Hostages - Season 1

[AntiArbitrator]

The pilot introduced the main characters and was exciting enough to hold my interest.

One of the things that I found very interesting is that no one is squeaky clean. We might not know what their demons are, but we know they are hiding something big.

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Full recap of the Pilot follows. Beware of Spoilers if you have not seen the episode.





Pilot: Ellen Sanders is successful surgeon and matriarch of what appears to be a very happy Washington DC family. She was just hand-picked to perform a very delicate, but very publicized surgical procedure on the President of the United States, and her life appears to be close to perfect. That perfection is shattered, however, when a group of armed intruders invade the Sanders' home and hold them hostage. The leader of the captors, Duncan Carlisle, informs Ellen that he will kill her entire family if she does not cooperate with his requests. Duncan orders Ellen to kill the President during the operation the following day, something she simply cannot see herself doing.

Just before the surgery, with her family staring down the barrels of the captors' guns at home, Ellen makes a calculated risk and slips the President some blood thinner, which allows her to postpone the surgery for two weeks. While being held hostage, the captors stumble upon many of the Sanders' most closely guarded family secrets. Brian, despite appearing to be a loving, devoted husband, has actually been having a secret affair and considered leaving Ellen. The Sanders children, meanwhile, have big problems of their own. Morgan, the oldest, just found out she is pregnant, and Jake, her younger brother, is in deep debt to a local drug dealer. The Sanders clan struggles to keep these secrets hidden from each other, but their precarious situation is making it harder to maintain the lies... Unbeknownst to the Sanders family, Duncan is actually an FBI agent and accomplished hostage negotiator with a family of his own. His wife, Nina, is currently in a coma in a local hospital, and his daughter, Sawyer, is staying with Burton, Duncan's father-in-law, while he holds the Sanders captive. While Duncan may be the leader of the group holding the Sanders family hostage, it’s clear that his orders come from someone higher up, and that the conspiracy to assassinate the president is much bigger than anyone could imagine

[AntiArbitrator]

Season 1: Episode 2 - Invisible Leash

I am glad Ellen did not kill the President because it would have been a one-episode series. Ellen has a strong will which became apparent during Agent Hoffman's interrogation. She remained steadfast.

Brian's mistress kept texting him when he did not show up for their Tuesday night date. That had him sweating bullets. Sorry, I feel no sympathy for him.

Let's keep in mind that the matriach is a well-known surgeon and they are not starving. So...I did not feel sorry for their son either when he got in trouble for losing his drug dealing money. That and the husband's infidelity complicated things for the hostage takers, but gave us more excitement.

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Full recap of the 2nd episode follows. Beware of spoilers if you have not seen the episode.






Invisible Leash: Immediately following Ellen's press conference and her stalled assassination attempt on the President, Ellen is whisked away to a private room by multiple Secret Service agents, led by the intimidating Agent Stan Hoffman. He presses her for the truth, but she reveals nothing about Duncan or her family's captors. When Hoffman steps away, Agent Landry whispers something to Ellen that indicates he's in on the conspiracy as well, and she realizes that she cannot trust anyone. Ellen races home, only to be confronted by Duncan, who tells her that her refusal to go through with the plan will cost one of her family members their lives. He threatens to kill Brian, which terrifies the entire family, but ultimately ends up only using the threat as a psychological tactic. He then informs the Sanders family that they will resume their normal lives for the next two weeks - until the President's next operation - and that his team will be monitoring their every move during that period. To do so, the captors clone all the Sanders' electronic devices and phones, and they plant GPS chips in Brian, Morgan, and Jake. Duncan then forces Ellen to frame her head nurse, Angela, for the attempted assassination, but this hits a snag when Angela refuses to accept the blame. Duncan then sends Archer to take care of Angela, and the episode ends with Ellen seeing a news report about Angela's apparent suicide, knowing that Duncan and his team were likely responsible for the death of her friend... When Brian gets a flurry of texts from his mistress, Samantha, Sandrine forces him to go see her privately to continue their affair. Brian is very reluctant, but he's caught between a rock and a hard place and ultimately has to go through with it. Meanwhile, Morgan continues to deal with her unexpected pregnancy in private, and Jake tries to convince Kramer to help him locate the money he needs to pay back Nico the drug dealer

[AntiArbitrator]

Season 1: Episode 3 - Power Of Persuasion

This episode moved the story along at a rapid pace and kept the level of excitement high. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Ellen continues to demonstrate she is both intelligent and clever when she slips her tail and sneaks off to talk to Duncan's daughter, Sawyer.

Brian has become increasingly frustrated from feeling a lack of control in his life. That frustration caused him to ignore his son's attempt to persuade him to return the money Brian found.

