SPOILERS!!!!!!
A well-made piece, with thoughtful, skilled work from the cast, director and HoDs. Ilan Eshkeri's score is particularly strong. The visual storytelling is purposeful.
Nabhaan Rizwan as Raza and Roger Jean NSengiyumva as Dadir are revelations, Arsher Ali is a delight. Considine is his usual excellent self. The rest of the cast do a decent job.
Scenes are well-constructed, with nicely deployed visual details, and lines of dialogue echo across episodes in a way that generally doesn't feel contrived.
Alas, the plot - gripping and well-paced for the first 4 of the 6 episodes - begins to unravel a little in ep 5 and loses credibility in ep 6, squandering the impact of the series as a whole.
There is some emotional pay-off by the end, but nothing like what could have been achieved if chasms of credibility/motivations hadn't opened up to distract us.
The key deficiency is the 'surprise' identity of the identity of the perpetrator of a mass shooting. Personally, I'd guessed it, though I don't fault the writers for that. Where they fell down was in not making it plausible - at least in retrospect - that the character would behave that way.
It wouldn't have been hard to to do. We just needed to perceive some particular vulnerability on his part, and to spend a little more time with him so that we could understand his distress. A more developed set-up of how much Holly's fake allegations (of child abuse on his brother) affected him would also have helped.
SPOILER COMING
As it was, young Nasir Shar was never a particularly developed character. When Akash fired the gun in his flat, he wasn't being threatening. He was even laughing about the recoil. So Nasir jumping on Akash to seize control of the gun wasn't credible. From that point out, things made less and less sense.
Nasir phones the emergency services, but doesn't give them Akash's location and then wanders off with the gun. Some hole-patching dialogue from Gabriel (Considine) about how Nasir thought Akash was dead doesn't do enough to explain why - as someone who thought he'd just killed a friend - Nasir elects to keep the gun in his pocket.
Then, when (coincidence alert) he stumbles on the café where Holly just happens to be, we are asked to make another huge disbelief suspension to believe Nasir was so distressed that he decided to shoot her there and then.
Remember, this is a young kid who's never handled a gun before, let alone pulled the trigger voluntarily.
Then it gets even less credible. Having shot Holly - against whom Nasir has a vague sort of fuzzy half-motivation - Nasir decides to turn mass-shooter and kill young girls and waiters and so on.
There was no sense at any point in the series that Nasir was either being radicalized to any real extent (beyond some misogyny against his step-mother), or that he was emotional unstable or vulnerable. And then, we are told, he turns the gun on himself. Something jihadis don't do, but mass shooters often do.
So, after six hours of well-structured drama about counter-terrorism, we're left with a denouement that involves a mass shooting which can't really be considered terrorism, and comes from pretty much nowhere in terms of character motivation.
The script tries to make a virtue of this from-nowhere precipitation of violence. But it doesn't work.
Gabe's "why does anyone do anything?" line near the end comes off as a non-credible shrug. He's in the business of anticipating and preventing terrorist attacks. He'd never shrug this off so casually.
And the take-out - that even if you manage to prevent major attacks by known Islamists, as Gabe and Raza have, random ones will spring up for no real reason - is a category error, playing into the "he was just mentally ill" excuse-making that sometimes gets put forward in the aftermath of religiously-motivated attacks.
The coincidenceyness of the ending (in terms of how the characters converge) feels a little lazy too, but it was the lack of proper motivation for, and credible response to, the attack that rang most false.
Frustratingly, both of these problems could have been fixed with some minor rewriting.
Nasir needed a handful of 1 to 3 minute scenes scattered through the series to give more sense of his psychology (which needn't have made his identity as the killer obvious), while the characters could more plausibly have converged on the hospital where Raza was being held and where there were lots of armed police to make Nasir feel scared.
Instead, as the credibility unravels, so does the tonal restraint that made the rest of the series powerful.
Holly's sister has a poorly-motivated on-the-nose speech to Gabe's wife Emily, in which she essentially mouths the theme of Gabe's character arc and then marches off in an inexplicable huff. All the tension between Gabe and Emily over his undercover work just dissipates as they drive off in their Saab. The reasons behind Gabe's continued involvement with the northern white supremacist types are never made clear - which is odd, since he's presented both as drawn to his old undercover life and, also, as some kind of avenging angel wreaking death and violence on the white racists he pretended to be one of.
So, all in all, it adds up to less than the some of its parts. But it's parts are good and it's well worth watching.
