REVIEW: ‘The Franchise’ Episode 7 — “Scene 113: The Bridge”

In what might be the bleakest installment to date, The Franchise Episode 7 drives home the petty cruelties those with any ounce of power are willing to enact to achieve their desired result. In the case of Daniel (Himesh Patel), Dag (Lolly Adefope), Anita (Aya Cash), and co, that means throwing rocks at a drowning bat to hide it from the wildlife representative and then covering up a major accident by paying off local workers. It’s mean-spirited and genuinely repugnant at moments, making it one of the more vital efforts of the series by going beyond what is already known.

While The Franchise Episode 7 is the penultimate episode, very little has changed. Daniel is getting to act with more control as Eric takes the backseat, and he and Anita are working better together. But Adam (Billy Magnussen) is still a mess of nerves, and Peter (Richard E. Grant) is still casually terrible to anyone who deems them less necessary than he is. Anita is still simply trying to muscle her way through the shoot to have more freedom with future projects while Daniel makes a mess of any significant control he gets.

Perhaps the point is the cyclical nature of failures. These people and their selfishness are their own downfalls in an industry that requires a tunnel-vision drive. That desire for power and creative control causes the major, destructive mess of Episode 7 when the on-location team blows up the wrong bridge as part of a crucial action sequence.

This happens because Eric (Daniel Brühl) has a minor breakdown. This isn’t helped by a recent Deadline article reporting that Martin Scorsese is talking about how franchise filmmaking is killing cinema. One of the smaller delights of the series has been watching how Eric descends into madness while trying to make an art film when he’s merely a cog in a mainstream media machine. Any sense of normalcy is gone as Eric leans into his eccentricities. From a bout of persistent hiccups to asking Daniel to find him a goat who can perform comedy to the hat that seems to have fused with his head, Eric is no longer the odd yet confident enough director we first met.

This means Daniel is forced to step up while concocting reasons to keep Eric in his trailer to maintain that control. Eric being upset about Scorsese’s comments wreaks potential havoc as he decides he no longer wants to blow a bridge up and would instead focus on these superhero characters’ “human” element.

Anita knows how bad this would be for the shoot and how it would reflect on her to higher-ups, so she pushes Daniel to take control. And he does. He goes as far as to fake a downpour to keep Eric confined to his trailer. Though it’s one of those grass-is-always-greener moments, he still must contend with picking up dead bats. Something that comes to bite Anita, too, as she makes a move on him before realizing that intimacy put her in complete contact with potential rabies.

The downfall of The Franchise Episode 7 is inevitable, but it doesn’t make it less cringe-inducing to watch play out. From watching the wildlife handler running across the bridge to Peter and Adam’s realization that the wrong bridge blew up to Daniel’s momentary fear that his error killed someone before realizing the handler is okay, it’s a well-written and directed sequence that delivers the necessary tension. The entire crew will have to be paid off, and they’ll have to put more work on an already overworked VFX artist, but they’ll have at least covered themselves from any potential scrutiny or consequence.

On the whole, The Franchise Episode 7 is absolutely fine—solid, even. But with only one episode to go, it continues to prove itself as a largely forgettable series with unlikable characters who are only sometimes funny. The finale will arrive, and we’ll laugh due to a game cast. Then, we’ll forget the show existed when we move on to the next one on our lineup.

The Franchise Episode 7 is out now on HBO.