Anons - Throughout this thriller, there has been no single character that Q has been more ambiguous about than Christopher Wray. It feels to anons like one giant fucking head fake.
We have been given so many mixed signals about this guy.
Q Trust Wray = POSITIVE
Q Pic of red X Wray = NEGATIVE
Q Wray is a sleeper = who da fuq knows?
Then I started thinking about The Sting (remember, we’re watching a movie). Redford and Newman characters were con men. We, the audience was kept guessing up until the very end…but the target of their con game wasn’t guessing. He was CONFIDENT enough to plunk down $500k on what he thought was a sure thing.
Let’s explore the word “confident”. All deception is based on confidence. Some people think the “con” in con game or con men refers to a CONvict or bad guy. But as anons probably know, con actually is short for CONfidence. As in a confidence man (con man) or a confidence game (con game). A successful con game convinces the target that it’s perfectly safe to take a ridiculous and careless risk by creating confidence and appealing to their baser instincts (usually greed). Once confidence is established, the target (often called a mark) throws caution to the wind and goes for it, completely confident they just had the win of a lifetime. When Sun Tzu said "Appear weak when you are strong", he was actually describing how to play a con game.
Back to Wray, it could be that as the election fraud sting was materializing, patriots were detecting some reluctance on the part of their target to commit such a dangerous and obvious crime. Were they wondering about about the reliability of Wray (no doubt monitoring Q)? Could it be that patriots needed to inject some confidence in them that Wray was in fact on their team? Enter the Q drop with the X’d out Wray picture. Shortly thereafter, we learn that Wray had the Hunter laptop and sat on it for a year. SEALED…to the intended target, this was what they needed to move forward with confidence!
At the end of The Sting, there is a plot twist to beat all plot twists. The audience is taken on a wild ride right up until the final scene. What they think is happening all along actually (a complex but fairly linear sting) turns out to be a head fake not only on the target of the con, but on them too. Only at the end does the audience realize how brilliant and elaborate the Sting actually was, and they collectively sigh and say "ahhhh, NOW we get it!"
So, which Wray will we get? Will we get Trust Wray, or RED X Wray? We will soon find out, but if we are still guessing at this point in the movie, maybe we are supposed to be unsure.