Warning: full spoilers below.
Well, that was a crisis averted. For now, anyways. The Brink brought the impeding war with Pakistan and Israel full circle in Sunday night’s finale, “There Will Be Consequences,” with not as many actual consequences as one would have thought given the events leading up to the closing episode.
With Walter finally in control in the war room and the President in lockdown with his Neiman Marcus purchases, things were finally getting done in regards to taking down the rogue bomber. Zeke and Jammer had quite a drunken ride in their jet while Alex Talbot attempted to get inside the head of Zaman with bloody results. Of course, even with the bomber down, it only took seconds for Walter to figure out that there was a second bomber, forcing the fighter pilots to be “Batman” and take it down in another glorious plane crash.
In true Brink fashion, even though everything (sort of) worked out in the end and a third world war was averted (for now), there were plenty of signature comedic moments pushing the narrative through. Between Walter going down on his wife in the war room while the Israeli prime minister looked on, and banter between Talbot/Rafiq and Zeke/Jammer, the episode managed to keep a light tone despite the mounting pressure of the actual story.
While it would have come as no surprise if the season ended with a grandiose explosion — or for Israel to be bombed or to go on the offensive after all — the writers instead closed the story while opening up new potential threats for the already-ordered Season 2. With Russia supposedly sneaking around and trying to reassemble the Soviet Union while the States was preoccupied with averting a nuclear crisis and the pilots landing Pakistani nuke in Eritrea, Africa for militants to steal, there will be plenty of high stakes situations for these characters to occupy themselves with throughout another 10-episode run.
Outside of Walter Larson, who miraculously kept his job and his marriage intact by the closing moments, it’s hard to see how the other characters could factor into a second season just yet. Given Talbot’s overall ineptness and his plans to move to Paris, and given the quarter-billion blow-ups from the pilots all season long, there’s no universe in which any of those characters should be put in charge of anything ever again. But this is television and these characters did become the most flawed of heroes in their own way by the end, so it’s probably safe to say we’ll see them back as well.
That will definitely be to the show’s advantage anyhow. All season long Pablo Schreiber and Eric Ladin stole every episode with their formidable chemistry and banter. Even during some of the series’ slower episodes, those two managed to come out on top again and again in terms of the laughs. By the season’s end Jack Black and Aasif Mandvi got into a likeable groove of their own, which culminated in the two of them attempting to flee before being bombed. Watching them high tail it and spout proclamations of friendship before realizing they were in the clear was one of the finale’s best moments. It would be fun to pick up on both pairs in Africa and Paris, respectively, and see how each pair gets pulled back into it all with another crisis at hand.
Or, as we’ve seen before, help to just blow the world up. Because we all know that’s coming in this show eventually, do we not?
