Editor’s note: The below recap contains spoilers for The Old Man Season 2 Episode 5.

We might have lost two old men last week, but a third comes back into play as the back half of The Old Man Season 2 ups the stakes for Dan Chase (Jeff Bridges), Harold Harper (John Lithgow), and their loved ones. With Emily Chase (Alia Shawkat) still back in Afghanistan, and Chase and Harper’s best hope at getting the Taliban off her back and away from Faraz Hamzad’s (Navid Negahban) village lying dead on the floor of his house while Suleyman Pavlovich (Rade Serbedzija) is out for their heads, things are looking dire all around as we head into Episode 5.

Emily Says Goodbye to Her Family in ‘The Old Man’ Season 2 Episode 5
Image via FX

Despite the complications facing the group back in the U.S., the episode opens in Hamzad’s village in Afghanistan, where Emily, Khadija (Jacqueline Antarmian), and Tarik (Amir Malaklou) are at Hamzad’s funeral. It’s an understated affair, underscored by Emily’s internal monologue, which turns out to be a letter she is writing to the biological father she barely knew, saying goodbye in her own way. The letter carries with it the type of poetry that, for me, was so emblematic of the first season, and while I have missed in this more grounded batch of episodes, and also brings with it Emily’s closure over never really knowing her mother well either, despite having her in her life as she grew up.

With the funeral over, the letter finished and burned, and Emily resolved to stay behind in Afghanistan for now, Tarik boards a chopper to return to the U.S. With him is Farouk (Michael Sifain), his hope for the future of their family. It seems he and Emily have reached a compromise, with her agreeing to at least convince Farouk to leave, even if the rest of the village wants to remain in the only home they know. Emily bids the boy farewell, with the warning that he’ll feel alone and scared in his new life but that Tarik will protect him because he loves him, giving Farouk assurances that she didn’t receive when she left. She explains to Khadija that she doesn’t want there to be unpleasantness between them the next time she sees them, and Khadija is hopeful that there even will be a next time, though at the moment that seems unlikely, as the Taliban have finally arrived.

Leaving them on that ominous note, the episode jumps back to the U.S., where Harper suddenly arrives back home to find his wife Cheryl (Jessica Harper) trying to get a plumber to come by and fix a leak. But busted pipes are not even remotely close to Harper’s biggest problem right now. He tells her that while he’d always promised not to bring work home with him, that promise is about to get complicated. He tells her to pack a bag for her and their grandson Henry so they can stay in a hotel for a while, but Cheryl drops the bombshell that Henry no longer lives with them. Before he can find out where Henry went, Chase and Zoe (Amy Brenneman) invite themselves in, in order to call Emily and warn her that Pavlovich is involved.

Though all they’re doing is waiting in the foyer of Harper’s house while a storm rages outside and nothing is really happening, the mood in the whole scene is unsettling, borderline scary, proving you really can do so much with a sparse setting, some choice lighting and music, and an omniscient camera shot that lingers at a distance in the empty driveway just a beat or two too long — another moody trick I missed from the first season and am overjoyed to see back now.

Chase and Harper Regroup in ‘The Old Man’ Season 2 Episode 5
Image via FX

Back in the house, Chase raids Harper’s closet for a change of clothes — it’s about time — and tries to get hold of Emily, to no avail, with his calls not even going through. Despite her insisting she wants to stay, Chase is determined to get his daughter out of there. Zoe, meanwhile, is worried about what will happen to Morgan Bote’s (Joel Grey) body, a worry Chase doesn’t share. Speculating on the reasons for Bote’s death seems to distract Chase though, as he suggests maybe Bote got a little too close to the truth, that Pavlovich probably wanted control of the lithium mine. He also suggests, however, that the truth is likely more complicated than that, as Pavlovich would not risk repercussions for killing a U.S. national on U.S. soil over a foreign lithium mine alone.

