Director: Félix Enríquez Alcalá
Starring: Piper Perabo, Christopher Gorham, Kari Matchett, Sendhil Ramamurthyy, Anne Dudek, Peter Gallagher, Steven Brand, Rya Kihlstedt
Music: Christopher Tyng

Walter’s Walk is the second episode in the Covert Affairs television series, and the first to feature a Led Zepplin song title as the episode title.

This episode begins with a flash back to the closing events of the pilot episode, and reminds the viewer of the ‘big question’ that the closing asked. As this is a new series (with many people still to watch the Pilot, I wont spoil it by talking about that here). This episode is pretty much a standalone episode anyway, so knowledge of the incidents in the first episode, while being helpful, aren’t truly neccessary for enjoyment of this episode.

And ‘enjoyment’ is the right word. This is the episode for ‘old sods’ like me. In some ways it is a throwback to the good old cold war days – quite knowingly and the characters (particularly Auggie) have a good time with it. But let’s start at the beginning.

Annie Walker (Piper Perabo) is now assigned to the DPD (Domestic Protection Division) of the CIA on a full-time basis. But as the new girl on the block, she gets all the crap jobs that no one else wants. One of these jobs in to debrief the walk-ins. What this entails is sitting in a pre-fab portable bungalow and listening to the ‘walk-ins’ who come to Langley with information. Most of the people who turn up are serial paranoid conspiracy theorists (and other assorted not-jobs). Annie’s job is to take down their statements and try to distill (if any) the valuable intel form the half-baked crackpot theories.

The first few interviewees are indeed conspiracy theorists. But then there is Helen Newman (Rya Kihlstedt). She is there to represent her eleven year old son, Walter. Walter may be young, but he is a mathematical genius (and a spy-novel fan too). It seems that when using his short wave radio, he has stumbled on a number coded transmission. Being a mathematical genius, Walter cracks the code and it leads him to a post box. Walter decides to go and see who turns up, and eventually somebody does turn up to collect the message from the box. Unfortunately this person sees Walter, and now as a safety precaution, Walter is targeted for assassination.

Helen relates all this to Annie, who is sceptical at first. But Helen persists, and asks Annie to come out into the carpark and meet Waleter, who is waiting in the car. Walter happens to be reading Robert Ludlum’s The Parsifal Mosaic. Interestingly enough, one of the seeling point for Covert Affairs has been that it is produced by Doug Liman, who directed The Bourne Identity and produced Supremacy and Ultimatum – which, of course, were all loosely based on books by Robert Ludlum. Anyway, Walter hands Annie a slip of paper with the radio frequency that he intercepted. She promises to look into it.

Later Annie passes the information and radio frequency to Auggie Anderson (Christopher Gorham), the DPD’s tech guy. He checks it out and indeed he stumbles onto the coded transmission. The beauty of it is – in a world where all modern high-tech didgital devices are monitored (phone calls / emails), that whoever this spy network is, they have chosen to do it that old fashioned ‘analogue’ way – and thus, have almost (if it were not for shear luck) slipped under the radar.

In the meantime, fearing for their lives after being followed from Langley, Helen and Walter go into hiding – and in doing so have taken the other recordings that may help the CIA discover what the enemy spy ring is planning.

It turns out, it is an IRA tranmission that Walter has stumbled upon, and they are in preparation to stage and ‘incident’ on American soil. Annie is teamed up with a British operative from M.I.6 and together their mission is to track down (and protect) Helen and Walter – and naturally retrieve the recording that Walter had already made.

I must admit I particularly liked this episode. Storywise it isn’t special, but I see it as an olive branch to old time spy fans who grew up on Le Carre, Deighton, Forsyth and Ludlum. The Cold War may be over, and the style of spy stories may have changed, but what this episode does nicely is show that the worls of the ‘old school’ spy and the new ‘high-tech’ spy can co-exist – and furthermore that no matter what your preference is, there is something for you in the series Covert Affairs.