The fourth episode of Citadel reveals the past connection between Nadia, Mason, Abby, and the Silje brothers. The episode is now streaming on Prime Video.
Recap
Nadia and Mason reach the Manticore black site and sneak in. They fight the guards and come face to face with Carter Spence, who immediately accuses Mason of being responsible for all this.
The scene shifts to ten years ago. Mason and Nadia continue sleeping together while working on their missions. Mason asks Nadia if he scares her because he is starting to see past her masks, but she never answers.
Instead, she informs him that she is bringing a new Tier-One spy to their team. This spy saved Nadia’s life once, and Nadia trusts her. The spy is named Celeste Graham, and Nadia thinks they need her.
Celeste is none other than Abby, Mason’s wife. She has a twin brother named David, and the siblings are very close. Celeste’s first mission as a Tier-One spy requires her to go undercover.
The Silje brothers rule the city’s underbelly. While Davik is the muscle, Anders is the brain. Anders is a Cambridge graduate who develops war technologies and is more dangerous than his brother.
Anders’ latest creation is the Oz Key, which is capable of hacking an entire nation’s infrastructure. With this, the Silje brothers could take the whole country hostage. While Mason does not think that Celeste is ready for this mission, Nadia believes she can handle it.
Mason teaches Celeste that she must lie to herself and believe those lies for her mission to be successful. Celeste meets Anders in a bar in Amsterdam as Brielle. She makes him fall in love with her in order to get close enough to him to gather intel on the Oz Key.
Celeste is supposed to contact Mason every week and update him, but when he does not hear from her in any way for three months, he decides to send in the ops team.
Furthermore, Carter Spence is the only Citadel spy who has access to all the encrypted communication, and he picks up anomalies. Celeste’s brother, David, is in debt, and Mason thinks that Celeste might steal the Oz Key and sell it to save his life.
On the other hand, Davik catches Celeste replacing the Oz Key with a fake one. The fight between them results in an explosion. The ops team also reaches the scene. They catch Anders, but they cannot find Davik or the Oz Key anywhere.
Someone sends a secure message to Mason that says, “She took the case.” Mason asks this person not to say a word about it. Mason goes to interrogate Celese but does not allow Nadia inside the room.
Mason threatens to kill David if Celeste does not reveal the location of the Oz Key, as he believes that she stole it to save her brother, who took the beatings from their stepfather to protect her when they were children. Celeste claims that she did not steal the Oz Key.
It is Nadia who intervenes and stops the interrogation because she believes Celeste. When Nadia is not around, Mason convinces their director, Grace, to backstop Celeste to protect Citadel’s secrets.
Only Grace, Mason, and Carter know that Mason is channeling an unsanctioned backstop procedure, which has not even been approved yet. They lie to Celeste and tell her that they are taking her for witness relocation to protect her from Davik.
Instead, they take her to the Citadel Backstop Facility in Mexico City and backstop her. They keep Nadia in the dark, who thinks Celeste has been resettled.
Additionally, Mason asks Bernard to destroy Celeste’s vial, preventing her from ever getting her memories back. Bernard warns him that he might be crossing a line with this and that he might lose his soul, but he does not listen.
Carter goes through Citadel servers because he thinks that Mason’s behavior is odd. He then confronts him because he figures out that Mason knows that neither Davik nor Celeste took the Oz Key.
He also finds out that a cloaked order was given to the chief of the ops team by a Tier-One agent in secret, against the protocol. The agent was Nadia, and she wanted the chief to hide the Oz Key and give it to her.
Although Mason loves Nadia, he suspected Nadia to be the mole. He was so adamant to erase Celeste’s memories because he wanted to prevent everyone from finding out that Celeste is innocent. Celeste might prove to be a threat to Nadia.
Back in the present, when Mason questions Carter after being accused, Carter clarifies that he is not accusing Mason, but Nadia.
Review
- The whole episode takes place in the past except for the action sequence in the beginning, which is not very long and not extraordinarily thrilling either, but it is still entertaining.
- Misleading the audience in the beginning to make the revelation of the real culprit unpredictable is a tried and tested formula, which is also used in this episode. While it does not make the revelations entirely unpredictable, it does bring mystery to the episode.
- As the mystery of the past is unveiled, the present becomes more and more complicated, considering the actions of the characters in the past and their present relationships. This certainly gives the plot the depth that it previously lacked.
Citadel season 1 episode 4
Director:
Newton Thomas Sigel, Jessica Yu
Date Created:
2023-05-11 20:13
Also Read: The backstop in Citadel explained
