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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 40 |
"The Last Enemy" began a five-week run on PBS "Masterpiece Contemporary" Sunday night with a 90-minute first chapter. It continues on Sunday nights on most PBS stations through Nov. 2, 2008. Check your local TV listings for the exact dates and times in your area. |
Futuristic thriller opens
new 'Masterpiece' series
of TheColumnists.com
Last January, PBS' "Masterpiece Theatre" divided itself into three new segments, starting with classic English stories, primarily a long series of Jane Austen dramas, followed by the summer segment, which swallowed up the formerly independent "Mystery!" series.
Now the third segment, "Masterpiece Contemporary," is under way, starting Sunday, Oct. 5, with "The Last Enemy," a five-part thriller set in London and the Middle East in the near future. I received the complete miniseries too late to watch all five chapters, but the first chapter certainly was promising.
"The Last Enemy" postulates a grim future for London--and, presumably, the rest of the world, by showing us a society where everybody has to produce electronic identification cards at every turn, the streets are patrolled by riot police and security cameras are watching everybody under the new British system known as TIA for "Total Information Awareness."
If it sounds a bit Orwellian, you are sniffing the right scent, all right. This is a "1984" world that even Orwell might not have believed possible. The sad thing, though, is that it not only will seem possible to most of us today, but some of us surely will already feel the hot breath of Big Brother on our necks.
The first chapter started with a four-wheel drive vehicle moving into what appeared to be a refugee tent city in Afghanistan. We watch as a camera-equipped falcon flies over the vehicle, sending back satellite-dispatched images as we see the vehicle suddenly strike a land mine and explode in flames.
One of those killed in the blast was Michael Ezard. When we finally figure out whose story we're watching, we realize that Michael was the brother of mathematician Stephen Ezard (Benedict Cumberbatch), who has been working for the past four years on math research in a remote section of China. We join Stephen as he arrives in London to attend his brother's funeral and is suddenly plunged into a complex mystery.
Nobody seems able or willing to tell Stephen how or why his brother died. What's more, Stephen has so totally lost track of his brother over the past few years that he had no idea he had married, that he had become a sort of folk hero to hundreds of people and had been living a rather clandestine sort of life.
Stephen is troubled to find a mortally ill woman apparently dying in his brother's house. He's also rather surprised to find Michael's wife Yasim (Anamaria Marinca), physician of Bosnian origin, is living there, eager to make his acquaintance. So eager, in fact, that they wind up in bed together, even though his brother/her husband has just been buried earlier that day.
All this rocks Stephen's world quite a bit. He's also flummoxed to be offered a high-paying job by a mysterious outfit called "Inquirendo," even though its representatives don't seem to comprehend exactly what his math research involves. And he's being tailed by some kind of rogue secret agent named David Russell (Robert Carlyle), whose motives aren't readily apparent.
London seems to have changed so much since he was last there that Stephen can't quite figure out if it's really the same place at all. I think I can understand his confusion because the London we see is overrun with refugees and almost everybody he meets seems to be from either the Far East or the Middle East.
Where this is going is anybody's guess, but it's surely revealing a gloomy future in which paranoia is extremely widespread and nobody seems to be living the familiar, cozy old English country life. The drama is the work of Peter Berry, whose recent works included "Prime Suspect 6: The Last Witness."
This is not the friendly, brightly colored and tastefully decorated world of most "Masterpiece Theatre" presentations. Maybe that's why I find it so seductive. Maybe that's why I'll be glued to the set until I can finish all five chapters of this very intriguing new drama.
©2008 by Ron Miller. The photo is courtesy of WGBH, the BBC and Box TV. This column first posted Oct 6, 2008.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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