Harper finally gets a moment alone with Cheryl to ask where Henry is, and she tells him he’s staying with Curt and Lois — his other grandparents — as Cheryl didn’t want him to live in a house with as much uncertainty as theirs had, with no guarantee that Harper or Emily would ever come back, and if they didn’t, with no way for Henry to ever get a straight answer about what happened to them. Cheryl, too, is struggling with a lack of answers though she admits at least she knew what she was signing up for. Realizing something’s got to give, Harper confesses that Emily’s alter ego, “Angela Adams,” was a fabrication, and comes clean about most of the messy ordeal. It’s about time, he really needs someone he can talk to about all of this, because keeping it all in might work for Dan Chase, but it was absolutely killing Harold Harper.

Back upstairs, Zoe pokes around the Harper family photos and realizes Emily was functionally a member of their family, even appearing in family photos on the mantle. He explains how their arrangement worked, that he had cut off ties with Harper and all connection with his old life, and once Emily got involved with the family, the two of them agreed on what she could and could not say. Zoe suggests that this might have been hard on him, but he brushes it off, and the two don’t get a chance to discuss this any further, as the house loses power — though miraculously, through the magic of TV shows actually lighting their dark scenes, we still manage to see everything. The mood of the episode was tense enough, but Chase’s panic at the loss of power is enough to crank that tension even higher. As he goes out to berate Harper for getting water on the breaker box, his call to Emily finally goes through.

Emily Is Caught in a Terrible Situation in ‘The Old Man’ Season 2 Episode 5
Image via FX

With a quick window to warn his daughter, Chase tells her that Bote is dead, and before dying, he did not agree to unfreeze Hamzad’s assets. While he doesn’t explain the whole deal with Pavlovich — though really if ever there was a time to explain something complicated that could save your daughter’s life, it’s probably now — he does ask Emily to get out of there. She explains that it’s too late, as the Taliban have already arrived and 20 or so guards from the village have gone to head them off. She also adds that Hamzad is dead, and they only had a chance to evacuate some people, with many families with children left behind. She tells them to wait while she relocates, as the Taliban are headed up through the pass. While Emily moves with the line connected, Harper strategizes on how to get her out of the village even with the Taliban there, while Chase just tries to keep it together, knowing none of Harper’s options are especially plausible.

When Emily rejoins them on the line, she tells them the tunnels aren’t an option for escape as that’s where the Taliban is approaching from. She says goodbye to Harper and Cheryl, and then privately says her goodbyes to her dad, telling Chase that her finding family in Afghanistan was not a rejection of him and her mother, and asks him to accept that all this was her choice. She doesn’t make it much further than that as she’s interrupted by the sounds of gunfire and screaming as the Taliban have arrived at last, and the line goes dead.

If this episode is making the most of music and lighting to set an unsettling mood, then this phone call with Emily is another bit of brilliant staging that contributes to the overall chilling atmosphere. The fact that we never see her, and rely only on her narration of events to convey the horror, as well as the expressions on Bridges and Lithgow’s faces to convey the loss, is a big factor in this. Like the best horror movies, the scariest thing is what you can’t see. We live in an era where there is a surplus of Middle East-set war movies, and watching the breach of the fortress happen in real time would have been reminiscent of that. But watching Chase and Harper lose their daughter (and surrogate daughter) in real-time, from thousands of miles away, when they’re unable to see her, is a particular kind of gut punch, and shows a remarkable amount of restraint. It’s hard to say whether we’ll see Emily again. Her being taken hostage is a plausible plot point, especially as the key players might know that she’s Hamzad’s daughter and Chase’s daughter, but it’s equally likely that she’s dead, with her final farewell delivered over the phone, and her death just as brutal and without closure as any death in wartime.

While Chase distracts himself from his grief, trying to fix the leaking pipe in Harper’s basement, where he is joined by Zoe. He’s not interested in her attempts to rationalize his choice to let Emily stay, or Emily’s choice to remain, maintaining that he should have just stopped her from staying. Though I’ve questioned Zoe’s presence in the season before — and I maintain that the writing needs to find something for her to actually do — she is a comforting presence for Chase, at least enough to be a shoulder for him to cry on. And he really does give in to his grief; no stoic, half-tears here, but instead a truly unrestrained performance from Bridges showing that men do, and absolutely should, cry through their grief and pain.

