Wow! What a strong conclusion for what’s sure to be recognized as one of the year’s best miniseries. The tone this time was definitely more of a piece with The Company’s slow-building first part than last week’s globe-trotting actionfest. But the dark, regretful feeling that permeated every action, every conversation, was, in the end, the only way things could have turned out.Watching the complete breakdown of Leo (Alessandro Nivola) throughout his interrogation was shocking — in part because of its swiftness, but more so because his only crime was being too loyal to the Company. Or so it seemed, until we found out he was the mole, Sasha, all along — a fact he later revealed by shooting his best friend and godfather of his children in the gut and fleeing to the crumbling remains of his adopted homeland.Truly, it seems, the Cold War was a grand debacle, perhaps summed up best by Michael Keaton ’s Angleton in his greenhouse conversation with Chris O&...
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With another two strong hours under its belt, The Company is really shaping up to be the miniseries of the year, and one to watch out for come the next Emmy nominations. Though the second section of a three-parter often suffers a little from being necessarily transitional (see the Lord of the Rings and Bourne trilogies), this episode side-stepped that trap, starting with a tried-and-true device: Open with a shocking dramatic event — say, the capture and torture of a main character (Jack) — then fall back three days to show how we got to this point.But what looked from the previews last week to be the climax of this episode was only the beginning of the excitement. You could have made two stand-alone films out of this one’s two main set pieces: The Hungarian uprising, shot as a bloody gun battle in an urban wasteland, and the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, a full-scale beach-storming under cover of darkness that rivaled any Hollywood war movie. While "Night 1" was about...
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Let me start off with a disclaimer: I’m not familiar with the Robert Littell novel of the same name on which The Company is based. However, based on the Internet buzz, I know a lot of fans of the book have been very much anticipating this miniseries. So what I ask of you, readers, is that you be as understanding as you can about my lack of foreknowledge, while still feeling free to tell me what’s what when I get it wrong. Thanks in advance. [end disclaimer]Well, we're only a third of the way in, but so far, I like what I'm seeing. Even abridged as it must be for TV, this is clearly a complex, multilayered story. The Company is juggling a large cast of international characters who are constantly double- and triple-crossing each other, but thankfully, I didn't have to strain too hard to keep it all straight. I don't know if the novel's focus was so squarely on the characters of Jack (Chris O'Donnell) and Yevgeny (Rory Cochrane), but the friends-turned-enemies situation set u...
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