Designated Survivor Season 1 Finale Review

The conspiracy story largely comes to a conclusion in the first season finale of Designated Survivor.


S1E21 "Brace for Impact"

Hannah races out of the FBI in the van with the bomb, and drives it into the Potamic, in a scene with intensity, but quite unimpressive CGI. Once the dumb FBI agents are told to go away, Hannah begins to work on solving this case. This ends up involving a lot of chasing, and ultimately a fight in an abandoned house.

After this, Hannah makes an important discovery, with an unread email from Jason. This is such a silly way of revealing this, because it so conveniently comes at an appropriate time for the story. A flashback shows when Hannah met Jason, and it's really a touching moment. It's also nice that she now has this chance to grieve, and it felt right that it would hit her now.

Kirkman doesn't get all that much to do through most of the season finale. He does get a great scene where he convinces the reporter to not go with the story that would be potentially damaging to national security. Later on, he begs Aaron to come back to the White House, which was very nice, but this felt a bit roundabout. He left, only to come back not too long later.

Kirkman asks the Secretary of State to be his designated survivor, and the little conversation they have about being designated survivor is great. Kirkman gives a speech to Congress, and when he gets a standing ovation from the audience, it feels very inspiring and patriotic. It is a wonderful speech. After this, it is shown that not everything is alright yet, as the defense system has been hacked. As long as this is not drawn out too much, this could be an exciting season two story.


Designated Survivor is not a perfect show. It wants to be two shows at once, both a political drama and a conspiracy thriller, and while it can do both well, it often struggles to meld the two together. This episode showed that. As the first five acts focused on the conspiracy side of things, Kirkman got close to nothing to do. This episode did though show some great examples of what the show can do in both realms.

Score: 8.5/10

What did you think of "Brace for Impact"? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Designated Survivor S1E20 Review

The end of the first season is almost here. The season finale airs next week, so we will be getting close to something big this week.


S1E20 "Bombshell"

The episode begins with Hannah attempting to avoid her captors, despite the fact that they are all on a ship. However, she is able to make a distress call. Now she just needs to survive until help arrives, however long that may be. That is, if help arrives, as they have trouble locating the ship. They eventually find it though, but all is not well yet. Hannah ends up discovering she is in a van with a bomb at FBI headquarters. And the clock starts ticking. Her next three minutes will be intense, that's for sure!

A newspaper article reveals that Al-Sakar was not behind the bombing, which will raise suspicious among the American people. Kirkman talks through the corner he has been backed into. This is an interesting dilemma. The show gets very Madam Secretary, as Kirkman tries to get Franco to vote with them at the NATO summit. It does a fine job in Madam Secretary's field, though it doesn't stand out in any way here.


The scenes having to do with Hannah this week were great. Kirkman faced an interesting dilemma, but the show didn't dive very far into it just yet. The NATO part of the episode was fine, but far from anything great.

Score: 8/10

What did you think of "Bombshell"? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Designated Survivor S1E19 Review

After a thrilling ending to last week's episode, I have been excited for this week's episode to find out what happens next.


S1E19 "Misalliance"

It is discovered that Hannah has been kidnapped. Since she hasn't been killed, the question arises: what do they want with her? Jason does some investigating, where he overhears an interesting conversation, but then gets shot. Since no one else was making any progress in finding her, Hannah attempts to escape, but discovers that she is on a boat.

Kirkman tries to get arts funding passed in Congress, so he turns to a congressman in the ways and means committee. However, he doesn't want to even debate this until the next budget, which would be too late for a particular school the president has been made aware of. Hookstraten offers to resign her seat in exchange for the arts funding, though Kirkman is disappointed when he hears that she is resigning. This feels like a randomly far length to go for this one issue. However, it leads to something, as Kirkman makes Hookstraten the Secretary of Education.


This was an enjoyable episode, though nothing really stood out to me as particularly interesting about it. The political story felt like a typical one, and Hannah's kidnapping made little progress.

Score: 7/10

What did you think of "Misalliance"? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Designated Survivor S1E18 Review

Scandal may be the title of a different ABC political drama, but a scandal is the topic of this week's episode of Designated Survivor.


S1E18 "Lazarus"

This week in the political story, Kirkman wants to make Hookstraten vice president, but a wrench is put in that plan when a news article implies that she was involved with Turkey. She has to face a hearing due to this. In one scene, Hookstraten essentially blackmails the person who gave the press the story, which seems to me like the show hasn't settled on its message. We love Kirkman because he is not a politician, he doesn't play their games. But Hookstaten is demonstrating the opposite of this, and in this half of the season is being portrayed as one of the good guys. Is the show unsure of what it wants to communicate? Is it trying to remind us that Hookstraten isn't all that good? If it's the latter, surely they could find a better way to communicate that, right?

Meanwhile dealing with the conspiracy, Hannah and Jason come back from North Dakota. Hannah looks into a lead, and that's pretty much all that happens. It feels like episodes we have seen before. Until the end! Hannah ends up getting drugged. Finally, something truly interesting to come out of the conspiracy story recently, though it does feel a bit like the car crash near the end of season 1A. Also, there is probably the most obvious instance of product placement I have ever seen. Look at what Hannah can do with her Ford Fusion!


The political story seemed like it could be interesting at first, but it did not deliver on that potential. The conspiracy went as usual until the ending, so while this week's episode didn't impress me at all, I am excited for next week.

Score: 4.5/10

What did you think of "Lazarus"? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

Designated Survivor S1E17 Review

The government gets closer to running like normal this week as Kirkman works to create a Supreme Court.


S1E17 "The Ninth Seat"

Kirkman comes up with a Supreme Court consisting of four liberal, four conservative, and one moderate justice. The names were approved by people from both parties, but at the last minute the Senator from Montana that has sort of become the villain here announces that he opposes the chief justice, because of a liberal bias. This leads to a great Kirkman moment, where he gets angry, and explains how important the justice system is, and that they need a Supreme Court.

They end up deciding not to appoint a ninth judge. There wasn't too much of the story about picking a ninth judge leading up to this, so it felt weird to have a conclusion to it, and the ending was somewhat disappointing, being a non-decision really. The one good thing that this story does give us, though, is the emotional plot point regarding early onset dementia, However, I don't feel enough of a connection to the character to truly empathize with her.

Hannah and Jason discover that there is a mysterious group that meets in North Dakota, so they try to figure out more about this group. They don't really end up learning much of anything about this group through the hour, until the end when they see who gets out of the helicopter. Also, throughout the hour, a reporter tries to uncover something regarding the capitol bombing and attempted assassination of Kirkman, but we don't get much out of this.


While it had a nice start, this ended up being a weaker episode. Little was accomplished, and the emotional moment attempted didn't really land very well.

Score: 6/10

What did you think of "The Ninth Seat"? Leave your thoughts in the comments!