Since Jake could not give his drug dealer boss the money, he received a brutal beating. Unfortunately, instead of Jake realizing it is not good to work for criminals, he blamed his father.

Kramer was angry about the drug dealer stomping Jake so he gave Nico the same kind of brutal beating and told him to stay away from Jake.

Morgan was also angry at her father because she thought he had been mean to Boyd, her boyfriend/baby daddy. Actually, Boyd had mistaken Duncan as Morgan's father.

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Full recap follows. Beware of spoilers if you have not seen the episode.



Power Of Persuasion: Ellen, still reeling from the presumed murder of her friend Angela, endeavors to learn more about Duncan after overhearing a private phone call he has with his daughter, Sawyer. She learns that Sawyer has an art fair at her school today, and Brian manages to discreetly find out exactly what school she goes to while at work. Ellen cleverly slips her tail at work and goes to the art fair, posing as Sawyer's aunt, and manages to carefully pry information out of Duncan's daughter. She is shocked to learn that her captor isn't some nameless terrorist, but an actual FBI agent whose last name is Carlisle, and that his wife is sick and in a local hospital. Satisfied with the information she obtains from Sawyer, Ellen slips out of the school just as Kramer arrives to see his niece’s artwork. Duncan narrowly avoids an assassination attempt by someone hired by Creasy. Knowing that the higher ups have decided to call off the assassination and eliminate all the loose ends, Duncan sneaks up on Creasy at home and blackmails him into keeping with the original plan. In order to make that happen, Creasy, and by extension, Duncan and Ellen, have to convince President Kincaid not to change surgeons. After some political wheeling and dealing, Creasy gets Ellen a face to face with the President. Duncan orders her to convince President Kincaid to keep her on as his surgeon and, knowing that it's the only way to keep her family safe, Ellen puts on a confident face and succeeds. Brian struggles with the fact that he is powerless in every aspect of his life: he's failing at work, he's being forced to continue an affair he wants to end, and he is completely at the mercy of his captors at home. Brian takes out his frustration on Jake, who comes to him begging for the drug money that Brian found. Brian lashes out at him and says no, which results in Jake getting beaten up by Nico. Kramer and Sandrine watch the beating happen from their car, but do nothing to stop it. Later, Kramer tracks Nico down and retaliates on Jake's behalf, giving Nico an equally brutal beating. Morgan also yells at Brian for the way he treated Boyd when he came to introduce himself - something Brian had no involvement in, as Boyd assumed Duncan was Morgan's father

[AntiArbitrator]

Season 1: Episode 4 - 2:45 PM

The hostages are scared but are still unwilling to do what Duncan and his crew are trying to force them to do.

Ellen put a huge burden on her children when she insisted that they escape by leaving school early, cut tracking chips from their backs, get to the bus station and leave. I think both of the kids were clever, but Morgan was more focused on sticking to the plan. No one mentioned that the son messed up by using the phone at a rest station to call his parents. When escaping from people in law enforcement, calling from a pay phone makes it easy to track you.

I admire Brian’s willingness to die in order for his family to escape.

Duncan is trying so hard to find a way to get a cure for his wife and all she wants to do is go home to be with her family.

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Full recap follows. Beware of spoilers if you have not seen the episode.




Season 1: Episode 4 - 2:45 PM Ellen and Brian put their secret escape plan into action. Brian tells Ellen that he'll distract Duncan and his team long enough to give Ellen and the kids time to sneak aboard a bus to Canada. Ellen manages to sneak a scalpel out of her first aid kit and gives it to Jake and Morgan, ordering them to cut the GPS chips out of each other before meeting her at a rendezvous point. The kids overcome obstacles of their own to comply with her orders and covertly ditch the GPS chips, just in time to quietly escape the school grounds during a fake bomb threat called in by one of Jake's friends. Despite increased scrutiny from Archer, Ellen manages to slip away from him and meet her kids at the bus station when Brian commandeers her car and leads their captors on a wild goose chase. Unfortunately, Duncan catches up to Brian and runs him off the road. Duncan calls Ellen and shoots Brian during their conversation, forcing her to make the impossible choice between escaping with her kids and leaving her husband to die... Duncan goes to see his wife, Nina, at the hospital and is surprised to see her up and about. Nina tells him that she's sick of the chemotherapy and that she wants to stop treatment, preferring to spend her remaining time traveling with her husband and daughter. Duncan, caught in a bind, encourages her not to give up on treatment and tells her that he may have found someone who does experimental procedures that can help her. She just needs to be patient. Duncan is pulled away before she can give him an answer as he learns of Ellen's plans to escape

[AntiArbitrator]

Season 1: Episode 5 - Truth and Consequences

Ellen had a lot to contend with in this episode. Firstly, she had to work fast in order to save her husband’s life. Then, she had to convince her daughter’s boyfriend to leave before he discovered what was really happening at that moment. As if that was not enough, Duncan then scared Ellen so much she was convinced that she was going to die.

