Word Weave Web

Directed by Jonathon Brown and written by Derek Haas, Countdown is a new show streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

It features a crime storyline. The first episode of the series is titled Teeth in the Bone. The launch day saw the release of three episodes, but Countdown will follow a weekly release schedule.

Countdown Episode 1 Recap

The beginning is kind of puzzling as the makers try to create suspense, mystery, and buildup to something big.

We see a Homeland Security officer of US Customs and Border Patrol, Robert Darden, doing an individual search operation on the Port of Los Angeles.

He then goes to another location, and before entering, calls his wife and heartily asks her to tell their son, Zach, that he will crush his upcoming performance.

Darden meets a man, possibly part of a trap set up for him, and a fight ensues with other men also roughing him up.

He fights back and puts up a brave front before rushing out of the place, triggering a chase in a street filled with people.

Eventually, he is able to get in the clear by navigating through a restaurant.

He feels free and starts to walk normally on a crowded road. However, out of nowhere, some goons land in front of him and shoot him to death.

With this, Countdown’s base is set: a Homeland Security officer shot and murdered in broad daylight.

The intro montage plays out.

Now, to investigate his death, Nathan Blythe, a special agent, creates a federal task force.

The members of the Federal Task Force in Countdown:

Nathan Blythe (in charge): Been with the Bureau for 22 years. This is his fifth task force and the second as the leader in charge.

Amber Oliveras: She is a DEA special agent, with 14 years of experience, who was in Koreatown, busting a drug cartel, before getting called in.

Mark Meachum: A detective with LAPD Robbery Homicide. He has been on an undercover mission at a correctional home in California since, trying to fetch critical information. This is his second task force with Nathan Blythe.

Luke Finau: Special Agent from the LAPD with 18 years of experience in the Gang and Narcotics Division.

Evan Shepherd: From the FBI and an expert in cyber investigation, internet fraud, and computer intrusion.

Damon Drew: He is Blythe’s deputy in the Task Force. Works at the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, Department of Homeland Security. His son recently died in a tragic car accident. As a homage to him, he decided to coach his basketball team. Blythe pulled him from there while requesting him to take the assistant coach role, and he would try to cut him as much slack as possible.

Keyonte Bell: Special Agent with the FBI. Well-versed in terrorist threats. He is a third-generation Fed. His grandfather worked the Anglin Brothers Alcatraz case in 1962.

At the briefing, Drew tells them that the CCTV cameras couldn’t capture a clear shot of the shooter.

Blythe further says that Darden was red-flagged for an unaccounted deposit into his account a fortnight ago. It was a masked banking transaction, so it couldn’t be backtracked.

They think it was a bribe, which may have led to his murder.

Since they cannot trust anybody, not even law enforcement agencies, this whole operation is underground and highly classified.

At the CBP, Darden, apart from keeping an eye on port activity in Long Beach, was tasked with monitoring border activity for Los Reyes Nuevos, the New Kings cartel, in Tijuana.

Oliveras, who has been working underground to monitor cartel activity, reveals that Los Reyes is a highly dangerous cartel that emerged around 2009 and has since claimed the lives of politicians, journalists, police, and others.

The goal of the task force is to find out:

Why was Darden murdered?

Why was he receiving payments, and from whom?

What did the payments have to do with his official duties at CBP?

Just after they step out of the briefing, Meachum starts hitting on Oliveras, but she passes by mentioning one Melinda Bates, whom he dumped two weeks before their wedding and cheated on her with her own sister, Rachael.

Blythe and Shepherd visit Darden’s house and talk to his widow, Meredith. They ask her if she knows anything about his corrupt practices.

But the wife is sure that Darden did nothing wrong and was a true patriot who would never betray his country. The sound of her kid crying in his room makes the situation heavy.

Their conversation ends up with an emotionally aggressive Meredith asking them to find out who murdered her husband instead of trying to malign his name.

The rest of the members of the task force visit Darden’s workplace to interview his colleagues.

Almost all the interviewees seem non-shady, and they are unable to retrieve anything vital. There were no loopholes in Bob’s operations. He had everything on record.

One of his co-workers, Maurith Spellman, tells them about Bob’s closeness with Jim Talbott, another colleague.

He says that they used to hang out a lot at Bob’s cabin in Big Bear, skiing or fishing.

The agents return to the office and inform Blythe of their conclusions.

Meachum says that Talbott is the man they should dig into.

Blythe asks Drew to look into it and also directs the agents to submit their detailed interview transcripts to him.

As a passing comment, Meachum asks Blythe why he has a lot of muscle for the task at hand. However, Shepherd interrupts their brief conversation.

She shows everyone a camera angle that captures a panel truck carrying mirrors. And on the mirrors, the shooter’s face appears for a little while.

Shepherd is somehow able to sync multiple video clips together and generate a clear picture of the shooter.

