Season 1, Episode 5: ‘The Mission’

Welcome back to the White House! This week’s episode of “Designated Survivor” revolves around a military strike, and contains all the classic elements of the show we’ve come to know and (maybe) love: ominous lead-chasing, flirtatious-yet-strained banter, close-ups on widening eyes, thickly laid moral dilemmas. Most interestingly, it implicitly floats the idea that President Kirkman is not, in fact, the hero of this story.

In the central scene, the show follows a Navy SEAL mission in Algeria, which ends in the successful capture of the suspected terrorist Majid Nassar. The scene toggles between a view inside the mission and Kirkman’s monitor screen; the feed flickers and warps, and it’s unclear at times what is happening. It’s a tense and skillfully filmed scene, but for a show that presumes to explore the moral complexities of American governance, it takes a pretty conventional approach to some of its portrayals. Each SEAL officer is a stoic, good-hearted, all-American family man working for a righteous and immaculate military. The bad guys are often easy to spot: They’re the ones with the beards and turbans. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, the more hardened, nuanced approach of a film like “Zero Dark Thirty” has apparently been deemed too sophisticated for a mass audience.

While good battles evil in Algeria, the scene in Washington is more subtle. Virginia Madsen, in particular, is electric as Congresswoman Hookstraten, who conveys volumes with each look from her steely eyes.

The congresswoman strode into the first episode like she was entering to the Darth Vader theme song, but she’s more wild card than evil villain. She’s also a skilled operator. Here, she needles Kirkman into revealing his covert military plans and then threatens to turn on him if the operation goes awry. She’s a doll to Seth Wright but a snarling pit bull to Congressman MacLeish: Her “coming, Peter?” as she leaves the Oval Office is searing.