God help me, I really liked Tyrant this week. It’s easy to call “Gaslight” the best episode of the season, because as I pointed out a few weeks ago, “good” and “good for Tyrant” are not the same thing. Amazingly, this episode was just flat-out good.
“Gaslight” takes its title from George Cukor’s 1944 film, which starred Ingrid Bergman (in a role for which she won her first Oscar) as a woman driven to madness by her lover’s manipulations. Barry spends much of this episode doing the same to Jamal, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t pretty compelling.
John Tucker alights on the idea of pinning the coup on Tariq, so he and Barry begin sowing the seeds of doubt in Jamal’s mind. It’s so nice to see Tucker given more to do, because I think Justin Kirk is wonderfully suited to the role, and Tyrant perks up whenever he’s on screen. He tells Jamal that some members of Tariq’s Elite Guard have been spreading rumors about Jamal and Katerina, and questioning Jamal’s capacity to lead. This not only puts Jamal on the warpath, but also fucks with his mind pretty good; he becomes suspicious and paranoid, searching the palace for bugs, and calling Leila out to the veranda when he wants to speak with her.
Jamal makes these leaps of logic pretty quickly; honestly it kind of defies belief. When Tucker tells him what the Elite Guard is saying, Jamal immediately puts two and two together, already blaming Tariq for a coup that hasn’t even happened yet. When he learns that Tariq wants to meet with tribal leaders, he deduces that Tariq aims to secure their support for the imminent overthrow. Which, granted, is exactly what Barry and Tucker want him to think, but it’s still an absurd amount of conclusions to jump to.
But I’m willing to forgive that because Jamal was so entertaining throughout “Gaslight,” no more so than in the scene where he calls Tariq off of his plane, only so he can watch it explode mid-air. It’s everyone around Jamal who is boring and shitty, specifically Leila, who delivers all her lines in the exact same fashion: demanding and patronizing. Moran Atias might be the most one-note actress on television right now.
Sammy and Emma actually got some material this week that didn’t want me to kick a hole in my TV. Barry takes them to the Bedouin village where his father was born, to give them a better sense of their roots in Abbudin. They seem genuinely appreciative of the effort he’s making, and for once aren’t a huge pain in the ass.
The same can’t be said of Molly, though. She’s clearly upset about the coup’s inherent danger, and decides to let everyone know she’s upset by sulking through dinner like a fucking sixteen-year-old. Later, she meets with Tucker and Mia Ecksley, and starts off by asking Tucker if his wife is still at the Betty Ford Clinic. I know you’re pissed off, Molly, but calm the fuck down. She’s pissed about having to “live” in a safe house outside Ashland, Oregon, even though a two-week stay doesn’t count as “living” anywhere, and Ashland looks like this:
Boo fucking hoo, Molly, you have to stay in a house in a beautiful wooded city before you can come home to your PALACE. Jesus, Molly is the most unlikable character on this show, and that includes Jamal, who is a fucking rapist. Looks like Moran Atias has some competition!
It looks like Tyrant is recovering in the wake of the inconsequential Plaza Trilogy. This coup plot is something I find myself more and more invested in, and if the show can keep turning out episodes at least this good, it might have a shot at being worthwhile.
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