The Endgame Episode 10 Review and Recap: 'Happily Ever After'

The Endgame episodes: what happens in "Happily Ever After"

The Endgame is an NBC crime thriller created by Nicholas Wootton and Jake Coburn that premiered on February 21, 2022. Morena Baccarin plays Elena Federova, a criminal mastermind, and Ryan Michelle Bathé plays FBI Special Agent Val Turner, the principled FBI agent who squares off against her. Viewers who met the show late can treat The Endgame episodes as one self-contained ten-part season, since there is no second one. The finale was written by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen and Moira Kirland.

The review reads the season as a long fairy tale. Federova's organization is called Snow White, she is known as the Queen, and the finale's title closes the motif. "Happily Ever After" starts well for her, then turns darker and more complicated. Among the cast, Costa Ronin plays Sergey Vodianov, Elena's husband who was thought to be dead, Jordan Johnson-Hinds is FBI agent Anthony Flowers, Mark Damon Espinoza is FBI Director Rogelio Réal, Noah Bean is Assistant Director Patrick Doak and Kamal Bolden plays Val's husband Owen.

The story of the golden buttons

The episode is framed by another story, this time told by Elena to young Sofiya. It is about an evil king, and it reveals what happened to the gold stolen from the Federal Reserve. It was moved to Peekskill Prison, where inmates melted it and pressed it into a harder-to-trace form: golden buttons. This clears up how Owen and Sergey ended up in that exact prison, which was no accident.

President Wright, Doak and the hunt for Sofiya

The finale makes it painfully clear how corrupt President Wright is. He lies about Federova at a press conference and sends Doak on a quest: first to find and delete evidence of his crimes, which Wright calls fabricated by Elena, and then, when that mission is complicated, to take young Sofiya hostage. Doak, described by the review as an incompetent FBI goon, is eager to try. He calls the agents watching the girl's house and takes a helicopter to fetch her himself. Sofiya and the old woman are a couple of steps ahead and reach a safe place, where Sofiya and her mother have a tearful reunion before escaping with Doak at their heels.

The escape, the trucks and the shootout

Val does not know what to do about the missing queen of crime until the light used to signal Elena goes silent, which tells her that Elena's people know she is missing. Snow White agents track a signal from a brooch Elena is wearing. Val decides to interrogate her husband at Peekskill, but Owen and Sergey are already escaping, strapped under trucks carrying the gold buttons. By the time Val realizes they are gone, Elena has been found and recovered by her men. Worse, Val finds proof that the man Owen escaped with is Sergey, Elena's supposedly dead husband, and that Federova has not told her the truth.

Owen and Sergey remove the Belok agents and take one truck in another direction, while Val and Anthony find the other three. Elena calls with another riddle and real information, and the FBI agents take down the armed Belok agents. After the shootout Réal reveals something that changes everything Val thought she knew about her husband, and puts Owen in danger from Sergey. Lady Belok makes a house call on President Wright and punishes him for failing. The review describes her as a cudgel to Elena's scalpel.

The ending: Fort Totten and a cliffhanger

Val finds Owen just before Sergey would have executed him, but Snow White and Elena arrive and out-gun her. Elena enjoys her moment, offers a token of respect and another puzzling clue about the matryoshka dolls, and leaves with her family. Val cannot forgive what she learned about Owen's secrets, at least not yet. Doak, having failed to grab Sofiya, tries to destroy the evidence against Wright, but an FBI tech stops him and the Director keeps the information to use against Doak later.

Then the episode turns. Happily Ever After ends in tragedy for Elena when Lady Belok catches up. TVLine's report on the cancellation describes the last scene: Elena calls Val to say Lady Belok has kidnapped their daughter and destroyed the vehicle carrying Sergey, and her last line is "I need your help." Val has just found another thread to follow in Fort Totten, so the story ends with both women in motion.

The Endgame episodes at a glance

The Endgame episodes review: a finale that deserved a season 2

The review closes with a verdict that was written in hope. The Endgame, it says, managed to set itself apart from The Blacklist, and Morena Baccarin proved her acting chops in a morally gray role. The finale supports that case. The fairy tale framing is lightly worn, the corruption plot around President Wright pays off, and Elena and Val both come out of the hour with new problems.

The cliffhanger is the sticking point. NBC canceled the show on May 12, 2022, alongside the comedies Mr. Mayor and Kenan, and TVLine noted that the May 2 finale ended up the series finale by default. The pilot drew 3.30 million viewers and the finale 1.45 million, according to the series' Wikipedia entry. There was no second season to answer Elena's call, so "Happily Ever After" has to stand as the ending of The Endgame episodes, and as an ending it is frustrating.

Two arcs deserve credit. The Wright and Doak thread turns the president into an openly corrupt figure and Doak into a comic failure who still gets one surprising decision late in the hour, which the Director banks as leverage. And the Val and Owen thread gives Ryan Michelle Bathé the best material of the finale: she finds her husband alive, learns what he hid from her, and still has to decide whether to forgive him. The one quibble is how casually the plot hands Elena a win, only to take it away, but the swing is also what makes the last scene land.

The numbers explain the decision, if not the timing. The Endgame opened at a 0.5 rating among adults 18 to 49 and closed at 0.2, and the series holds a 33 percent approval score on Rotten Tomatoes from 12 reviews, according to its Wikipedia entry. Small sample sizes aside, that is a weak critical start for a show the review still liked. The Endgame episodes were built around riddles, matryoshka dolls and a running contest between Elena and Val, and the finale keeps that structure intact until the last call.

Rough Cut Review's view: the season is a tight ten-episode thriller and the final episode is a strong hour of television that stops in the middle of its own story. If you have not seen the series, watch it as a ten-episode story with a cliffhanger and expect no resolution. If you already did, the finale holds up as a tense and grim hour. For other shows that ended before their stories did, see the cancelled TV shows tracker.

Sources

• The Endgame (TV series), Wikipedia — Premiere, cast, finale date, cancellation and viewership
• The Endgame Cancelled At NBC, TVLine — Cancellation report and a description of the final scene