FUBAR – Season 1 Episode 3 “Honeyplot” Recap & Review

Honeyplot

Episode 3 of Fubar starts with Emma deciding to warm up the magnets with nuclear sludge. Luke decides to use their magnetic suits to help, the ones from their therapy session last chapter. With both Luke and Emma on either side of the carriage, they finally listen to one another and work together to bring the hose in and warm the magnets. It works to slow the train down and they breathe a sigh of relief

Boro manages to get away given his plan is foiled, but Emma and Luke do take a massive step forward given they’ve learned to work together. Emma is still struggling with balancing her work and lying to Carter, but promises him a wild night.

Remember William? Unfortunately, Boro has him held captive and demand he tell them everything about Luke and Emma. With the threat of torture on the cards, William sobs and tells him that all he knows are two words – violin and Emma. Unfortunately, his leg is cut off all the same, despite giving this intel. Boro takes this info and launches a cyber manhunt for bringing Emma to him. And the prize? 1 million dollars.

On the Tally-Ho (Luke’s ship he intends to use as a gesture to get Tally back), Tina is there too, the woman from the NSA. It’s clear that Barry has a crush on her, but Tina is more fixated on work right now. She’s set up a bot alert on her phone to ping whenever anything about the radioactive material (and by extension Boro) pops up. Well, a story about a Moldovan scientist being kidnapped shows up just then, and that seems to be their next play.

Emma has another moment with Carter back home when he mentions kids, which certainly spooks her. Thankfully, Luke is on hand to take Emma away but en-route to the office, he mentions how he’s on board with her “no children” policy.

Luke is not sure that Carter is the right guy for her, given she needs to be challenged and stimulated by whoever her partner is. He doubts that Carter is that guy. Given Luke had a moment just before this with Tally, practically begging her to hop about his boat in front of Donnie, he’s maybe not the best judge of character!

Back at the CIA, Dot briefs the team over their next play. The Moldovan applied physicist is called Dr Karl Novac and he was in Ireland on a goodwill plan. He actually authored a paper on how to extract and augment fissile nuclear material from nuclear waste. They don’t have much to go on but it does play into Boro’s hands, given this is what he’s after.

Similarly, Aldon is put into play as the “pooh bear” of this operation, serving as the honeypot to trap Nika Stalinovich, a mid-level manager with low self-esteem who also happens to have Novac’s files on her computer. Emma isn’t exactly happy with this honeypotting, believing it to be an excuse for frat boy behaviour. However, it turns out Aldon doesn’t like it either and he opens up to her later in the episode, admitting that he’s never been in a real relationship and sometimes feels awful about what he has to do.

As fate would have it, it turns out it’s not Nika after all but actually Nik A. As a result, Aldon is out and Emma will need to be put in place, especially as he’s not gay. So Emma heads in to do her best, with Aldon watching on. In the truck happens to be Roo and Luke, who work out where his house is. As they get into place, Emma is invited back to Nik’s place.

Tina and Barry work to get rid of the faraday cage that limits comms inside the building, but there’s an awkward moment when Emma drops her phone while kissing Nik. He picks it up and notices the mobile game, the same one used to decrypt the data from Nik’s laptop. It’s touch and go for a while, as Luke manages to fix the connection, and the group download the data.

Emma goes all-in with her honeypotting, as they take things into the bedroom where she severs her communication with the group and proceeds to start spanking Nik, given that’s one of his fetishes. Emma finds the safe and breaks in, taking the hard copy of the research papers. A click of a gun prompts her to turn slowly though, as Nik wakes up and points a gun at her.

The Episode Review

The key to any show like this is good writing and so far, FUBAR has managed to deftly deliver some pretty good scripts overall. Every character has a consistent amount of work to do, while characters like Emma and Luke are far from perfect but compliment one another nicely. In fact, this show work surprisingly well as a comedic spy drama and with every episode that ticks by, this one is really growing into the genre.

This episode in particular sees Emma wrestling with her job a lot more than she has done previously, even showing off some weaknesses along the way. This only makes her more likable, and I’m absolutely rooting for her and Luke to patch up their differences and work together properly now to stop Boro.

However, we’ll have to wait and see if they get that far first, given they’re both right in the thick of danger!