With the killer now having a face, Blythe orders the agents to run the image through every US database until they find a match.

They find a match in Cesar Murillo, and the scene shifts to Alhambra with the team running an operation to catch him.

After a brief gunfight in an upstairs apartment, they get hold of a couple of suspects, but none of them match the description of Murillo.

Oliveras talks to one of them in Spanish, trying to get information about Murillo, but he doesn’t budge.

Meachum thanks Oliveras for giving him backup during the gunfight.

Back at the office, Ray Kubler from SSA pays a visit to Blythe, asking him to reconsider the inclusion of Oliveras in his task force.

A DEA informant has given Kubler a credible report that she is an addict. Ray calls her a ticking time bomb before leaving.

Finau quietly tells Oliveras to look up Meachum’s last assignment as a UC. The reason behind this is not disclosed at this point.

Shepherd tells Blythe that Darden’s bank accounts are clean, with the anomaly being the recent unaccounted transfer. He and his wife never owned any property other than their house.

His tax records are clean; there are no gray shades to him.

Blythe then talks to Meachum about his interview of Bob’s colleague, Spellman, where he mentioned Banco Geraneo (a bank) in Guadalajara.

Nathan asks whether they mentioned the term first or was it Spellman. Finau confirms it was Spellman.

Blythe then reveals that when he put the red flag on Darden, he had held back the information about Banco Geraneo.

Now, Spellman could only know about that information if Darden had told him, which is highly unlikely.

Connecting the dots, Meachum and Finau, along with the other agents, rush to Spellman’s place.

They find him running away with luggage in his car. Meachum uses quick thinking to block his way and catch Spellman.

He is brought to the interrogation room, and Blythe directs Meachum and Oliveras to break him, which surprises most of the team members, including Drew, given their confronting personalities.

When the agent duo starts blabbering and blaming each other before pulling strange mental triggers on Spellman, Drew understands why Blythe had sent them in the first place.

Eventually, they get a confession out of him.

What Did Spellman Confess to?

He said that the cartel was looking for a window of time when the customs and DHS would vacate a facility so that it could make an exchange unencumbered.

They don’t exactly know what the exchange was about, but they guess it was for drugs.

Darden found out that the cartel had bought Spellman, which is why he was eliminated. However, Spellman says he doesn’t know anything else about the exchange.

Blythe gives Bell Spellman’s burner cell and his work phone to crack them and uncover the contents. Shepherd says she can do it, but Blythe wants her to come along to Meredith’s place.

They inform her that her husband was not doing anything illegal. In fact, he was standing up to a dangerous cartel. He was a hero.

Damon goes to the basketball pitch and shares an emotional moment with the kids. They gift him a cap in his son’s memory.

Oliveras checks out the profiles of Drew and Meachum on her laptop at a bar. This is when she learns about Drew’s son dying in a tragic drunk driving incident.

Moreover, as told by Finau, she checks out Meachum’s last assignment at the correction center.

She is at the bar to get some information from one of her informants.

The next scene shows Meachum’s visit to a doctor regarding his headaches. It is revealed that he has a tumor in his brain (glioblastoma multiforme), which he has known about for nine months.

The doctor suggests surgery, but he says he is just looking for some relief from medications.

The next morning, Meachum visits Blythe’s cabin.

Blythe and Meachum’s History

He had cursed him to his face when they had been in a task force together the last time. Blythe had sent Meachum on an impossible undercover mission where he had to live with the Aryans without any contact with the outside world.

He had to be a part of their day-to-day lives, including bunking with them, cooking, and going to protests.

Had he failed, it would have been the end of Blythe’s career. But he didn’t, and hence, earned him a name.

Blythe knows what Meachum brings along. And his outside personality doesn’t reflect the kind of man he is on the inside.

During their conversation, Meachum connects the dots. The task force was put together within a day of a local homicide, and that too with homeland security access.

Everything pointed to only one thing: Blythe had been working on the case even before Bob’s murder.

On being confronted, Blythe tells him that he heard from an informant that a foreign player was trying to buy DHS officers.

He tried to open an investigation twice, but on both occasions, his request was rebuffed without a reason.

After Bob’s murder, he went to the director personally, which is why they are working underground.

Blythe cannot trust anybody, even people from within the Bureau.

Meachum says that this is the reason he has picked the five of them, because nobody will miss them if something were to happen.

Bell interrupts their conversation, announcing that he has broken into Spellman’s phone.

He had lied about not knowing anything else related to the exchange.

All the agents and Blythe immediately leave for Pier 31 at the port, where the exchange is to take place within an hour.

At the port, an intense firing standoff takes place between them and the cartel members, including the hitman Cesar Murillo, who is killed in the clash.

The team, helped by Bell, discovers that the exchange was not for drugs but for gamma tongs, which carry enough fissile material to trigger a Chernobyl-level event in Los Angeles.