You know what I love about Annie Walker? It's that she can find herself face down on the pavement in a shady alley somewhere from a myocarditis attack while her mission goes completely sideways, bad guys left free to their own devices ... and yet, by the time she wakes up ... if she's lucky enough that someone has dragged her lifeless body somewhere safe ... she STILL manages to have all the attitude of someone who just threw a winning touchdown. She gets up, she dusts herself off, and she's right back on the mission.
O.k. I'm half kidding, as that hasn't exactly been the case every time an attack has happened. If it was, and if there was no struggle with this issue, this storyline would be pointless. She welled up with tears as she hung up a call with Auggie after nearly letting the Borz thing get away from her, only having eked out the win by the skin of her teeth out of pure dumb luck after McQuaid & his dudes found her passed out on the dock (and helped her rather than hanging her out to dry.) She finally broke down on the mountain in Azerbaijan in frustration and despair after having repeatedly run into this insurmountable wall over and over and over again.
And therein lies the strength of season 5. After Annie returned home from Russia in the fall of season 3, her character shut down emotionally. Which makes sense, as it's how a lot of people react to trauma. But it also serves to close her off from the audience. And I can live with that for some length of time, but there was another issue at play that doubled the problem: Her quick recovery from everything that had happened to her in season 3 was so unrealistic that it made her seem superhuman ... like an indestructible spybot. An emotionless, indestructible spybot. And you know what that is? That is NOT something the rest of us mere mortals can relate to very well. Which inherently makes the show less emotionally impactful.
Season 4 was a bit up and down with this issue as well. We got the boyfriendy relationship emotions on the "Walkerson" front. O.k., it's something I guess, but not enough. And then Annie going dark kind of just forced her to become even more of a spybot than she was before. She had to focus on getting the job done, after all. Even when Auggie broke her heart by cheating with Helesa during that time, she held everything in. But as we moved into the season finale, we did start to see a few glimpses of human Annie shining through again.
And the good news about Annie going dark is that it helped to lead us to where she wound up in season 5. Which was, as it turns out, somewhat of a delayed fallout from everything leading into it, including those season 3 events that she recovered far too quickly from at the time to be believable. Fiiiinally Annie was human again - imperfect, struggling with her job, struggling emotionally and even physically, like all of us would if we'd been through what she has, and like all of us DO at times in our own real lives. Finally I could relate to her again. Aahh. If you want to know why I enjoyed season 5, summed up in just one picture, this is that picture:
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| Relatable. |
There's other good stuff about season 5 too, along with some not-so-good stuff. I wrote it all down here:
http://geekfurious.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-plopper-reviews-covert-affairs-516.html
Overall I quite enjoyed the season, and felt that it was a significant improvement on the extremely uneven season 4. Read my GeekFurious review for all the deets.
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