The Taliban Are No Longer the Biggest Problem for Chase and Harper in ‘The Old Man’
Image via FX

He doesn’t get much of a chance to cry for long, as the power switches back on and Harper joins them in the basement, suggesting that they leave now. Chase, however, says he doesn’t want to leave just yet, instead wanting to stay and get some answers, as both he and Harper heard the attackers on the phone speaking Russian, rather than the Dari or Pashto they might have expected. Harper asks Zoe whether Bote ever mentioned Pavlovich having access to mercenaries, though what her answer is, we have to wait to find out, as Chase and Harper go “speak to” (read: torture and interrogate) Pavlovich’s hitman they’ve been keeping in the trunk of the car.

Back inside the house, Cheryl asks Zoe how involved she is with everything going on, whether she’s on the inside or the outside. Zoe admits she isn’t sure — and as an audience neither are we — but suspects she’s somewhere in the middle. Cheryl also uses the opportunity to grieve Emily, revealing to us that while Harold told her some things, he clearly didn’t tell her everything, as Emily’s final words, forgiving Harold for “what he did” doesn’t mean anything to her. Zoe decides that at the very least she’ll be honest with Cheryl if no one else will, and tells her that Pavlovich had Morgan Bote murdered, and explains why, adding that he’s likely behind the mercenaries that killed Emily.

With the ladies occupied both drinking tea and spilling it, and Chase busy spilling blood in the basement, Harper ventures upstairs to his son Chip’s (Brad Beyer) old room, where he’s visited by a vision of him. In conversation with the vision, he gets the chance to reflect on the life and the lies he has built up around himself, lies that are now about to come crashing down around him as the truth forces its way out. This episode is already so full of atmospheric callbacks to Season 1, and this is another great example of that, with Harper’s entire conversation with Chip — a hallucination — occurring while Chip is in shadow, acting as a sounding board for his father’s grief and confusion. Harper laments that he never got the chance to properly say goodbye to Chip or Emily or even Henry, and something in this thought triggers a brainwave and sends him rushing downstairs.

He asks Zoe if Bote said or did anything before he died, and she remembers he was holding his phone when the assassin entered. Harper says he was likely sending something out that needed to survive, even in the event of his death. While Harper wasn’t the recipient, he suspects he knows who it was. But before he can reveal it to Zoe, or to the audience, Chase joins them in the kitchen, hands bloody, and tells them the gunman didn’t know anything about either Pavlovich or his actions in Afghanistan. All the gunman did know, Chase tells them, is that he had two other targets: Marcia and Henry Dixon, the alter egos Chase and Zoe used when they were first on the run together. If the writers wanted to bring Zoe back in for the second season, this probably would have been the moment to do it, once Chase realized his machinations have endangered her as well. At least we know why she’s here now. Chase suspects Hamzad’s lawyer might have some idea why the “Dixons” would be targeted, guessing that that was why she wanted to talk to Zoe in person. With that, Zoe’s mind is made up, and she tells Chase that they’re headed to London, to strike back at Pavlovich.

Harper bids Cheryl farewell, as he convinces her to check into a hotel for a few days, telling her that Zoe and Chase will get her settled while he straightens up at home. And by straighten up, he of course means “cut the man Chase just tortured to death to pieces with a hand-saw.” You know, normal Harold Harper stuff. While I relished the change in pace for the first four episodes of the season — because some things just need a more direct, dramatic approach — it’s nice to see a return to eerie, too-quiet, almost ethereal form for The Old Man as the show ventures into the back half of the second season.

The first five episodes of The Old Man Season 2 are out now. New episodes air on FX every Thursday and are available to stream next day on Hulu.

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