of shadowing Senator Gil Jarvis (D.W. Moffett), the chair of the committee. Joan puts Jai in charge of overseeing the operatives, which gives him a chance to hang out at Annie’s desk and flirt sexily with her while Joan lurks in the background and looks displeased.

In her semi-permanent cover as a Smithsonian employee, Annie shows up at Jarvis’s office to supply him with new artwork. She meets Jarvis’s vapid wife Madeline (Lauren Holly) and his attractive young Chief of Staff, Ashley Briggs (True Blood’s Anna Camp). Annie chats in fluent Portuguese (chalk up another language on her ever-growing list) with the Brazilian custodian, Frederico, and discovers Jarvis always stays in his office extra-late on Tuesdays. Annie swipes Frederico’s access card and slips into Jarvis’s office at night, where she spies on Jarvis getting it on with Ashley.

Annie orchestrates a chance meeting with avid rower Ashley at the Congressional Rowing Club. They go out drinking together, and Annie expertly pries the truth about the affair out of her new best friend. Ashley also spills the beans about Madeline’s close friendship with Tina Varma, the shady wife of the Indonesian ambassador. This scene really plays to Annie’s strengths as a spy -- Piper Perabo is great here, wheedling information out of poor Ashley under the guise of engaging in a little innocent girl-talk.

In other news, Auggie, currently on loan to the Special Activities Division, has been working late hours on something called Operation Goliath. He’s remotely helping his former Army unit track down and capture a pivotal tribal leader named Nasir on the Afghan border. At one point, Joan tries to pull him away from the mission so he can help out the DPD; when Auggie explains how important it is for him to reconnect with his old buddies from before he lost his sight, she immediately relents. Joan’s awesome: She’s hard-edged and brittle and brusque, but there’s something fundamentally nice about her. It helps greatly that she’s smart and competent, too. Thumbs up for Joan.

Auggie’s plotline, on the other hand… I like Auggie just fine, and it’s good to see him getting a bit more character development, but watching some guy sitting at a desk listening to a bunch of other guys describing some offscreen action taking place halfway around the world doesn’t make for compelling viewing.

If the B plotline is less than a rousing success, the C plotline is, sadly, even duller: Annie’s sister Danielle frets that her husband Michael, who has been working late hours, is growing distant. When Annie spots Michael leaving a hotel in the middle of the afternoon, she suspects Michael of having an affair. She confronts Michael about this, and Michael explains that he was fired from his job two months ago and hasn’t yet worked up the nerve to tell Danielle. He was at the hotel for nothing more nefarious than attending a job fair. Annie advises Michael to come clean with Danielle; Michael does, and Danielle appears to take it well. Danielle is fine in this episode -- for a nice change of pace, she’s not acting either bitchy or condescending toward her sister -- but that doesn’t mean her mild and easily-resolved marital difficulties are a source of great fascination.

Once again, Annie skulks around Jarvis’s office after hours. She finds a flash drive belonging to Madeline which contains a draft of a memo ostensibly from Jarvis explaining how Ashley has been fired for selling government secrets to a foreign power. From this, Annie deduces that Madeline is the leak -- she’s passing information to Tina Varma, who is passing it along to the Indonesian government -- and she’s plotting to frame Ashley to take the fall for it.

Madeline is not especially villainous -- she’s a scorned wife who is taking revenge against her husband and his mistress, and she seems legitimately unaware of the scope of the mess she’s in. Tina Varma is the closest this episode has to a villain, and we meet her in one brief scene where she’s a bit snotty and aloof to Annie. It’s not enough. Covert Affairs really needs to come up with some interesting and compelling villains to anchor these plotlines and give the episodes a bit of weight.

Joan assembles a meeting of the DPD to hammer out a course of action against Madeline. Some nasty little worm named Marty mouths off to Joan and orders poor Annie to fetch him coffee; Annie starts to obey, but Jai wordlessly (and awesomely) places a hand on her shoulder to keep her in her seat. I like Jai. Marty wants to plug the leak immediately; Joan wants to keep Madeline in place so the CIA can use her to pass false information to the Indonesians.

Annie shadows Madeline as she meets with Tina at a restaurant. After Tina leaves, Annie joins Madeline, tells her the jig is up, and takes her into CIA custody.

At Langley, Joan grills Madeline, who claims it was all Tina’s idea to pin the leak on Ashley. Madeline passed the state secrets along to Tina because she wanted to destroy her husband’s career in retaliation for his various affairs, in the hopes that she and Jarvis could then return to the happiness of the early days of their marriage. It’s never quite explained why Madeline thought committing high treason would be a better option than getting a divorce or going to marital counseling or writing a sensational tell-all memoir about Jarvis’s infidelities.

Joan gives Annie the bad news: Because the CIA wants to keep Madeline in place, Ashley is going to have to publicly take the fall for the leak. Annie thinks this is pretty sucky. She claims Ashley is an innocent party whose life will be ruined because of one indiscretion, but Joan points out that Ashley got herself into this mess with her ill-advised affair with Jarvis. While she’s going on about the hazards of workplace romances, Joan throws Jai a meaningful look. The logical interpretation of this is that Joan is trying to warn Annie of the dangers of hooking up with beautiful Jai, but I prefer to think that Jai and Joan once had a scorching office affair that went south, thus creating all the weird tension between them.

Speaking of Jai, he somehow gets it into his pretty head that the Indonesians will try to kill Ashley to tie up loose ends. I regret to admit I was so distracted by Jai’s cheekbones that I missed whatever led him to draw this conclusion; all I know is he charges up to Joan, filled with sudden wild concern about Ashley’s safety, and Joan sends him scampering off to intercept Ashley and Annie.

Anyway, Auggie’s plotline finally hooks up with the main plot (kinky!) when it’s discovered that Madeline leaked vital information about Operation Goliath. With the mission well underway and no way to warn his buddies, Auggie gives the order to smash a drone into a nearby building, thus alerting them that danger is afoot. His buddies get the message, and the mission is aborted.

Annie meets Ashley at the rowing club and breaks the bad news about having to take the blame for the leak. Ashley does not react well to this. As Annie slinks off, feeling wretched about ruining Ashley’s life, a man working for the Indonesians ambushes Ashley and tries to throttle her. Annie, who for once is wearing sensible flats instead of teetering heels, jumps into the fray and fights him off. Jai rushes to the rescue, only to find Annie already has the situation well under control, having thwarted Ashley’s attacker through the use of oars and a handy flare gun. It’s not a bad fight scene, but it’s the only bit of action in the entire episode, and it can’t hold a candle to Jai and Ben leaping madly around on shipping containers last week.

Since the Indonesians are already hip to the fact that the CIA knows about Madeline’s treason, there’s no longer any need for Ashley to take public responsibility for the leak. Jarvis gives a press conference about the treason charges against his wife and humbly apologizes for his messy personal life.

Not a bad hour of television, but Covert Affairs is capable of much, much more.