Land Of The Free And The Home Of #TheBrave #3weekroundup #NBC #review #recap

Land Of The Free And The Home Of #TheBrave #3weekroundup #NBC #review #recap

All pictures courtesy of NBC 

I am trying my darnedest to fly through these reviews of these new shows so that I can get back to my usual writing but they seem to come faster every year, and I also seem to need to say more about them every year. On deck today, we have NBC’s new military-themed show The Brave (#TheBrave). What the heck is this show about with such a pedantic and uncreative title you ask? And is this show made to last or will it crumble beneath the weight of great expectations? Let’s find out together.

NBC’s The Brave stars Anne Heche and Mark Vogel as leaders of a special forces command team. While Anne Heche’s character Patricia Campbell runs the intelligence and office unit of the team at a safe command center somewhere in the US, Mark Vogel’s character Adam Dalton is the leader of the boots-on-ground tactical field team that traverses the globe following orders on a myriad of different crimes that need a militaristic force to properly execute commands. His field team consists of Jaz Khan, a Middle Eastern-looking young woman who is a weapons and language specialist who speaks a few languages and is a sniper. During the first two missions in the first two episodes, she is seen wearing a traditional Muslim head garb for women but doesn’t do the same in the third episode. Next we have Joseph “McG” Mcguire who, to me, melts into the background and hasn’t been of any significance yet from what I can remember. Granted, I was doing another review while watching the first two episodes so I didn’t catch as many thorough details as I normally would, but he has just sorta been in the background. We also have Amir Al-Raisani who is the Muslim male that they have on the show. He has many talents, one of which is being a pickpocket and another of which is being able to slip in and out of any role. Also, with his presence, if you haven’t noticed most of the dirty work that will happen will most likely take place overseas in the many Islamic-run states in the Middle East and throughout all of Asia and Africa. Speaking of Africa, we finally have the black guy Ezekiel “Preach” Carter. It’s assumed by his nickname that he is the devout Christian of the group which could potentially set up a few really good scenes later in the season where he and the other Muslim team members have a philosophical and theological dialogue (don’t hold your breath). He is probably the biggest one on the team and, even though the team is made up of all field op specialists, can be considered the muscle.

Back in the office, we have Heche who is the command that coordinates with other agencies and gets her orders from the top. Next we have the newest team member Hannah Rivera who is one of the two main strategists. She is special because she just recently got off from field work and her own ops team. In episode three her background is explored more and we learn that she was previously stationed deep undercover in Mexico keeping tabs on a drug cartel. And finally we have Noah Morgenthau who is the other strategist and mainly does data analytics from what I’ve seen. We have also learned that he graduated top of his class from Quantico (or maybe it was some other intelligence agency academy. I say Quantico because, funny enough, the actor playing Noah, Tate Ellington, was one of the original cast members on the show Quantico) and keeps a low profile while trying to give the best scenario for each mission. He is a by-the-book type of guy. It should be known that both Hannah and Noah are on equal footing here and one does not outrank another just in case I made that confusing.

The Office Team

The crew’s first mission is to some Middle Eastern country where they must rescue a recently kidnapped American doctor who was working with Doctors Without Borders in a rundown village on the outskirts of some town. The woman was taken captive by her supposed driver while on her way to the airport to finally get back to the states after so long overseas. She is kidnapped and taken by a terrorist group that has yet to make any demands on the US government to get her back. So the team must not only figure out where she has been taken but also why she was taken in the first place.

As Heche’s team gathers intel from afar, utilizing drones and satellites from across the world to try to get a trace on where she might be, the ground team embarks on a mission to work the streets to find her. In conjunction with the “directors” back in HQ, the ground team discovers that some terrorist guy who freely roams the streets in this city but is a known bad guy on one of the many flagged lists that US intelligence outfits have, is actually part of the kidnapping. Or at least they operate off of such a theory. Using whatever covert ops skills they can, they follow him first through the streets of the city, keeping him in drone sights until he ducks into a covered street marketplace and the ground crew takes over. They didn’t want to tip their hand that he was being followed because they know that if he realizes someone is on him, he will call and most likely have the doctor murdered or moved. So while the Muslim woman and man are trying to blend into the marketplace patrons, their fearless team leader Adam Dalton gets in on the action as the white tourist looking at silks in the market.