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Full recap follows.







Truth and Consequences: Duncan has shot Brian and he is at risk of bleeding to death. Ellen, forced to choose between saving her husband and fleeing with her kids, races back home in time to perform an emergency operation on Brian. Midway through the procedure, Boyd shows up and storms into the house, demanding to talk to Morgan. He blindsides Ellen by mentioning that Morgan is pregnant, but she's forced to hurry him away to continue Brian's surgery. After Ellen saves Brian, Duncan binds her hands, throws her in the trunk of his car, drives her to a deserted field in the middle of nowhere, and orders her to dig a grave. Ellen is sure she's going to be executed, but Duncan surprises her when he dumps Angela's corpse into the grave and orders her to bury her former friend. Emotionally exhausted, Ellen complies, taking solace in the fact that her kids have escaped. Jake and Morgan narrowly avoid Sandrine at the bus station and board a bus heading for Canada. However, Jake gets nervous and fearful for his parents, and he calls home from a rest stop to try and talk to them. Kramer traces the call, allowing Sandrine to pick them up and return them to the Sanders' house. Meanwhile, Sandrine is confronted by a man who tells her that he'll kill her if she doesn't pay him fifty thousand dollars by the next evening. She confronts Duncan and demands the money as her payment, which he reluctantly agrees to. After Duncan learns that Archer killed Angela, an innocent in the scheme of things, he tips off local police and manages to get Archer arrested. Once he's been booked, however, Archer claims that he knows crucial information about the attempted Presidential assassination...

[AntiArbitrator]

The season finale will air tomorrow and I am really looking forward to watching it.

Thus far, all of the key players are still around, but they do not trust each other. There is so much backstabbing going on that it is difficult to tell who is pretending to go along with a plot and who actually plans to turn against the team.

Colonel Blair knows that the President's sister-in-law has reneged on her deal to promote him as a candidate for Vice President and that will turn ugly.

Archer found the bombs that Sandrine hid, but I do not know how that will turn out.

The action and extended plots bring "24" to mind because I do not know what will happen until the moment it goes "BANG!"

[AntiArbitrator]

"Hostages" - "Suspicious Minds" and "Endgame"

FINALE NEW Mon 1/6/14 (9 p.m. and 10 p.m., CBS)


Both of the final two episodes of "Hostages" Season 1 air back-to-back on Monday night.
First, Duncan discovers Sandrine's betrayal and uses it to his advantage to save his wife and daughter.
In the second hour, the First Lady confronts Ellen just as the surgeon is about to operate on the President. She forces Ellen to tell the truth about the assassination plot.

[KyleEl]

Now that was an exciting night.

There is no season 2. This was a limited series like "Under the Dome" and has little if any potential to continue, especially since ratings have been poor.

[AntiArbitrator]

I thoroughly enjoyed the series even though I started watching near the end of the season. I watched most of the episodes on-line, but the picture would flutter most of the time and not seem in sync with the dialogue. I still enjoyed it, but I enjoyed the episodes I saw on TV much better.

The finale was excellent. I do not understand the final scene so I might have forgotten something that happened. Do you know why Duncan went to the police station and said he was there to turn himself in? What crime was he turning himself in for? *confused*

I am thrilled they used my home town for the locale. The fictional location for the series is Maryland. The operation took place at "Maryland College, School of Medicine" but the building was designed to look like The University of Maryland Hospital, School of Medicine, which is a world-renown teaching hospital. There actually is a Maryland General Hospital, but it is not a school of medicine.

In the episode where Ellen's sister had to be sent away, the doctors came to take her to Sheppard Pratt Hospital which is the real name for the Maryland psychiatric hospital.

They also mentioned Bethesda, which is a real location, but I think they were substituting that for Mt. Sinai Hospital.

I wanted to know if any of the show was actually filmed in Maryland, but the only location I could find on-line is New York.

[KyleEl]

There are any number of crimes Duncan could be confessing to. Conspiracy to kill the President is one. Taking the family hostage would be the other big one. I guess we'll never know.

[AntiArbitrator]

I do not understand why Duncan would turn himself in unless he plans to implicate people like the President's sister-in-law and others. It just seemed like a strange and unlikely conclusion for the final scene and he would probably get the death penalty.

I did not like the fact that two of Duncan's friends were killed because he involved them in the plot. That was sort of sad to me because they were loyal and trusted him.

Other than that, I really enjoyed the series.

[AntiArbitrator]

Dylan McDermott, along with Maggie Q, has a new series that starts in the fall titled "Stalker". I plan to watch it.