Madam Secretary - The Call - Recap and season so-far review

Did you all hear the good news? Madam Secretary has been picked up for a full season! We are getting more episodes of this good series! I am thrilled we will see more of Téa Leoni as the Secretary of State and I can't wait for more storylines to play out. As we're now a quarter into season 1, I thought it would be a good idea to have a critical look at the season so far. But of course, first a recap of episode 6, "The Call".

On this week's episode, we saw another story used from the headlines. This time it was about the Republic of West Africa, where a militia was threatening woman and children. The story comes to Elizabeth's attention when she find Henry's old religion professor, now a priest, at her house who tells her that thousands of woman are in danger of genocide. She says she will bring it to the attention as soon as possible, but the President doesn't seem to be really interested in taking action. She talks to the Ambassador of West Africa and he says nothing is wrong in his country. In the meantime, Elizabeth is also preparing for her first official speech with her speechwriters doing their best to write a great speech. However, while giving the speech she goes off book and talks about the problems in West Africa. While certainly a risky move her staff is not happy with, Elizabeth manages to convince France to lend air support if the US takes action. Sadly, things change for the worse when the priest is publicly asked on television about his involvement in the smuggling of drugs. Elizabeth has tied the President to a drug dealer.

As Henry gets pissed at his friend for lying to him, Elizabeth does the best she can to handle the situation. Fortunately, the President is still on board with the operation even thought France backed out of the air support. Military action seems out of the question now so the only thing Elizabeth can still do is make a deal with the drug dealers in West Africa to save the woman. After striking a deal, however, a drug dealer turns up dead so they're back to square one. But of course, there's still the priest who has ties to drug dealers. The US manages to get a deal with him in exchange for saving the thousands of other women, which also includes some of his family members. While Henry is still not happy he lied to him, the priest once again comes by the McCord mansion to say his goodbyes as he is leaving for Rome.

Meanwhile, Blake's investigation into Nadine turn up empty until he finds a long phone call with one of Marsh's supporters. Blake later finds out that she offered Nadine a job, which she rejected. At the end of the episode, Elizabeth admits to an already suspicious Nadine that she had her investigated. Up next for investigation is Vincent Marsh himself.

For this part of the review, I'm gonna look a bit more at the series so far and will later come up with my opinion on this episode. We're six episodes in now and I'm very much enjoying the series. However, something still doesn't feel right. In my opinion, the show lacks some consistency. This is not so much true for the cases of the week which are fine by me (more on that in a bit), but more so to the stories of the background characters. Or must I say, lack thereof. Their stories seem so random every episode and there's no real character progression. For example, Daisy and Matt's affair from last week came out of the blue as it was never once referred to earlier. Allison's boyfriend, who broke up with her a couple of episodes ago, was not even mentioned till that very episode. I know Elizabeth is the main character, I like her very much and I believe Téa Leoni is doing a great job. It's just that there should be some focus on other characters as well. When Stevie was introduced in episode 2 I found her very promising, but she hasn't had much to do lately. I would like to see some change in this.

The cases of the week are good though I'm still not entirely agreeing with the concept of a new case each week. I can't imagine the current Secretary of State having a new case every week. Also, some build-up to the cases would be nice. Issues like the Iranian nuclear program and coups in the Republic of West Africa have been going on for much longer so it would be good to have some continuity in that. I also hope they will come back to the Canada issue from last week as the report needs six months to be written. Besides, I wouldn't mind stretching a case out over a few weeks, but maybe it's too soon for that.

Despite my criticisms, I did enjoy episode 6. The priest reminded me a bit of Mr Eko from LOST, a drug lord turned priest. I found it very funny when Elizabeth went off book in her speech and her staff realised that. They immediately made preparations for the worst as they hadn't seen this coming. Hillarious! On another note, I do think the Nadine investigation went too quick. It would have been nice to have it stretched out a bit as it now felt somewhat anti-climatic.

Overall, this is a good series but there's still room for improvement. I'm hoping there will be changes coming soon.

What did you think of this episode? How do you feel about the series so far? Do you agree with my criticisms or should I stop whining already? Fire away in the comments below.

Promo for the next, intense-looking episode:

About the Author - Daniel

Daniel is a Dutch university student studying Psychology. On SpoilerTV he is a reviewer of NCIS, The 100, Madam Secretary and the upcoming shows Battle Creek and Odyssey. He also enjoys LOST, Arrow, NCIS: Los Angeles, NCIS: New Orleans, Nikita, The Blacklist, Stalker, Scorpion and How To Get Away With Murder.

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