Dalton is made, forcing the team to take the terrorist and change the plan on the fly. They decide to use Amir as a sort of bait hostage similar to what happened in the movie Inception with the “uncle Pete” character just after Sato got shot. Amir sits in the room trying to plead with the man for details because he supposedly doesn’t know what’s going on and why he’s been kidnapped but says that they keep mentioning this girl, this doctor. He then manages to escape and helps the terrorist escape in a well-played ruse. But when the man follows him out of the building, hops in the getaway car and puts something sharp to Amir’s neck, the team’s hope that the terrorist guy would lead them to the place where they have the kidnapped doctor starts to jiggle like an unstable Jenga tower.

Luckily the man blabs just in time for Jaz to snipe his brains out. After hearing that they took the doctor to a local hospital, the HQ team realizes that they didn’t kidnap the woman because they wanted a ransom for her, but because the bigger terrorist leader, some guy who is on the top ten list is actually sick and in need of a doctor to perform surgery. Holy crap, they could both save this doctor and take out one of the most ruthless terrorists in the world.

Well, the ground team concocts a plan that sees them sneaking into the hospital, isolating half of the guard soldiers for the big bad terrorist, beating them up and taking their uniforms to disguise themselves, and escorting the doctor lady out of the hospital after she successfully performed the surgery. Even better, they planted a remote detonating bomb on the big bad terrorist’s wife. Boom, go the terrorists.

The episode ends in a rather strange fashion with the team back stateside we’re assuming and at some beach. As they play and their boss back at HQ spies on them with a drone, a small truck makes its way onto the beach and detonates a bomb near the group. Why is this weird? Well, it leads into episode two which...

In episode two the conclusion of the first episode is only discussed in passing. It’s like in movies where they talk about some amazing action scene as opposed to showing it to you, generally because they didn’t have the budget for it. They literally say that some people died in the bombing and how crazy that was and that it happened two weeks ago and you’re like what? Hmph! Well that’s... strange. It felt like it was a cliffhanger to something amazing and then just got completely dropped the next episode.

Dalton and Preach (the black guy)

Anyway, episode two sees the crew going to rescue another person. This time, they must rescue an undercover CIA agent who had been compromised in the foreign country of Ukraine. The woman is bleeding and beaten and jogging around the city for most of the episode, trying to avoid the Ukraine government that doesn’t want her there. This is yet another job for Jaz.

At some point, even though the team does get to the CIA agent early on, they are ambushed and their transport out of the city is compromised. The agent is carried off by some Ukraine soldiers and manages to eventually escape into a women’s bathhouse. See, the person she was spying on/working for while undercover is so powerful that he has the military and local law enforcement under his control. But the bath houses are strictly for women and are supposed to be a refuge away from men. So the ground team sends in Jaz to find the woman in the bathhouse. The funny thing is that Amir, being the rather traditional Muslim he is, is very protective of the Muslim woman on the team (you bet they’re gonna have a romance later in the show) and knows that she has almost zero experience with undercover work like he does. He is worried for her and almost loses his grip when she gets stopped on the street by two Ukrainian soldiers. Luckily, the men dismiss her as not a traitor and more likely to shoot the escaped American than they are. They check out her butt and send her on her way.

Jaz gets into the bathhouse and finds the CIA agent. Meanwhile, the HQ team is trying to figure out a way to evac the ground team with the agent. As it turns out, Noah has personal ties to the agent—they were in the academy together and she was number two in their class behind him. Their current problem: the guy that the agent had been spying on has roving street sentries driving in tight patterns in the area where she was last seen around the bath house. They’re checking every vehicle and making sure she can’t escape. While HQ has a bead on all of the moving vehicles and relays that info to the ground team, Jaz and the agent move to the back of the bath house.

Dalton and Preach realize that they can bypass having their vehicle checked by procuring one of the guard vehicles. They beat up the guys inside, pull the vehicle to the back and make a smooth getaway from the bath house with the Agent and Jaz in-tow. Not cleared yet, they have to provide cover for the evac copter to land safely and long enough to get everyone loaded. Preach and McG go and set a big charge at an abandoned building while HQ coordinates the copter’s landing in a nearby empty yard. They play a game of watch-closely with the Ukrainians and detonate the building as cover for the helicopter landing in a different area. While everyone is distracted, the copter lands, loads and takes off into the night. Another day saved, another mission completed and no strange cliffhanger bomb at the end.

