Hanna – Grape Vines and Orange Trees

By: Kelly Kearney

After the premiere ended with Marissa and Hanna saving Abbas Naziri from another Stapleton issued confirmed kill, the two women race against the all-seeing eye of Pioneer and their mysterious leader “The Chairman” to save more targets and end this rogue program once and for all. With the help of CIA programmer Ethan, Marissa is one step closer to figuring out who is behind this whole operation, but will the reveal be too much for her to take? Let’s find out.

MARY HAD A LITTLE SECRET

When Benson (Dempsey Bovell) catches up to Mia/Hanna (Esmé Creed-Miles) and asks what happened to the plan for Abbas (Adam Bessa), and she lies and tells him the boy tried to kiss her, so she freaked out and tossed him off the building. In reality, we know Marissa (Mireille Enos) and Hanna saved the activist from his ordered assassination but the world and it’s new stickers claim he died. Now he has no choice but stay that way and never see Hanna again if he wants to live. Agent Stapleton (Chloe Pirrie), who has been suspicious of Mia from the start, doesn’t believe the information she has heard about this young man’s death. Something doesn’t add up, but with Benson’s eye-witness account of his plummet and subsequent funeral pyre, she decides to gage Carmichael’s reaction to sniff out any lies. For his part, John (Dermot Mulroney) plays the clueless and shrugs off her concerns with an assumption- the fire was thanks to the right-winged enemies Abbas made over the years. Stapleton has no evidence to the contrary so continues to take John’s word for it.

Speaking of evidence, Marissa gets the results back from those blurry photos of The Chairman (Ray Liotta) and what she discovers instantly makes her sick. Who is this man, and what ties does he have to Marissa? In a flashback we see a young Marissa hiding from a man with a very familiar “Chairman” sounding voice. This sick and twisted monster torments and hunts the young girl throughout her house, while barking out a chilling announcement, “I’m gonna find you, Mary!”

With her mission seemingly complete, Mia heads back to the university and is surprised to hear Abbas told his friends he loved her. That is a first for this isolated girl who never had another soul outside of her father to talk to. The thought of this bright and deeply focused boy having feelings for her seems to both sadden and intrigue her. Sad, because the world thinks he is dead, and he needs to stay that way for Hanna; intrigued because he is still out there and never seeing him again seems like a long time for her to wrap her young mind around. After that personal reveal, Marissa pops out of the campus’ shadows to let Hanna know the boy is staying in a safehouse and in the meantime, she needs her to be ready for their next mission. They must stay ahead of these assassination orders so they can intercept each one across the world. It is a tough job for two women – one of whom is supposed to be dead. Marissa leaves, but Hanna follows her to an apartment where she assumes Naziri is hiding out. After Hanna sees her leave, she breaks in and tells Abbas that Clare AKA Marissa, cannot know she stopped by. She explains their situation and how he got involved. She keeps it simple by saying they are destroying an organization that wants him dead. A rogue government agency that’s trying to prevent a future from happening that they aren’t entirely sure will. It is a gamble that costs lives, and mostly the lives of young people who make their way onto the kill list. The depth of this situation hasn’t sunk in yet because he is too busy worrying about his pride and how this tiny girl manhandled him. She soothes his ego by telling him his philosophies of activism touched her and that is why she broke Clare’s rules. She just had to see him one last time to say thank you. He brushes off her compliments but before she can leave, he reaches through the chained door to touch her face. A romantic notion mixed with a final goodbye.

Back to Marissa, and she is still trying to wash the filthy flashbacks of that horrible man from her past out of her mind. She did, however, send notice to her contact at the CIA Paris office to look up a Gordon Evans. Decades of top-secret military and government documents pop up on screen accompanied by a photo of the man in Marissa’ nightmares. He is the same one calling the shots at Pioneer! Later, she meets with Hanna at Abbass’ fake funeral and after some health concerns muttered by Hanna over Weigler’s new smoking habits, she tells the girl she thinks someone was at the safe house. Did Abbass have a girlfriend Marissa was unaware of? Hanna plays dumb and says she will ask his friends, but Marissa’s mood is a bit cold and distracted. It gets even chillier when she segues the conversation to Erik, Hanna’s father, and his knowledge of the men who worked above Marissa at Utrax. Hanna can tell something is off with the usually calm and focused woman who now seems jittery and like she is hiding something. Lying she says she hasn’t cleaned up The Chairman’s photo yet but to be ready for their next mission.

LOVE BLOOMS IN CHAOS

When Abbass wakes up to find Mia in his safehouse polishing off his cereal he joins her for breakfast and the two talk. She wants to know about the woman he was talking to on the phone when they met. It is one part- fact finding mission and all parts jealousy over another girl he could be seeing. He brushes her off claiming she is the only girl he is interested in and thanks her for saving his life, even though the current situation is weird and confusing. The two share their first kiss over a steaming cup of coffee.

