What Happened on 'State of Affairs' Tonight?

It's Monday night, everyone. That means it's time yet again for us to pick up our never-ending quest to understand the whirlpool of plots that is State of Affairs . Tonight, episode 3 aired, and while I was hoping that things would get simpler with time, they're just getting more complicated. Because there's always a lot going on here, I've deduced that the simplest was to make sense of this show is to break down the most significant stories into subtitles of 5 words or less. Now, let's dive in.

Subtitle number one for this episode could be: "current events sampler." A group of Nigerian school girls are kidnapped by Boko Haram to be sold into slavery. A world health organization researcher studying the spread of Ebola was of course the person who found the mass grave of young girls. Those are both horrible things that happened in Africa this year. Not like those two events were related to begin with, but sure. Great job reading the newspaper, guys.

"It's not easy being prez" is yet another working title I'm tossing around. President Alfre Woodward tangles with with numerous quandaries this episode, from personal to professional. She and her husband had a real tense discussion about the release of confidential files regarding their sons death. UGH, so things aren't great at home, but maybe office life is moving along smoothly. ANNND, no. Turns out, she totally could've saved those kidnapped girls that ended up in the mass grave. When Tucker briefs her on this fact, she's basically like "Oh Darn! Mercury must be in retrograde..." Despite all the things to make this a totally crappy day, she still ekes out a home run by securing the favor of President Chu, which is very important for some reason related to Nigeria and Oil and the discussion necessitates the question: "May I speak frankly?"

A third subtitle could be "Nick: Explained," because this week, there's more character explication behind this character, whom I'm starting to realize looks like a face meld between Taylor Kinney and Simon Baker. As we learn in that oh-so-revealing flashback (which is actually not all that revealing, because it lasts for 2 minutes), Nick was once a freelance torture specialist working for the government. He and Charlie first met on a freight liner when he was in the midst of torturing Fada. And just to give you an update, that photo of Nick and Charlie is still out there, it's still a threat to everyones jobs, and a different man in a different hat is emphasizing that it's an imperative for Charlie to deal with that sitch like now.

Honorable mention goes to Tucker's one female colleague who has one supremely fun moment this episode: she is the first to acknowledge that Charlie is hungover about 80% of the time. Points for believability! This gal is officially the show's Greek chorus. Now, if only they could eliminate that totally unnecessary awkward romantic thing between her and her co-worker.

One last title: "Charlies most believable hair yet." No barrel curls, no updos, just the reasonably flat mane of an extremely busy/ high powered/ maybe still-drunk-from-last-night lady.

Image: NBC (2)