Episode three sees the team encounter an agent from Mexican intelligence that has been working in the drug cartel division for some time. He tells them that he has been following a drug kingpin for a very long time. One of the drug guys happens to be the same one that Hannah has a past with. He ordered her killed and beat her mercilessly, leaving scars all over her back. He is one of the biggest reasons she is no longer in the field. Well, as it turns out the drug lord is on the cusp of buying some illegal arms for his cartel. While the cartel guy is important (note: he’s not the top guy), the arms dealer is on the top ten list for illegal arms smuggling in the world. But no one can ever get the guy because he is so careful. As it turns out, the Mexican intelligence dude has been able to turn this arms dealer’s girlfriend. She’s supplied him with a wealth of information about how he operates but it still isn’t enough.

So, the plan is not to kill him or capture him but to use him to gain intel. The team hopes to bug him and track his movements so that they find his base of operations and are able to bring down his entire network of clients. Thinking it easy, their first plan is to bug his cellphone—a thousand-dollar custom job that is dipped in gold and all of this crazy crap. The point is that it is expensive. All they have to do is use Amir’s pickpocket skills to switch the phone out with their own dummy phone and voila, they have him. Unfortunately, as he is walking and right before Amir is about to switch the phones, the guy takes his real phone out and literally breaks his expensive phone in half and tosses it into a fountain like a penny into a wishing pond.

OK, new plan. They now have to contact the girlfriend and get her to help them get a bug into his necklace, the one thing he would never destroy because it has sentimental value to it. To do this, the ground team stages a robbery using intel from the girlfriend. She gives them info on their travel route for the next day and the team lies in wait. They have to switch plans slightly when the paranoid arms dealer confesses that he thought he saw Amir in two different places, following him. So, he orders that they turn around.

Well, the ground team still go through with the roadside heist, saying that they are taking his money from the recent arms deal with the drug lord which is really a guise to touch his necklace and plant the bug. The mission completed, the ground crew starts to go home but the arms dealer is still suspicious. His head of security tells him that his girlfriend was probably the one who betrayed them—intel that HQ gets from the bug that is in working condition. The dealer really loves the woman and reluctantly orders his security guy to kill her but not that very night, giving the team time to concoct a plan.

Back in HQ, Hannah and Noah get into a fight about whether to call the ground crew in the absence of their leader Patricia who has already left after another successful mission. Noah thinks the personal angle of this mission is effecting Hannah’s judgment because she sees the girlfriend as the informant she had while undercover who she couldn’t save. While Noah goes to look for their boss, Hannah breaks the chain of command and calls Dalton about the girlfriend.

The ground crew, after hearing that the girlfriend is in trouble, gets into a brief argument about what to do because if they go and rescue her then they sacrifice the bug and the arms dealer will go back into hiding and his clients will all disperse back into the underworld. But the Mexican intelligence officer is in love with the girlfriend and knows she will be killed, so he begs them to do something. Well, after much thought, Dalton concocts a plan. What they do is that they sneak the stolen money that they still had from their fake heist into the home of the drug dealer who had just bought the guns. Knowing that the arms dealer would soon come to close out the deal and shake hands, they also place Amir in the driveway on a bike, helmet off, to stare menacingly at the arms dealer as he arrives.

Naturally, the dealer and his head of security think that it wasn’t the girlfriend who was the traitor but the cartel guy who wanted the guns and wanted to keep the money for himself. The arms dealers goes in and kills the cartel guy and all of his people, bringing justice and an easing of mind to Hannah back at HQ, and saving the girlfriend’s life while keeping their bug intact. And there is yet again no strange bombing cliffhanger.

What’s my grade? I give this show a solid C+. Here’s the deal, I used to didn’t know why people said that TV wasn’t all that great and why movies and books were these phenomenal things, and that was even while I still loved all three of them. But now I understand: TV is more predictable and relies on this predictability “life is not like a box of chocolates” mentality to draw the viewer. After the past few years in which we saw some truly unique procedural ideas, this year networks fell back on the old tried and true standbys that see a lack of creativity returning to primetime. Don’t get me wrong, I see that this show has potential, especially if it finds its right audience and doesn’t get much competition from the similar CBS show Seal Team, but its very vanilla considering the other dramatic offerings on display for TV. Yes, it follows a small band of military special forces doing “God’s work” in foreign lands, but when boiled down to it, it is really nothing more than a case-a-week show where, each week, there will be clear-cut bad guys and good guys that are supposed to stop them. It’s basically almost every other cop drama ever made but with better tech and military might and ingenuity. Hell, the show is essentially Taken but with fatigues. Will it interest people who love military action? Sure. Everyone else? Eh!

