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3 hours ago
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Prime Target is one of those endeavours that gives you the inescapable feeling that someone came up with the title first and worked backwards from there.
Edward Brooks (Leo Woodall) is a brilliant young postgrad mathematician at Cambridge. We know he is brilliant because various maths professors keep saying that his is the best mind they have come across in 30 years of teaching. He works into the night, frantically scribbling in real notebooks with real pencils (“Computers aren’t fast enough”), even when there is sex on offer from hot barmen or young women yearning for him to come to their birthday parties and fall in love with them. And we know we’re in Cambridge because everywhere is covered in ivy outside with antique brass instruments and oak panelling inside. Everyone is in layers of brown cord and tweed. They look like very large, very clever sparrows.
Ed is obsessed with prime numbers. He thinks they are the answer to everything. He reckons he is on the brink of something, something big! So big that he scribbles all over his supervisor’s tablecloth when inspiration strikes at dinner. You get the vibe now, I’m sure. His supervisor is Robert Mallinder, played by David Morrissey, who I suspect is usefully funding his next passion project.
Alas – it seems that some pesky shadowy forces also reckon he’s on the brink of something, something big! But something that they don’t like. And perhaps something Prof Mallinder knows they won’t like because before you know it, he is stealing Ed’s work and burning it in bins along with the tablecloth. Then the professor apparently kills himself, leaving his wife, Andrea (Sidse Babett Knudsen), bereft not just of table linen but of a loving husband.
Although was he so loving? Or did he have an emotional affair with a brilliant female postgrad who, years ago, was working on similar stuff to Ed? “I can see why he’s got under your skin,” Andrea says to her husband as they discuss Ed. “That passion. The purity of it. He’s very like her.” We’re not here for the script, people, which is the most by-numbers thing of all.
We’re here for the plot, and there’s plenty of it. For the prof was one of a cadre of brilliant older mathematicians being secretly surveilled by the NSA because, as one helpful explainer has it, we live in a computerised world now and computers are all numbers inside and if anyone really understands them they can really set the digital cat among the binary pigeons.
Anyway. While Ed is following up clues found in the late professor’s study and discovering that key pieces of research have been removed from the university library’s records, we move to France, where the NSA gang, including brilliant young – uh – surveillancer Taylah (Quintessa Swindell) is beginning to notice something hinky about the job she has been hired to do. A whole new side-plot begins to develop that is sure to tie into the main one soon. As is the discovery of a ninth-century underground chamber in Iraq that may be the site of “the greatest library ever created! Finally! After all your research!” This is said to Andrea, who is a professor of – Arabian libraries, I guess? – before she declines the offer of supervising the gig. She sends an underling instead, because viewers cannot be expected to follow a plotline led by a middle-aged woman who has already had quite enough screen time, including a couple of grieving scenes, to satisfy the woke mob.
It’s a little bit Good Will Hunting (though instead of a charming janitor we are asked to root for a young man who appears to have read Applied Morosity for his undergrad degree), a little bit Bourne Identity, with more than a dash of A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code thrown in. Or, if you prefer to keep your references televisual, it is a little bit The Mentalist, Bones, Monk and many, many more. Which is to say it is derivative, preposterous, utterly unbelievable and great fun. It’s got confidence and style and is here to deliver escapism to the power of pi cubed, or something, and it does. Prime ridiculous entertainment.
