Hulu’s newest sci-fi thriller by Tom Rob Smith, Class of ’09, released its fourth episode, and terror strikes the class big time in this week’s episode. In the previous week’s episode, domestic terrorist Mark Tupirik had been arrested in 2023 and was being held for interrogation when he announced that some “news” was coming. The news arrives this week in a big way, and the FBI agents are scrambling for the same. We also get to look into the past of the four main characters of the show during their trainee phase in Quantico back in 2009. Here’s what happens in Class of ’09 Episode 4.
Spoilers Ahead
Hour’s Family
A flashback of a young Drew getting shot by a fellow FBI agent because she got out of the van and joined the action back in 1996 opens the fourth episode. The class of ’09 learns about using a weapon, and they’re handed a Glock as their standard-issue arm. At home, Hour Nazari is slighted by her parents for becoming a part of the organization that deliberately harasses people in her homeland, pushing the young FBI candidate to tears inside her car. When the routine polygraph test is carried out, Hour’s questions irritate the test administrator, but it’s clear that ever since she was a candidate, Hour had plans to create a library that’d keep records of every agent so that future agents could do their jobs with ease.
Poet’s Dilemma
When the team had their firearm proficiency test, Hour and Tayo passed without a hiccup, but Amanda Poet failed to shoot the cutout of a woman holding a revolver. Poet reasoned that there was no way to know that the woman was a threat, and her nature made the two instructors wonder about the logic in her statements. Inside her dorm, Poet debated heading to a date with her boyfriend Lennix until Hour assured her it’d be okay when the instructor Drew called Poet for her second poly test. The Poet ends up admitting her relationship with Lennix, and later on, she is stopped by Drew. The more experienced tutor gave the young candidate a heads-up that in the FBI, it’s the woman who often has to shoulder the blame that comes when the relationship between a man and a woman turns sour. Drew recalls how she was blamed for being shot by a lousy FBI agent in her starting year, so she returned to the class to continue tutoring. Her goal was to not let the chauvinist men at Quantico tell her that a woman was unfit to be an FBI agent.
The Problems Of 2023
In the present, Tayo interrogates Mark Tupirik, who continues to make the process difficult for the FBI agent as Hour and her team try to figure out the direction the truck transporting Tupirik was taking when they were arrested. An associate suggests the possibility that the whole arrest of Tupirik could’ve been a distraction to misguide the FBI, but the question was, to distract them from what?
An Infiltrator
At the J. Edgar Hoover building, Poet shares her suspicions that Tupirik’s men might’ve infiltrated the FBI, and Hour said it’s very easy to do because almost anyone can cheat the polygraph test. As the news reports displayed the search for Tupirik’s other members, one person at Quantico secretly informed someone about the firearms assessment. At the Edgar Hoover building, a truck of contractors arrives, and the supervisor announces to his team that they carry out their mission on this very day. In the secluded location, Tayo shows a series of pictures of uniformed men to Tupirik to gauge his reactions, and the domestic terrorist’s heart rate and perspiration increase upon looking at a particular person. At the arms test inside Quantico, the same man whose picture stumped Tupirik opens fire at the trainees, mercilessly gunning down anyone and everyone before him. Drew draws her gun but is immediately shot in the torso, and she drops to the ground while the shooter continues killing. With one final attempt, she manages to shoot the terrorist, thereby for the first time ever firing her gun to kill another person. However, as others converge around her to try and stop the bleeding, we can hazard a guess that she might not survive this time around.
What Happened To The J. Edgar Hoover Building?
With an alert coming from Quantico, Poet asks Lennix to evacuate the entire building, and the process goes underway, and people start beelining out through the multiple flights of stairs. Poet goes to the basement to find a person in a builder’s uniform pouring a bubbling, acidic substance into the foundations of the building as cracks start forming on the pillars. When the man starts approaching Poet, she quickly guns him down, and the main supervisor suffers the same fate after scuffling with her. Lennix arrives and leads her away, but by then, the cracks reach the highest floors, and entire floors begin collapsing, with people still rushing to descend the several flights of stairs. As Lennix and Poet stumble towards their way out, an outside view of the J. Edgar Hoover building shows the entire structure collapsing like a bomb went off inside.
In all certainty, this was probably the plan that Tupirik had cooked all along, and he got himself intentionally arrested so that the FBI wouldn’t guess that an attack was coming to their home turf. Tupirik hit both grounds of the FBI, with one sleeper agent opening fire at the helpless trainees at Quantico and a group of terrorists posing as contractors pouring a solution that destroyed the entire foundation of the nerve center of the FBI. The collapse of the J. Edgar Hoover building would be the biggest blow to the organization because it’s proof that domestic terrorists can waltz into their stronghold and collapse it from within. One might’ve questioned if Hour, Lennix, and Poet survived the attack or not since their fate isn’t shown at the end of the episode, but given that we’ve seen them in 2034, we can confirm that they survived. However, Poet’s bionic eye and Lennix’s robotic arm that they keep hidden in 2034 might be the result of the injuries they suffered in the building’s collapse, but we’ll learn more about it as the newer episodes drop.
Review
The fourth episode of Class of ’09 manages to present two exciting moments where Tupirik’s plan is executed on two separate grounds. However, to fill the episode’s runtime, the showrunners are intentionally using filler content like extended scenes between characters, which is ultimately slowing the pace down. The show certainly has a lot of engaging and nail-biting action sequences, but the downtime of the characters is so slow that the audience will skip to the interesting parts or, worse, skip the episode totally. Since nobody came here expecting a slow-burning art film, the tepid pace and hushed conversations about reminiscing about the past take away the charm of the series.
