Did you hear that Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord is a murderer?
She’s not (of course!), but the truth doesn’t matter much when a fake news story starts making the rounds in Madam Secretary‘s Season 4 premiere. Not helping matters: Someone does die mysteriously during a closed-door meeting with Elizabeth… but it’s not her fault!
Read on for the highlights of “News Cycle.”
THANKS, WILL! | Elizabeth steals away for a quick hello with Will, but she needs something from him: She hands him her bloody blouse, asking him (a doctor) to have it tested to see if there was anything weird in the man’s blood. Will balks but eventually agrees, then teases her about her guilt over Alli’s move-in day. That’s when she reveals that because their parents died when she was a teenager, she had to move herself into school, and that’s why she went out of her way to make sure she was there to help Will relocate to his college… except he can’t even remember her being there. Rude!
Anyway, Will’s tests later come back saying that the dead man was poisoned, and Elizabeth and her team deduce that it was because he was about to blow the whistle on his government’s shady sale of some atolls to an anonymous buyer. Elizabeth & Co. at first think the buyer was China but after some sleuthing, they realize that Timor-Leste’s president (and the whole country, really) is under the control of a Mexican drug cartel that bought the atolls to use as a shipping base. So Elizabeth subtly strongarms China into helping out, and eventually the cartel’s leader is arrested: an important first step.