Blood & Treasure Review: Code of the Hawaladar (Season 1 Episode 3)

It is easy to say Blood & Treasure Season 1 Episode 3, “Code of the Hawaladar,” is a marked improvement over the show’s insufferable pilot; it offers a tighter narrative, a sharper focus on the show’s more interesting characters, and even a few moments of much-welcomed humor.

But those changes, while relevant to Blood & Treasure‘s development as a series, only serve to make it a slightly more stylistically interesting show.

At its core, “Code of the Hawaladar” mostly reinforces the bad habits and regressive storytelling choices of “The Curse of Cleopatra,” an uncomfortable collection of stereotypes and cliches overshadowing any surface level progress Blood & Treasure manages to make in its third episode.

The plot of “Code of the Hawalar” is mostly superfluous, and deathly uninteresting in its vagueness; Lexi and Danny attempt to chase down a box of Nazi photographs, find some clues written in a forgotten language, impersonate the vanished Aiden, and then get into one of those deadly-but-only-for-the-minor-characters type of gun fights.

In theory, this is actually a good thing for Blood & Treasure, giving its main players a bit of breathing room from the constant flood of expository details plaguing the opening episodes.

However, “Code of the Hawalar” doesn’t seize this opportunity to distinguish itself as a series — if anything, the script (credited to Taylor Elmore) only provides more room for Blood & Treasure to exercise its worst instincts, further cementing the show’s most disappointing elements into its foundation.

Chief among those is the show’s uncomfortable racial divide: Danny, Father Chuck, and Gwen Interpol (I’m just dubbing that her official last name, even though it’s really Karlsson) are the only seemingly unassailable characters on Blood & Treasure.

As “Code of the Hawalar” displays with the abrupt introduction and departure of Egyptian federal agent Asim, any non-white person is assumed to be deeply morally compromised, something baked into each character’s introduction and reiterated as their defining trait over and over again.

After being introduced as Danny’s former colleague at the FBI, everything from Asim’s identity to his allegiances are overtly questioned; even though he is only there to bring Farouk to justice, this isn’t revealed until the scene before he dives on a bomb to save Danny and Lexi, his entire presence a question mark until his sacrifice is demanded. 

The two-part pilot did the same thing with Lexi (thankfully, they gave her character some room to develop beyond that, and didn’t kill her off immediately), and appears to be setting up something similar with Farouk, whose motivations are as visible as he’s been in the first few episodes (which is to say, not very much). 

The vague danger of brown and black people is really the only dramatic conceit the series has offered in three hours, beyond some background noise about a Nazi plot to unleash mystical forces on the world — a much less visible evil, and one led by Farouk, a man whose entire character description to this point is “terrorist who wants the West to burn”.

Considering how little screen time Farouk has had, it is to be expected with him: but Asim, Farouk, Aiden, and even Lexi are privy to this same brand of characterization, where the assumption is they are criminals first, with the potential for redemption (or at the very least, context to their actions) given later, employing their moral ambiguity as a dramatic device, in a way we haven’t seen with any other character on the show. 

For Lexi, this ambiguity mostly works; untethered from government agencies and the influence of religious zealots, Lexi’s skills and motivation at least offer shades of a potentially interesting character — but others, like Aiden and Asim, are not offered this same depth at any time, which leaves nothing but their overt actions to define them.

The lines between them and characters like Danny (the choir boy/federal agent whose biggest “flaw” is dating Lexi) or Chuck (a literal priest), couldn’t be more explicit, which makes the events of “Code of the Hawalar” predictably disappointing as it plays out from Rome to Paris.

It may be a telling sign when the hippest references in an episode are Magnum, P.I. and Pulp Fiction, and there are multiple scenes where the driving conversation is the female character’s body.

From the depiction of foreign characters, to the stale pop culture jokes it attempts to make, there is a feeling of antiquity to Blood & Treasure in that every aspect of the series feels hopelessly dated, like the television equivalent of any Michael Bay production.

There are elements of Blood & Treasure that could be fascinating; but those promising suggestions of a action-packed historical saga are buried under the show’s atavistic portrayal of minorities and deafeningly dull protagonist.

“Code of the Hawalar” is the first glance of how this show will look and feel through its first season, divorced from the larger scope and budget of the pilot — but the small, superficial improvements it makes are not exactly a ringing endorsement for the show’s ability to grow moving forward.

There is a better, more Lexi-centric version of this show worth watching; what we get instead are scenes filled with empty tension, either around a romantic relationship we’ve been given no reason to be invested in (beyond “wow those two pretty people might kiss”), or trying to generate paranoia around all of its foreign characters — except Gwen Interpol, of course. 

There’s still time to right the ship — unfortunately, “Code of the Hawalar” feels so set in its ways, it may already be too late.

What did you think of this episode of Blood & Treasure? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Blood & Treasure airs Tuesdays at 10/9c on CBS.

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