Joel Grey brings Morgan Bote to life in the beloved FX drama The Old Man, who has crucial ties to several other characters.
The Old Man's cast is led by Jeff Bridges, who plays a former CIA operative thrust back into the world of international espionage after he is forced into hiding and sent on the run.
Season 2 of the series debuted on September 12, throwing fans back into The Old Man's world of continent-hopping intrigue.
Who Is Morgan Bote in The Old Man?
Despite only appearing in a handful of episodes so far, The Old Man's Morgan Bote is essential to this TV drama's ever-evolving plot.
In the series, Morgan Bote is brought to life by Cabaret actor Joel Grey, having appeared in four episodes to this point.
Bote appears as a wild card in Season 1, first showing up in Episode 2 as a seemingly unsuspecting government agent somehow involved in the plot to take down Jeff Bridges's Dan Chase.
However, it was eventually revealed (in Season 1, Episode 5) that Bote was the old man the series' title refers to.
In Season 1's penultimate episode, the audience learns that Bote is an ex-CIA head who is quickly approaching retirement. He is described as a surrogate father figure to both Bridges' Dan Chase and John Lithgow's Harold Harper, who has been pulling the strings behind the scenes the entire time.
This has included him working with the villain of the series, Faraz Hamzad, an Afghani warlord looking to pull apart the CIA from within.
That means that across Season 1, Bote was responsible for shocking events like the kidnapping of Dan Chase's daughter, Alia Shawkat's Angela Adams (who was rumored to be pregnant on the set of The Old Man Season 2).
With his mentor turning on him, Season 1 leaves Dan Chase questioning everything he has ever known. The man he once looked up to turned out to have no loyalty to the organization he had worked within for many years.
Heading into Season 2, fans had even more questions about Bote and his potential connection to other characters. This comes from a sneaking suspicion that Bote may also be hiding the information that he is, in fact, the genetic father of Jeff Bridges' Dan Chase.
Early in the second season, it is heavily implied that Dan and Morgan are more than just mentor and mentee. It's too bad they may never find out the true nature of their relationship, as Bote was taken off the board in Season 2, Episode 4.
Joel Grey's Old Man character is shockingly assassinated by local mercenaries hired to break into his Afghan estate (which was filmed like the rest of The Old Man in Santa Clarita, California).
He is killed in the same episode as longtime antagonist Hazmed after the Afghan warlord tried to transfer ownership of some lithium deposit rights to a Russian oligarch.
Even though Bote is now dead and buried, his impact will surely be felt in future episodes. In his time on the series, Bote wove an intricate web of back-stabbing and double agents, and despite his death, some of his crimes may have to be answered for.
Perhaps Dan Chase will be the one to take the fall as the hit FX series continues. This Bote plot thread is just one of the many questions left to answer in Season 2 of the show.
New episodes of The Old Man air weekly on Thursdays on FX before streaming the next day on Hulu.
