The story begins with the Woodhull family—Judge Richard Woodhull (Kevin McNally), his son Abe (Jamie Bell) and daughter-in-law Mary (Meegan Warner), and his grandson Thomas—gathered in the burying-ground to memorialize the judge’s elder son, killed fighting as a British soldier. Mary says that the Woodhulls’ strength as a family was what reconciled her to an arranged marriage. This sounds somewhat odd since in the 1700s a family of only four would have seemed tragically small. Off-island, Maj. Ben Tallmadge (Seth Numrich) of the Continental Army complains how his commanding officer has made him a mere “secretary” (though in fact a general’s military secretary was a position of trust and honor). Tallmadge and Lt. Caleb Brewster (Daniel Henshall) scheme to go over the head of their stubborn commander and send Abe’s intelligence from episode 3 to headquarters. This storyline ends with a nice wordless tracking shot that raises the suspense about whether Gen. Washington will ever learn of Hessians in Trenton. And finally, Maj. John André (J. J. Feild) and Philomena, the actress he recruited in New York (Amy Gumenick), lure Gen. Charles Lee, the Continental Army’s second-in-command, into a trap. In real life, Lee was indeed captured at a tavern in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, in December 1776. Gumenick has some clever scenes in this story. But even more striking is seeing the “Marco!” “Polo!” game not only played in the eighteenth century, but used as eighteenth-century foreplay. This episode has no sign of Maj. Rogers, Capt. Simcoe, or Anna Strong. And we have yet to see more of the enslaved Long Islanders who were so prominent, and yet so silent, in the pilot. But surely more is coming. J. L. Bell is proprietor of the Boston 1775 blog, which offers daily doses of history, analysis, and unabashed gossip about the start of the American Revolution in New England. He is an associate editor of the Journal of the American Revolution and an assistant editor of a forthcoming Colonial Comics anthology.
