The episode begins benign enough with everyone dealing with the fallout from last week’s shocker: Simone is a traitor but has gone to ground, and Dante Allen has confessed his treason but may not recover from his heart attack. The first warning sign of trouble, in retrospect, is that the only character of importance Saul had hovering over Dante was Carrie, when in fact he should have armed personnel both inside his room, and three beside the door. Upon immediately seeing the inexplicably lax security, it became obvious that Dante was a dead man sleeping, whether he recovered or not.

Fortunately for Saul and company, he did recover long enough to both size up again his choice of confessing his litany of sins to Carrie, and then decide to continue singing. Carrie played this scene very well, convincing the dumb bastard that he should betray anyone who’d dare poison him… by telling his chief poisoner exactly what she wants to hear. He gives up the entire Russian operation, including a Twitter code that apparently burns down the SVR’s whole network that made this happen, flushing close to two dozen out for Saul and the FBI to begin visiting.

So all’s well and good, and at least on the Saul end, this continues in an intriguing fashion. First Saul, Keane, and Wellington bring in Sen. Paley and let him know he’s been a useful idiot, which is the highlight of the episode. His incredulity at hearing about Russians obviously is meant to mimic certain Republicans now who at least feign ignorance to what obviously is happening in the world. Yet his dismissive attitude turns to indignation and then outright horror. Having him literally ask why a “UI” is next to his and Carrie’s names (when really he should know) is just delicious. Sir, we’re listing you as a useful idiot. It just makes sense. Sir.

When Paley goes to whine to his legislative aide, Dylan Baker gets to really chew the scenery as he wallows in his stupidity. The episode even tricked me into thinking the aide is also a traitor, because “Russians,” and that Paley inadvertently tipped her off they’re burning down the SVR network. However, as that happened anyway, I suppose I’m just paranoid these days, no? Instead he immediately looks for the political posture he’ll need to withstand the shitstorm to come. And frankly, in reality, it should come no matter what happened to Dante, but I presume the “twist” will be Paley will swing back to antagonistic when he finds out that Dante died under FBI custody in a hospital after conveniently having a heart attack. (We’ll get to more on that later.)

In the meantime, Saul and his team have a nice ethics discussion about hacking and the dark web, which is just repetitious enough that I think we understood what was happening while still being so vague that we can’t check the proverbial science of it. Either way, the episode gives a light thumbs up to breaking into telecommunications to spy on people. So that happened. But like The Dark Knight, it proved effective, so it is hard to argue with it in this fictitious context.