I get it. This is the network’s patriotic reaction to the Midwest values that voters supposedly showed in last November’s election, but I’m not sure this appeals to Trump’s base quite like what they might like for it to. The amount of diversity on this show is astounding and judging by Trump’s “all sides” supporters, that’s not what everyone wants to see. Hell, there’s really only, like, two white people. Granted, they’re the two in charge, but still.

If the race thing and the fact that it is a ton of minorities doing the work to protect this country doesn’t bother you, then good. But unfortunately this show also doesn’t really supply that much in the way of mental stimulation or plot intrigue. It doesn’t even follow the recently most popular setup of a procedural that The Blacklist does so well by having a case a week in conjunction with an overall case that lingers throughout the season. I thought for a minute that the bomb at the end of the first episode might trigger something great and amazing, maybe a revenge plot thrown into the military actions or something different than what the trailers looked like, but nope. Nothing. Again, that final scene was so bizarre because it not only happened in a way that made it feel like a bold cliffhanger that suggested maybe they would kill one of their main players already, but it was not discussed in any great detail the next episode. Who did it? Why? How’d they know Dalton and his team were there? Was this a retaliation for killing the terrorist guy or just random? All good questions that have no answers. The only answer given is the worst one that we don’t want to hear as an audience: (paraphrased) “oh, we’re not gonna pursue revenge because that’s not our job. Our job is to follow orders from HQ. Their job is to figure out what happened.” And you’re all like, “What? Really? Dude, you’re gonna actually play goody two shoes. That’s no fun.” Sure, it may be closer to real life, but it’s also not that entertaining to not even see the characters give a single damn about it.

But I think the worst failing of the show is that it is almost character-less in its writing. OK, shameless plug here, if you read even one episode, the military episode of my episodic serial novel Extraordinary (that episode is titled “Fatigues” and is available on Amazon. Click “Extraordinary” at the end of this article), by the time you’ve finished the one episode, you should have a great understanding of exactly who the characters are or at least one aspect of their lives. I understand that this series is different because it has to do the case-a-week thing so it has to fit in a case, but my Extraordinary episodes are there to mimic the quick 60-minute format of drama shows. You should know something about these characters at the end of an hour.

Take for instance our leader Dalton. If you’ve seen the first three episodes, what do you know about him? How long has he been serving? When did he join the military? Why? Does he have a wife, spouse or girlfriend back stateside? Why did he become special forces? I bet that if you’ve been watching the episodes, you could only maybe answer half of those questions, if any. What’s sad is that the same goes for just about every other character on the show. You could ask the same about Patricia, Preach, Amir, Jaz or that other guy on the ground team. And yes while we know that Noah was top of his class and Hannah was “affected” by her in-field work, we still know little about their personalities and who they are outside of work. The action is great but the characters are all sort of robots, which, frankly gets tiring to watch after a while, especially when you know they are almost always going to win.

Should you be watching? Eh! Listen, if you like military-themed entertainment and are all about soldiers fighting against evil and stomping out the bad guys, then sure, this might be the show for you. But just know that this is definitely no American Sniper, no Quantico, no Homeland, no Tyrant, no any Middle Eastern, military or covert operations show that others have thought was really good. This show is closer to something that you probably can miss a few episodes of in a row because your schedule gets busy, and you won’t really miss much in the way of plot, nor will you feel bad for having missed it. Frankly, I’m not sure that this is even as good as the other military show Seal Team. Unfortunately, because I haven’t watched Seal Team yet, I can’t do a comparison of the two shows in this review so I can’t tell you which is better (they look like a carbon copy of each other). Look for a comparison in my Seal Team review in a few days. The Brave airs at 10pm on NBC Mondays.

What do you think? Have you heard of The Brave? If not, do you think you will check it out now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Do you like it? Where do you think the show can improve? And who is your favorite character? And what did you think of the first episode’s bomb scene? Should they have done something cool with that plotwise or was it good the way it was? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend. #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary on Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.

Until next time, “Why do you young people always think you’re so special? Huh? Well? You think you’re special?”

‘Well, I am in special ops so...”

P.S. Did I get some stuff incorrect on purpose in this review/recap? Yes, just to show how little this show entertained me. I didn’t care about the details in it because I was bored. I’ll try to come up with a better sign-off next time.

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