A well-made piece, with thoughtful, skilled work from the cast, director and HoDs. Ilan Eshkeri's score is particularly strong. The visual storytelling is purposeful.
Nabhaan Rizwan as Raza and Roger Jean NSengiyumva as Dadir are revelations, Arsher Ali is a delight. Considine is his usual excellent self. The rest of the cast do a decent job.
Scenes are well-constructed, with nicely deployed visual details, and lines of dialogue echo across episodes in a way that generally doesn't feel contrived.
Alas, the plot - gripping and well-paced for the first 4 of the 6 episodes - begins to unravel a little in ep 5 and loses credibility in ep 6, squandering the impact of the series as a whole.
There is some emotional pay-off by the end, but nothing like what could have been achieved if chasms of credibility/motivations hadn't opened up to distract us.
The key deficiency is the 'surprise' identity of the identity of the perpetrator of a mass shooting. Personally, I'd guessed it, though I don't fault the writers for that. Where they fell down was in not making it plausible - at least in retrospect - that the character would behave that way.
It wouldn't have been hard to to do. We just needed to perceive some particular vulnerability on his part, and to spend a little more time with him so that we could understand his distress. A more developed set-up of how much Holly's fake allegations (of child abuse on his brother) affected him would also have helped.
SPOILER COMING
As it was, young Nasir Shar was never a particularly developed character. When Akash fired the gun in his flat, he wasn't being threatening. He was even laughing about the recoil. So Nasir jumping on Akash to seize control of the gun wasn't credible. From that point out, things made less and less sense.
Nasir phones the emergency services, but doesn't give them Akash's location and then wanders off with the gun. Some hole-patching dialogue from Gabriel (Considine) about how Nasir thought Akash was dead doesn't do enough to explain why - as someone who thought he'd just killed a friend - Nasir elects to keep the gun in his pocket.
Then, when (coincidence alert) he stumbles on the café where Holly just happens to be, we are asked to make another huge disbelief suspension to believe Nasir was so distressed that he decided to shoot her there and then.
Remember, this is a young kid who's never handled a gun before, let alone pulled the trigger voluntarily.
Then it gets even less credible. Having shot Holly - against whom Nasir has a vague sort of fuzzy half-motivation - Nasir decides to turn mass-shooter and kill young girls and waiters and so on.
There was no sense at any point in the series that Nasir was either being radicalized to any real extent (beyond some misogyny against his step-mother), or that he was emotional unstable or vulnerable. And then, we are told, he turns the gun on himself. Something jihadis don't do, but mass shooters often do.
So, after six hours of well-structured drama about counter-terrorism, we're left with a denouement that involves a mass shooting which can't really be considered terrorism, and comes from pretty much nowhere in terms of character motivation.
The script tries to make a virtue of this from-nowhere precipitation of violence. But it doesn't work.
Gabe's "why does anyone do anything?" line near the end comes off as a non-credible shrug. He's in the business of anticipating and preventing terrorist attacks. He'd never shrug this off so casually.
And the take-out - that even if you manage to prevent major attacks by known Islamists, as Gabe and Raza have, random ones will spring up for no real reason - is a category error, playing into the "he was just mentally ill" excuse-making that sometimes gets put forward in the aftermath of religiously-motivated attacks.
The coincidenceyness of the ending (in terms of how the characters converge) feels a little lazy too, but it was the lack of proper motivation for, and credible response to, the attack that rang most false.
Frustratingly, both of these problems could have been fixed with some minor rewriting.
Nasir needed a handful of 1 to 3 minute scenes scattered through the series to give more sense of his psychology (which needn't have made his identity as the killer obvious), while the characters could more plausibly have converged on the hospital where Raza was being held and where there were lots of armed police to make Nasir feel scared.
Instead, as the credibility unravels, so does the tonal restraint that made the rest of the series powerful.
Holly's sister has a poorly-motivated on-the-nose speech to Gabe's wife Emily, in which she essentially mouths the theme of Gabe's character arc and then marches off in an inexplicable huff. All the tension between Gabe and Emily over his undercover work just dissipates as they drive off in their Saab. The reasons behind Gabe's continued involvement with the northern white supremacist types are never made clear - which is odd, since he's presented both as drawn to his old undercover life and, also, as some kind of avenging angel wreaking death and violence on the white racists he pretended to be one of.
So, all in all, it adds up to less than the some of its parts. But it's parts are good and it's well worth watching.