“CIA” spent most of its season two premiere on a cartel case and saved the real story for the last scene. “The Deep” aired Monday, October 5th, on CBS. Bill Goodman (Nick Gehlfuss) came back to work three weeks after his father died. By the end of the hour he learned that his father, Robert Goodman, had been CIA.
Ken Girotti directed the premiere, and it streams on Paramount+ the day after it airs. FBI Special Agent Stuart Scola (John Boyd) crosses over from “FBI”, which opened its ninth season an hour earlier. This review is written from the recaps that followed the broadcast and from the showrunner’s interviews, not from a screener. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “CIA” season two, episode one, “The Deep.”
By the end of the hour he learned that his father, Robert Goodman, had been CIA.”
Bill’s first scene back is a boxing session with Scola. He does not want to talk, and he has been ignoring his partner’s calls and texts. Then he gets into his car and finds Colin Glass (Tom Ellis) waiting in the back seat. Showrunner Mike Weiss told TV Insider the gag was there to remind viewers of the dynamic at the top of the season. Colin, he said, “is always going to be half a step ahead of Bill wherever they’re headed, which is impressive, but also annoying, the way siblings annoy each other.” It is a good opening that tells you where the partnership stands without a single line of exposition about season one.
The case starts with a cartel fixer named Lalo. He works for the Ortega cartel, and Nikki Reynard (Necar Zadegan) puts the team on him as soon as he arrives in New York. Bill and Colin track him to the house of Mitch Selby, a former Navy SEAL, and find Selby dead. A second man, Kip, turns up dead on his yacht. Both were tied to the same old DEA crew. At one point Lalo takes Bill for a CIA man. Asked by TV Insider whether that said something about Bill, Weiss agreed. “He’s embracing what he’s going to discover was a family lineage that he didn’t know he had,” he said.
Gina Gosian (Natalee Linez) puts a name on the killer. Felix Vincente (Sasha Roiz) is an assassin with three dead CIA operatives on his record. The recaps agree on his motive. Years ago a DEA crew stole money from the Ortega cartel, and a 15-year-old boy was killed during the theft. Felix is working his way through that crew. Keith Truman, a DEA agent working undercover, is not on the list at all because he is working with Felix. Gary Martin is the one who finally talks to the team. The boy’s death drove him out of the DEA, and he gives Bill and Colin the whole story.
Colin’s plan is to use Gary as bait. Felix makes his move on the day of Selby’s funeral. Colin fires, Felix runs, and Bill chases him onto a bridge. Felix goes over the side and into the water, and the team arrests Truman with a van full of stolen cartel cash. Then Nikki delivers the bad news that Felix is alive. That is the weakest part of the hour. Dirty federal agents and stolen cartel money are well-worn ground for a Dick Wolf procedural, and nothing in the case is built to last past the closing credits. The assassin is the exception, and the show knows it.
The episode’s real work happens in the margins. While going through his father’s things at his mother’s house, Bill finds a plane ticket to Tbilisi, Georgia, from 1998. His mother cannot explain it. TV Insider reports she assumed her husband was consulting after he left the Army. Bill admits to Colin that the ticket is weighing on him. Colin plays it down to his face and then goes to Nikki to ask for a classified file that Weiss calls Operation Palomar. Nikki calls it “a dark stain on us all” and agrees to help anyway. Colin reads it and brings Bill straight in to show him that Robert Goodman was CIA. Colin tells him they will figure it out together.
This is the smartest move the show has made. Season one sent Bill into the fusion cell to hunt a mole inside the CIA’s New York station. He arrived suspicious of the agency and of Colin. Before this season started, Ellis described Bill as a man who “doesn’t particularly like people that commit treason.” Now the father he modeled himself on spent part of his life in the same shadows, on an operation his own boss calls a stain. Weiss said Bill believed his dad was “honest and loyal and truthful and the type of man Bill wanted to be.” The premiere takes that image away in one scene.
Weiss told TV Insider the twist was built to tie the two leads together. “It’s almost as if we’re saying on some level, these two are brothers,” he said. That is a cleaner engine for a season than the mole hunt ever was. The mole was a puzzle the partners solved from opposite sides. This one belongs to both of them. Weiss also put a timer on the whole mystery. He told Give Me My Remote that the show will “get to the bottom of this mystery by the end of episode 10,” the last episode before the Christmas hiatus. That is a firm promise, and it is the right one for a 22-episode order.
The escaped assassin is not a loose end but the key to the whole story. Weiss told Give Me My Remote that Felix “also connects with Bill’s dad. They had a professional relationship back when Bill’s father was a CIA intelligence officer, and that’s complicated because it turns out that Bill’s dad did some really dark things, on behalf of the CIA, overseas.” Weiss told TV Insider that Roiz will be in “a bunch of episodes” and named six, seven, eight and ten. Weiss told TV Insider that the operation took place in “the former Soviet Georgia, 25 years ago.” The ticket says 1998, which is closer to 28 years, so call it a round number. He also said Nikki has her own connection to the operation from her early years in the field. Her nerves when Colin asked for the file were not an accident.
Colin has his own problem, and it is still Toni Napier (Angela Sarafyan). Season one ended with his former partner and girlfriend alive, exposed as a double agent and sitting in CIA custody. In the premiere Colin learns that Nikki may be planning to put her back in the field. Weiss made it clear the two stories will meet. “Why wouldn’t Toni be involved in the hunt for Felix Vincente?” he told TV Insider. Bill has loose ends at home as well as at work. Weiss said he will have to come clean to his fiancée, Katie (Caroline Pluta), about what his job really is. He will have to tell his mother what he found. Lauren (Molly Griggs), the prosecutor from his past, comes back this season.
The show has the room to do all of it. The season one premiere drew 8.4 million multiplatform viewers in a week, and CBS raised the order from 12 episodes to 22. The partnership is the thing that earned that renewal, and the premiere spends its best minutes on it. The case of the week was disposable and the last scene was not. If “CIA” pays off Operation Palomar by episode 10 the way Weiss says it will, this is the hour people will point back to. If the payoff drifts past the hiatus, the show will have spent its best card early.
What Do You Think? What did Robert Goodman do in Georgia that his own son never heard about? Should Colin have told Bill about the file right away, or waited until he knew more? And is putting Toni on the hunt for Felix a good idea or a disaster waiting to happen?
See you on the next binge!
