CITADEL: Episode 1.4-6

Name: CITADEL: Episode 1.4-6
Item: CITADEL: Episode 1.4-6
Author: Cooper Dowd

"Convoluted, Frustrating Espionage Caper"

Content: -3 Excessive sex, violence, immorality, and/or worldview problems. (Sometimes excessive content such as violence is in otherwise redemptive movies.)

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Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

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What You Need To Know:

Episodes Four to Six of CITADEL, a spy thriller on Amazon Prime, finish Season One with very unexpected plot twists. Mason and Nadia rescue Carter, another surviving Citadel agent who’s been captured by agents of the evil spy group called Manticore. Flashbacks reveal some secrets that Nadia has been hiding from Mason and vice versa. Mason’s secrets come as a total surprise to him, because he’s still suffering memory loss. Meanwhile, Nadia and Mason try to stop a nuclear threat to the world.

CITADEL started with some promise, but the flashbacks, revelations and plot twists develop into mass confusion and a disappointing first-season conclusion. The program’s constant jumping between past and present is hard to follow and sometimes rather boring. It turns the whole first season into an unsatisfying muddle. The surprising plot twists about Mason in the last three episodes give Season One of CITADEL a strong Romantic, politically correct, feminist worldview, despite light moral content. The last three episodes of CITADEL also contain intense violence, two or three lewd bedroom scenes and strong foul language, including about 20 “f” words.

Content:

(RoRo, PCPC, FeFe, B, LL, VV, SS, N, A, M):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Strong Romantic, politically correct, feminist worldview for final three episodes, with some light moral elements about stopping the villains from obtaining nuclear weapons, with some licentious sexual mores

Foul Language:

Episode 4 has 12 “f” words, four other obscenities, and one strong Jesus profanity; Episode 5 has seven “f” words and two other obscenities; Episode 6 has three obscenities (including one “f” word)

Violence:

Strong action violence throughout the three final episodes of Season One includes a man and woman kill many enemies in a gun fight, a woman kills two men with a knife (no blood, but impact and gurgling sounds), a man beats a woman inside a bathroom, and she eventually knocks him out and escapes, a man is shot by a woman, a birth scene shows minimal blood and screaming, a woman hits a man with an extinguisher, two men fight on a submarine with many painful punches and holds and a final stabbing with some blood flow, a sniper takes a headshot right past the face of a captive young girl, a man sticks a large needle into another man’s neck

Sex:

A woman is shown in a hotel room wearing nothing but a man’s dress shirt talking to a man with whom she obviously just had fornicated (they talk about their experience with strong innuendo), man unzips a woman’s dress and carries her into a bedroom where sex is strongly implied (she wraps her legs around him, they kiss, and fall onto the bed)

Nudity:

Upper male nudity, a woman is shown in a hotel room wearing nothing but a man’s dress shirt talking to a man with whom she obviously just had fornicated, young woman is shown in bed with a man and is obviously naked (legs, back, and shoulders visible)

Alcohol Use:

Multiple people drink socially

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking or drugs; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

The show revolves around who’s lying to whom in figuring out the person or people who were behind the fall of a spy organization working to stop evil terrorists, groups, countries, and spies.

More Detail:

In Episodes Four through Six of CITADEL, a spy thriller on Amazon Prime, Mason and Nadia try to find their kidnapped boss while long flashbacks reveal Mason had much more to do with the fall of Citadel, their spy agency, than anyone had guessed, and that Nadia and Mason had married and had a baby before their memories were erased. Despite some surprising plot twists, the final three episodes of CITADEL: Season One turn the program’s story into a convoluted, unsatisfying mess, with a Romantic, politically correct, feminist viewpoint, strong foul language, intense violence, and two or three lewd bedroom scenes.

In Episode 4, Mason and Nadia rescue a Citadel agent named Carter. The story goes back 10 years. The agency decides to use Celeste, a close friend of Nadia’s, to infiltrate a Manticore cell run by twin bad guys. One of the brothers, Anders, has developed a software key that can control all of a nation’s infrastructure. Anders finds out Celeste’s a spy, but Celeste manages to kill him first. Mason panics, however, and pulls Celeste out prematurely, only to find that the software key has disappeared. Mason fears that Celeste has stolen the key and plans to sell it to the highest bidder. So, he secretly has her memory erased.

When Nadia discovers this, she breaks with Mason and goes into hiding, even though she and mason secretly had gotten married. It turns out that Nadia is pregnant with their daughter. With help from her father, Nadia gives birth and lets her father hide the daughter in another city.

Back in the present, the evil British diplomat, Dahlia, has the codes to some nuclear weapons that the bad guys, Manticore, want to use to blackmail any superpower. However, Dahlia still needs Mason to fully access them on an automated Russian submarine. Years ago, Mason had gone on a mission to give Citadel control of the nukes, but he felt Citadel shouldn’t be trusted with them either. So, he manipulated the software for them with his own personal code. Now, however, Dahlia has kidnapped Mason and Nadia’s daughter, to use as a bargaining chip.

Can Mason and Nadia thwart Dahlia’s plan to gain control of the nukes and turn them over to Manticore?

The first season of CITADEL tells a story that started with some promise but which, by the last three episodes, has developed into a convoluted, confusing, frustrating mess. The story isn’t very well told, because it relies on a bunch of flashbacks full of complex twists. The two leads have shallow or confusing character development. They start as espionage caricatures, then, suddenly, their very nature shifts before the viewer’s eyes, as both characters do totally unexpected things. Worst of all, Mason’s character, which is about as upright as anyone in the show gets, goes from hero to zero as the season ends. It turns out that he’s responsible for the deaths of many of his colleagues at Citadel. This plot twist is in keeping, however, with the program’s hardline where the women are always right, and the men are always wrong.

Beyond all this, these three sexually charged final episodes wander aimlessly toward an unfulfilling end where a final resolution is withheld from viewers. Audiences most likely won’t care what happens to anyone. Also, the ending is not an ending but a “see you next time” shout out to the intended second season. This ending makes CITADEL’s convoluted mess even messier. The program’s constant jumping between past and present is hard to follow and rather boring. It turns the whole first season into an unsatisfying muddle.

Finally, the surprising twists about Nadia and especially Mason in the last three episodes give Season One of CITADEL a strong Romantic, politically correct, feminist worldview with some light moral elements. The female characters in the first season are always right, and the male hero turns out to be a dark villain controlled by his evil mother. Totally ludicrous scenes of petite female agents beating down buff male agents add to this hackneyed picture. In addition, it turns out that one character who lost their memory is now actually married to two people. Finally, the last three episodes of CITADEL: Season One also have some sensual bedroom scenes, intense violence and strong foul language.

All in all, MOVIEGUIDE® finds CITADEL’s first-season finale unacceptable.