The president doesn’t have senile dementia — he has Advanced Havana Syndrome! We should all be so lucky, huh? Ah! Well. Nevertheless, that’s the solution Zero Day appears to have devised for its central moral conundrum: the fact that the show’s hero, George Mullen, is covering up his own diminished mental capacity despite the danger it poses to the nation. Now it turns out that this danger was deliberately inflicted on him by enemy agents utilizing Proteus, a long-abandoned long-distance neurological weapon that seems to have been revived. Most likely, it’s being employed by billionaire Bob Lyndon, who’s got a secret connection to the Zero Day hackers via long-range AM radio transmissions — and who has his asset Roger assassinated Michael Clayton–style for failing expose Mullen’s condition and thus shutter the investigation. 

Now, this leaves George every bit as incapable of doing his job as if the condition had been brought on by aging or trauma or prescription interaction or any other run-of-the-mill cause. He still should have come clean about it long before his ex-gf and chief of staff Valerie takes it upon herself to unearth what Proteus is and what it can do to a person. But as long as it’s the result of enemy action, refusing to tell anyone kind of reads as refusing to give up without a fight. It’s a bit more excusable, which blunts the show’s heretofore rather pointed critique of gerontocratic politicians holding on past their rightful retirement age.

It does not, however, leave George off the hook. The only reason he gets a clean neurological bill of health isn’t because he moved out of his house, the target zone, in favor of sleeping in a radio-proof tent in his office. It’s because he lies! Once again, he hears “Who Killed Bambi?”, very literally during the investigation when the doctor asks him what music she’s playing. He lies and says there is no music! Pants on fire, George Mullen!

There’s a reason he’s aurally fixated on “Who Killed Bambi?” that goes beyond the Proteus wielder’s cool taste in music, though. As you probably guessed, the song is directly tied to the death of George’s son, Nick (Jackson Eick) — it’s what was playing on the stereo when George found him dead of a heroin overdose. So maybe George can try to explain its recurrence away to himself when he hears it again, approaching the bathroom where the hitmen dumped Roger’s body to make his death look like an overdose as well. But no, I’m guessing he’s a targeted individual, struck by quiet weapons for silent wars.

Which means it’s also an open question if his increasingly fascistic methods, which include pointlessly torturing cosplay revolutionary and tax cheat Evan Green for information on the attack that he doesn’t possess, are the result of a sound mind or a horrifically compromised one. By lying during the exam, in fact, George effectively alienates his wife Sheila, who now can no longer tell herself some kind of mental disability is the reason her beloved husband is imprisoning journalists without a warrant and so forth. 

The backdrop to all this is a run on the banks caused by a second attack, one that freezes one of the nation’s largest financial institutions. George orders a shutdown of all financial transactions in the entire United States for a weekend until he can figure out what the hell is going on and prevent a potentially even wider assault on the banks. He assumes it’s a second Zero Day attack and that Green is responsible. But eventually, thanks to the FBI, President Mitchell and Speaker Dreyer deliver a joint press conference (what side of the aisle are these people on again?) in which they reveal this was just a common old ransomware situation. It makes George look weaker than ever, especially because Green doesn’t even give anything up under torture. (Ideally the show will make note of the fact that torture is a notoriously unreliable and stupid way to try to get actionable information, in addition to being, you know, a moral abomination. I’m not holding my breath, but we’ll see!)

But you know who else doesn’t? Roger. When (presumably) Lyndon’s hitter Segal (Larry Mitchell) demands he produce evidence of George’s mental state or else face exposure — not to the world, but simply to his girlfriend and George’s daughter Alex — Roger chooses exposure. In fact, he goes to Alex himself, revealing that he was behind the phone hack that sank her ex (whoever he is), and hacked her phone as well to engineer their romance’s first “random” encounter after many years apart. (There’s more, but we’re not made privy to it just yet.) Because this is Jesse Plemons we’re talking about, he makes the man look and sound in his final hours as though he has a 104-degree fever, and he’s fighting to stay on his feet. He was given the opportunity to forfeit his soul to please a billionaire, and he said no. 

Speaking of billionaires, George refuses to kowtow to one as well. (Granted, he then starts torturing people, but pobody’s nerfect.) When Monica Kidder, who’s been turning her monopolistic tech company’s algorithms against Mullen and the investigation, is granted an audience, it quickly turns nasty, and Mullen has no interest in dancing to her tune. He corrects her garbled Ben Franklin quote about trading freedom for security — billionaires adore mangling the wisdom of the ages when they’re not just quoting made-up email-forward bullshit in wisdom’s guide — by saying “‘Freedom’ is what allows people like you to do whatever you want. ‘Liberty’ is what protects the rest of us from people like you.” If Zero Day can grasp this concept even a little bit, there’s hope for the rest of us yet.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.