Tango Romeo (Season 2, Episode 10)
Premise: A travel agent’s sudden death in his driveway turns out to be a nerve-agent poisoning, pulling Graff into a Canadian spy operation and a confrontation with his own half-brother.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 10
- Starring
- DS Henry Graff (Aden Young), DS Frankie Bateman (Kathleen Munroe), Insp. Vivienne Holness (Karen Robinson), DCA Theo Forrester (K.C. Collins), Mark Yohannes (Araya Mengesha), Dr. Lucy Da Silva (Nicola Correia-Damude)
- Guest stars
- Anwen O’Driscoll as Alice Temple, Dmitry Chepovetsky as Yuri Petrov, Seana McKenna as Daphne Roblin
- Director
- David Wellington
- Writers
- Tassie Cameron
Summary
The Case
“Tango Romeo” centres on Gordon “Gord” Greene, a travel agent who collapses and dies in his Mimico driveway after coming home from an all-night shift. Brought in at the request of Inspector Jamie McDougall of 44 Division, Graff and Bateman notice his wedding ring on his little finger, a BlackBerry charger in a house with no BlackBerry, and a wife, Kelly, who will not go near the body. The pathologist finds that all his organs failed and cannot name the poison, and Gord’s coworkers at Rubicon Travel recite the same cover story.
Police surveillance catches Kelly handing the BlackBerry to a disguised man, and she will say only that she was trained for this and is following orders from Gord’s employer. That leads to Graff’s half-brother, Miles Graff, an associate director at CSIS, who confirms Gord was a field officer, says the agency suspects a new Russian nerve agent and refuses to cooperate. A hint from Gord’s junior colleague, Alice Temple, leads to a Royal York Hotel room beside the one used by Yuri Petrov, a laser-eye salesman whose past matches a Russian physics student named Mikhail Orlov. Pressed through his daughter, he admits giving Gord a 10-millilitre sample of the agent.
With a production order, the detectives find the sample reached the CSIS lab two millilitres short, carried there by Miles, and that two inconclusive polygraphs of Gord were deleted. The retired examiner, Daphne Roblin, says Miles ordered the deletions, and Alice’s own polygraph session reveals that Gord repeatedly drugged and raped her after assignments and that her complaints went nowhere. Graff then confronts Miles about his golf partner McDougall and accuses him of steering the police into the case.
The Interrogation
Miles hands his boss, Director Tom, a device loaded with his calendar files, and Tom is later heard on a recording ordering a staffer to destroy the backups of Gord’s polygraphs. At a meeting with Tom, Miles and Alice, the tape is played and the detectives accuse Tom of ignoring Alice’s complaints; he answers that a long-running operation to free four Canadian journalists from a Moscow prison came first. Then they lay out that Alice killed Gord, taking two millilitres from the sample and putting it on the wedding ring he removed before each assault. Alice says she could not be in a room with him again.
The ending
Spoiler: A quiet resolution is laid out: a manslaughter plea for Alice with no trial, Tom’s resignation and the operation carrying on. Tom protests, Alice is led away, and Graff accuses Miles of using him to take his boss’s job; Miles says they both got justice. The season ends without the deal settled on screen.
Suspect’s fate: Alice Temple, arrested.
Why it stands out
- The season finale introduces Graff’s half-brother, Miles, a CSIS associate director, and Miles mentions Graff’s belief that their father contributed to his mother’s death.
- The title is how a detective tells Alice that the police know Gord worked for CSIS Toronto Region: “Tango-Romeo”.