Apparently, Line of Fire took my praise for its Technicolor Urgency in the premiere as a challenge.
Could it move even faster? Why, yes. Yes, it could.
Line of Fire S1E2: “A Bigger Picture” doesn’t lose any of the momentum that made S1E1 so much fun, but I’m beginning to think somebody needs to grab this show by the shoulders and tell it to slow the hell down. There are secret agents, dead agents, undercover agents, rogue agents, bank robbers, hidden cameras, cranes, presidential code names, family secrets and approximately 900 federal agencies all colliding with one another.
And that’s before we get to the Hollingsworths, who apparently have never met a professional boundary they couldn’t stomp all over.
It’s ridiculous. It’s also still ridiculously entertaining.
The Hollingsworth Family Has No Boundaries
The bank robbery case takes up a lot of “A Bigger Picture,” but the actual robbery isn’t particularly important. It’s really an excuse to show us more of what makes this family tick.
And holy hell, these people are messy.
Clare is grieving Logan and does exactly what you’d expect Clare to do: throws herself into another investigation rather than sit around thinking about him. Jane thinks she shouldn’t be working. Clare thinks Jane should mind her own business. Unfortunately, they’re working overlapping investigations, which means their mother-daughter argument becomes everybody else’s problem.
Imagine standing around for a federal briefing while the woman running one investigation argues with her daughter, who’s running the other investigation.
Awkward.
But that’s basically the Hollingsworth family in a nutshell. They use each other. They keep secrets from one another. They call each other for favors while working cases. Clare pulls Russ into her investigation and bribes him with a promise to attend grief counseling, gets what she wants and promptly blows off the appointment.
Jane then uses Russ herself.
Nobody follows the rules.
And somehow almost everybody in this family has risen to a ridiculously important government position.
Mike is the Secret Service Agent in Charge protecting the president. Micah protects the president’s daughter. Jane heads the U.S. Marshals. Clare is leading an FBI investigation. Russ is at the DOJ.
What the f*ck?
It’s ludicrous if you stop and think about it, which is why Line of Fire works best if you don’t.
Turn off the thinking cap. This isn’t 12 Monkeys. It isn’t Fringe. Logic has left the building.
Just enjoy the ride.
Peter Krause Looks Like He Knows Something We Don’t
I need to talk about Peter Krause.
Mike can be interrogating his son, discussing murder or dealing with a potential threat to the president and Krause still has that naturally amused expression on his face.
I don’t even think he’s doing it intentionally. It’s just his face.
Everybody else is playing this deadly serious family conspiracy drama while Krause occasionally looks like he’s about five seconds away from delivering the punchline to a joke.
It was especially distracting while Mike questioned Micah about Sparrow. Mike clearly knows his son well enough to realize something is going on between Micah and the president’s daughter, and there’s something genuinely funny about watching him torment Micah over it.
Unfortunately, Mike is also supposed to be a very serious Secret Service agent.
Try harder, Peter.
Or don’t. I’m beginning to find it funny.
Mike and Micah also continue one of the show’s stranger patterns: everybody is supposedly brilliant at his or her job until the plot needs them to become an idiot.
Mike lectures Micah about reading people while they’re supposed to be scanning the crowd around the president — except Mike is staring at Micah instead of reading the crowd.
Fortunately, Micah is watching and spots the potential threat.
Suddenly Dad will never doubt him again. Okay, Mike. How are you the guy in charge?
Everybody Is Lying to Everybody
The real reason I’m still here isn’t the bank robbery. It’s Jack.
And Logan.
Nia’s investigation into Logan quickly confirms what seemed obvious after the premiere: this guy did not simply wander into Clare’s life.
His apartment barely looks lived in. Almost everything came from a thrift store, complete with price tags that apparently nobody thought to remove. His history doesn’t quite add up. There are missing months. The deeper Nia digs, the stranger everything gets.
By the time she tells Clare that Logan was an undercover CIA operative assigned to her, it’s not particularly shocking.
Jack already told us Logan was more than he appeared to be before killing him.
The interesting question is why.
And Logan being CIA creates another question: if this guy was trained to operate undercover, why was he so spectacularly bad at looking like an actual person who had lived somewhere before?
Take the price tags off, Logan.
More importantly, how did he not become suspicious of Jack constantly appearing at his apartment when Jack didn’t even live in the building?
Again: thinking cap. Remove it.
Because the bigger mystery works even when some of the details don’t.
Jack is alive. Jane and Mike have been hiding things from their children about what really happened to him. Logan was secretly assigned to Clare. Somebody keeps leaving origami cranes. And while Nia finally tells Clare the truth about Logan, Jack is nearby photographing Nia.
So what the hell is Jack doing?
Is he rogue? Is he protecting his family? Is he part of whatever is targeting them? Is he working his own investigation?
That’s the bigger picture I care about.
And eventually Jane and Mike are going to have to explain what they knew about Jack, because their children aren’t going to be thrilled when they discover Mom and Dad have been sitting on their own pile of family secrets.
Slow the Hell Down
My biggest problem with “A Bigger Picture” is that Line of Fire has gone from moving quickly to occasionally moving at Speed Racer speed.
There is so much information coming at you that there’s no time to digest one revelation before the show throws another one across the room.
At one point I couldn’t even remember which bank robber was which. And I had captions on. That’s a problem.
I’d still rather have this than get stuck in the River of Molasses, but there is a middle ground between crawling through a swamp and firing the entire script out of a cannon.
Some of the twists and names simply don’t land because I’m still processing the last three pieces of information. The mystery remains intriguing, but the show needs to trust it enough to let some of these revelations breathe.
Fortunately, the family remains the glue holding all this insanity together.
Jane saving Clare’s ass after Clare recklessly walks into a dangerous situation alone says more about them than the bank case itself ever could. They fight. They interfere. They undermine each other professionally. But when one of them is in trouble, the rest of the Hollingsworths show up.
Even Mike and Jane, despite being separated, still have plenty of fire between them. And with Clare temporarily moving home, the kids may end up pulling this family back together just as the truth about Jack threatens to blow it apart again.
Oh, and Chris Chalk is the president?
GET THE FUCK OUT.
Dick Hallorann from It: Welcome to Derry. Lucius fucking Fox from Gotham.
Now I’m even happier.
🔥 Our Verdict: WATCHABLE
Line of Fire is still moving with the Technicolor Urgency that made the premiere so much fun, but “A Bigger Picture” occasionally mistakes information overload for momentum.
The bank robbery itself is mostly filler, but useful filler. It exposes more of the Hollingsworth family dynamic, gives Clare somewhere to dump her grief and reinforces that nobody in this family understands the concept of a professional boundary.
The real hook remains Jack and Logan, and that mystery gets considerably bigger by the end of the episode.
There isn’t much logic to any of it. Peter Krause still looks vaguely amused when Mike should probably look terrified. Clare makes decisions that should have gotten her killed. Everybody has an absurdly important government job. And the entire family appears to conduct federal investigations by calling relatives for favors.
Whatever. I’m still having fun. Just slow the f*ck down enough to let me keep up.
Read All Our Line of Fire Season 1 Coverage
We’re still working through the season, so check back as we continue our coverage.
