At the heart of FX's The Old Man has always been a handful of fatherly relationships. The key one to date has been that Angela/Emily/Parwana (Alia Shawkat) with her three "dads': the one who raised her, Dan Chase (Jeff Bridges), her surrogate work dad, Harold Harper (John Lithgow) and, as we get to see in The Old Man season 2, her biological father Faraz Hamzad (Navid Negahban).
But only one character has been referred to by the show's title, "the old man" — Joel Grey's Morgan Bote. That is what Harper called Bote when he met face to face with Chase after Emily had been kidnapped at the end of The Old Man season 1. It was laid out that both Chase and Harper had a long history with Bote, as he helped train them early in their careers but things have clearly gotten complicated over the years and after Chase went into hiding.
However, after The Old Man season 2 epsode 4, there may be a deeper connection between Morgan Bote and Dan Chase: it feels heavily implied (though never explicitly confirmed) that they are actually father and son. Let me make my case for that argument. Fair warning, I'll be getting into some The Old Man SPOILERS, so if you're not caught up probably best to do so before you continue reading.
First off, it's been established that Dan Chase is not Bridges' character’s real name, it's one of his aliases. We don't know his real full name, though Harper has referred to him as Johnny both in flashbacks and in the present storyline. Whether or not Johnny is his real first name, we've never heard a last name with it. Could it be Bote?
Looking specifically at what happened in The Old Man season 2 episode 4, Chase and Bote's complicated history is brought up numerous times, with Harper saying that it's so bad there's no chance that Bote will listen to Chase. He also mentions Bote's advanced age (saying he's basically 100); even if that's exaggeration, there could be enough of an age gap where Bote being Chase's father could work.
When they come face to face, Chase does try to appeal to Bote, revealing he told him years ago when Bote helped get Emily into the FBI that she wasn't his real daughter, adding a curious connection to Bote: "I said she didn't need to be your granddaughter for you to help anymore than she needed to be my daughter for me to ask."
The other big clues in the episode are Zoe (Amy Brenneman), who constantly refers to how similar Chase and Bote are in mindset, and the fact that Bote is so angry at Chase; it feels like the kind of hurt that can generate from a father and son having an irreconcilable rift.
In fairness, holes can be poked in any of these arguments: Bote could just be mad at how Chase chose to handle his exit from Afghanistan and the agency all those years ago, feeling betrayed by the young man he trained. And just saying Emily didn't need to be Bote's granddaughter for him to help her doesn't necessarily mean that he thought he was, the plan could have been to have her appear to be Bote's granddaughter. As far as Zoe's mentions of similarity, that doesn't necessarily have to be a familial trait, it could have just been what Bote drilled into Chase as he trained him.
And yet, the possibility of Chase being Bote's estranged son feels on brand for the show. As we said, different paternal relationships are a big theme of the show. So Chase having a prickly relationship with his own father would add additional layers to all of that.
We don't get a straight answer to this question in The Old Man season 2 episode 4, and it's possible we never do since Bote was killed at the end of the episode. We can't go back to the source material (Thomas Perry’s The Old Man) to check either, because the show is so dramatically different. But at the very least it's another interesting dynamic in a show that is as much about the relationships as it is the thrilling action sequences.
New episodes of The Old Man season 2 air Thursdays on FX, then are available to stream the next day on Hulu.
