“National Treasure: Edge of History” Episode “Graceland Gambit” Recap: Stealing From the King
Nicolas Cage stole the Declaration of Independence and kidnapped the President of the United States. So what will Jess Valenzuela do in National Treasure: Edge of History‘s “Graceland Gambit”? How about steal Elvis’s golden record? It sounds weird, but the context makes it an exciting heist! Here goes!
Ancient History | Jess (Lisette Olivera), Tasha (Zuri Reed), and Liam (Jake Austin Walker) arrive at Oren’s (Antonio Cipriano) doorstep early in the morning with a camcorder videotape from 1999 of Jess’s mother (Vanessa Vasquez) giving a presentation on the treasure’s history. With Jess translating the Spanish, she narrates that a Mayan immigrant woman was hired as the translator for Spanish conquistador Cortez, while also covering for her fellow Mayans to smuggle Cortez’s treasure out of the camp and hid the map in the cubes. Unfortunately, the scholars Jess’s mother is presenting to dismiss her history as theory, but Jess’s father defends her and tells them that they will prove it by finding the treasure- leading to them falling in love.
At FBI HQ, Agent Ross (Lyndon Smith) gets a call from a Doctor Hudson (Tommy Savas) regarding Sadusky’s toxicology report, but keeps it a secret from her boss, who confesses that he was the one who ignored Ben Gates’s tip about the theft of the Declaration of Independence. Back with Jess and company, Ethan (Jordan Rodrigues) walks in on them discussing the treasure and Jess convinces him to help them. They head to Sadusky’s secret room, which is full of relics from the “National Treasure” movies, and find a clue to the location of one cube, while Liam tells them that the third cube was found by his father and went missing after he died diving for it.
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The King’s Clue | After a deciphering the clue to the third cube, Oren figures out that the clue refers to none other than Elvis Presley, since he did the Freemason handshake while meeting President Nixon. The gang realizes that Elvis hid a clue to the cube’s location on his guitar which is being held in a secret room at the Graceland museum on Elvis’s estate. Meanwhile, Ross meets Hudson, who tells her that the toxicology report on Sadusky found numerous unknown substances and Ross promises to find out what meds he was taking to whittle out what could’ve been in his system.
The gang heads to Graceland and Oren unleashes moths into the case containing Elvis’s jumpsuits to get the staff to call the exterminators. Liam and Ethan pretend to be the exterminators and get access to the secret room and Ethan snaps pictures of Elvis’s guitar, but Jess realizes that the clue refers to Elvis’s golden record instead. With security wise to their act, Liam performs “Suspicious Minds” in the lobby to cover for Jess as she sneaks into the room and records the audio of the golden record. They get away by the skin of their teeth, but the record’s audio is nearly inaudible. Liam says that they can mess with it in a music software to decipher it, while Billie (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and her crew not only unlock the cube they stole from Jess, but the cube that Liam’s father stole as well.
Billie and her crew go to a Mayan temple they figured out from the maps on the cubes, but one of her men triggers a trap and falls to his death. Ethan goes to see Liam at the bar and tells him to be more careful with Jess, since she’s undocumented, but he later admits to Jess that he let that information slip. Jess tells Ethan that it doesn’t matter, but she goes to see Liam and says that it’s not okay that Ethan told him. Regardless, Liam plays the audio file from the record backwards and they hear Elvis’s voice telling them another clue. Unfortunately, Billie somehow gets the file sent to her phone.
National Treasure: Edge of History is now streaming on Disney+.