After The Chairman tells Stapleton to keep her eye on Carmichael because something is off with him, Terri (Cherrelle Skeate) gets a computer update for the second mission in Prague. A young woman, an environmental activist named Katrina (Anna Kameníková) has been marked for death. She spots her assassin in the street having no idea the unsuspecting woman just placed a device under her car. Hanna makes her way to Prague to intercept the kill and meets with Katrina in time to

point out her would-be killer. Katrina immediately recognizes the woman, and it is enough for her to believe Hanna. The two young woman switch clothing and Hanna takes off in the activist’s car with the assassin tracking her with a hovering finger over the remote detonator. The mountainous snowy roads of Czechia and their steep cliffs makes navigation difficult after the assassins hits the button and blows Hanna’s breaks. She manages to hop out just as the out-of-control vehicle goes over the cliff. The assassin texts Stapleton that the job was complete without a hitch never realizing Hanna tricked her.

When Marissa and Hanna make it back to Paris, a letter from the informant Ethan (Sam Swainsbury) is waiting. Chain smoking her way through the Gordon Evans material, it appears the packet is light on details. All his top-secret Utrax/Pioneer assignments say, “nature of operation unknown.” She calls Tracey, her sister, and it’s the first time we realize Marissa aka Mary has a family. The two haven’t seen each other in years; their mother wasn’t even sure she was still alive. She asks Tracey if she’s spoken to their father, and her sister, who seems to hold animosity towards Mary for being his favorite, says “not in two years” and she should know, Mary works with him. According to him, Mary was crucial to his entire operation and sees her every day at work. She holds her tears back and until she hangs up while Tracey is rambling on about family dynamics. Gordan Evans is Marissa’s father, and like some puppet master, he has been pulling her strings since her first days at the CIA. As the realization dawns on her that her entire career was the brain child of one twisted man she has the misfortune of calling father, Stapleton spots Mia on CCTV and notices a cut on her face. It’s leftover from the car crash and something about it bothers her enough to send Benson to Paris to look in on her.

At the same time Stapleton is ordering secret check-ups on Mia, Terri gets orders to launch mission three in Rome. She lets Carmichael know what’s up because Terri cares for Mia and knows her employers are not on the up and up. John blows Terri off, to text Marissa with the mission news but she’s four-fingers deep into a whiskey bottle and wallowing in her Daddy pain. When Hanna hears the news, she’s leaving for her next mission she goes to say goodbye to Abbas. On the way, she gets the sense that someone is following her, but no one makes themselves known. When she gets to him, she explains everything and the two young lovers fall into bed, making love like it’s their first and last time. When the lovers wake, they dream about a future together someday, but deep-down Hanna knows it’s just a fantasy. Her life is too unstable for anything permanent. When she leaves him with a kiss goodbye, she recognizes a car parked in front of the safe house and it looks like the one following her earlier. She spins around and races back to the apartment just as Benson shoots Abbas! He is still alive, and before he can take the final shot, Hanna jumps on his assailant stabbing him with a cork screw until he falls to the ground. She finishes him off with a bullet, grabs his keys, and the two take off as she calls Marissa with a code red. Now that Stapleton can’t get ahold of Benson, Hanna knows the woman will send an entire team to find her and that means none of them are safe. Terri overhears the Mia wolf situation and so does John who takes off to his secret office to find out what’s going on. Stapleton’s goons follow but he manages to send off a message to Marissa before he trashes the laptop and any evidence of Weigler’s plans.

Meanwhile, we see Ethan back in his favorite Viennese café under the watchful eye of his assassin and Hanna hater, Sandy. She’s a lioness stalking her pray – just waiting for the orders to strike and kill. Back in Paris, Marissa patches Naziri up and lets Hanna know she is peeved the girl lied about going to the safe house and taking such a risk. She is angry but not enough to turn down those maternal instincts that keep slipping out in all of their interactions. “Be careful” she makes Hanna promise, as the teen assassin heads off to Rome and the next mission. At the same time, The Chairman orders Stapleton to get the truth out of Carmichael; he knows he lied about Marissa because they tracked the IP addresses of all his contacts. He wants Stapleton to kill Hanna and Naziri but take Marissa alive. Terri realizes John is missing and starts to worry. She sends Hanna an alert letting her know Pioneer is on to her and they know where Marissa and Naziri are. Hanna sends Marissa a text to get out now they are coming and as she and Abbas leave, they’re fired upon. Now Marissa is surrounded. She gives cover to Naziri to run just as Hanna shows and it’s a full ally shoot-out with Naziri taking off into a shadowy mannequin factory to hide. He is followed by a team of gun men, but they are no match for Marrissa and Hanna- who take out the shooters one by one with ease. Naziri hops onto the back of a dock loader and manages to escape the deadly chaos, but the women will have to find him before Pioneer and Gordon’s bulldog, Stapleton find do or he won’t survive long enough to make his Hanna dream-life come true.