When is a secret agent not a secret agent? Covert Affairs Season One saw CIA trainee Annie Walker prematurely promoted to Domestic Protection Division operative, in order to lure an agent/paramour out of the shadows; love is, after all, a manifestly manipulable thing. Season Two has made Annie an official shield-sporting super-spy. Too bad she’s sworn to secrecy about the whole thing. The new question: When is a secret agent nothing more than a secret agent? If Annie can’t balance her personal and professional lives, she’ll blow her cover and break her own heart. Love is in the crossfires: Did the cold war just get colder?
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Courage! My word! Though it might sound hyperbolic, and more than a little bit tragically hip, it wouldn’t be out of line to say that last night’s installment of Covert Affairs Season Two — episode 15 of 16, “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” — is an episode about the cherished American trait (well, Canadian, too, albeit surely to a lesser degree). Under instruction from the agency to rack up some hours at her Smithsonian cover job, in order to maintain the cover’s credibility, Annie is approached by an MI6 operative who wants to deputize her in order to prevent a terrorist attack from a visiting curator/sculptor. When MI6 agent Kenneth Martin is revealed as, to begin with, AWOL and in defiance of MI6 edicts, Annie has to decide whether or not she should put her life on the line over a bomb threat, and whether or not Kenneth (groan) is doing the same. Courage!
Granted, courageousness is part of a CIA field agent’s job description, along with wisdom and cunning and, in TV-land at least, awesome to tha bodacious to tha super-sexy appeal. (Pouty Perabo lips: optional, though no one’s complaining.) Still, the courage evinced in “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” transcends mere description, even surpassing metaphor — profound, I know. Let’s break it all down into easy-to-face-down, no-fear/cavalier/renegade-steer-clear sections. For those keeping score at home, the above lyrics are from R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”
Oh, did someone mention R.E.M.? Thanks, makes my segue easier. In keeping with all episodes in Covert Affairs Season Two, this week’s title, “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?,” is the title of an R.E.M. song: this time out, the smash image-and-sound reinvention single from Monster.
That single was released in 1994, aka. the pre-internet era, which meant that only R.E.M. insiders and/or fans of CBS news correspondent Dan Rather had a prayer of understanding what the song meant. (Music detour #3: Oasis would up the ante in 1996, releasing the intentionally meaningless single “D’You Know What I Mean?” Cheeky!) R.E.M. frontman/lyricist Michael Stipe describes the song’s first-person protagonist as a naïve do-gooder, “a guy who's desperately trying to understand what motivates the younger generation, who has gone to great lengths to try and figure them out, and at the end of the song it's completely fucking bogus. He got nowhere.”
So, where does nowhere get a naïve person in Covert Affairs? A few non-sequitor lyric samples:
#1) I was brain-dead, locked out, numb, not up to speed
#2) An idiot’s dream
#3) You wore a shirt of violent green
#4) You wore our expectations like an armored suit
Impossible to know who could be the Covert Affairs analog of #1. Definitely not Annie, definitely not Kenneth — even if Kenneth’s a nutjob (one of the CIA’s theories, as the story progresses), he’s an intelligent one. So: We have to presume it’s MI6 and general intelligentsia bureaucracy. Oh, actually, that works nicely.
Number 2 is harder, as it can only be Kenneth, who’s no idiot. The only thing that makes him come even close to being an idiot is a feral drive to be morally and ethically just (again, even if he’s delusional). His character will not compromise, even if refusing to do so will lead to, in the worst-case scenario, his death. Come to think of it: in modern-day America, not only an idiot, but also a seamless fitter-inner!
Violent green, #3. I forgot to watch to see if someone in the episode was wearing that shade. Please hit me in the Comments so that I can better understand.
Finally, number 4, the wearing of expectations like an armoured suit. A fantastic metaphor for the way that Kenneth “plays” Annie, only to have Annie end up “playing” him (scare quotes to indicate spy-ee work!). Vaguely spoilerrific bonus: An armoured suit might help if you’re caught in a bomb blast.
Further complicating matters is the post-internet now-widespread understanding of the inspiration for the R.E.M. song: a savage mugging/beating received by CBS’s Dan Rather in 1986, during which the news correspondent’s attackers uttered, repeatedly and without explanation or context, “Kenneth, what’s the frequency?” Far too much to the story to explain/compare in this post, but you can read an interesting précis here and draw your own conclusions about both the song proper and the Covert Affairs episode.
But why, you ask, all the top-of-post emphasis on capital-c Courage? Because, before pop culture doomed Rather to be forever kneejerk associated with the ‘meaningless’ (and misquoted, as it moves the position of the name) “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?,” the news anchor had all-but permanently tied himself to another word: his signoff, “Courage.”
UP NEXT, THE FINALE OF THE Covert Affairs Season 2 BLOG: ANNIE’S RECKONING