The Undeclared War eps 2 and 3
Jul. 30th, 2022 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessEpisode 2
Prescience points for the throwaway(?) suggestion about SWIFT!
But I felt thumped over the head by Saara’s lack of conventionality, despite sticking to halal foods, for most of the ep. Then right at the end there was a neat twist to a flashback that had just felt like another hammer blow to give us the cliffhanger.
Before that, Saara was suffering from being the golden girl who’d showed up her colleagues at work and got ditched with a rubbish job, until she found something and despite/because of pushback, reached out to Gabriel, a new father figure (hello, Thomas Cromwell, I mean, Mark Rylance) and the American lady, ignoring GCHQ’s compartmentalisation and security clearances to get the help she needed. Because she’s not one for conventions! The encrypted message she’d found led to a plausible place and she got permission to go there.
Before that, she got advice from The Pedant, who I liked solely for said pedantry, to cherish her family, even though things remained difficult. I don’t know enough about Islam to know how suicide is generally considered and whether the words spoken at the funeral are the words that are always said or had a special significance.
There was more attention on Saara’s boyfriend, who I at first thought was a teacher who took his kids to climate protests that Saara didn’t approve of. Things got complicated when she revealed that her interviews for GCHQ had mostly been about his politics, and we learned that he’d been her lecturer (okay, teaching your students to potentially break the law is dubious but not as dubious as if they were school pupils) and they’d presumably struck up their relationship then. (Dubious.) And she dropped the bombshell that she wasn’t thinking of having his babies, thanks.
She then continued to emote at American lady, who was going to the potential meet with her. We learned she had an ex-girlfriend and a living dad (and I clearly haven’t absorbed what her name is.) I was glad she had the sense and maturity to stop Saara once she started kissing her, because that was just screaming ‘Bad idea’ (and I’d started half shipping Saara and Gabriel based on very little, myself). Good for her for calling Saara out for starting to apologise just before the potential meet or trap was about to happen.
Except it was Vadim from the flashback – I felt smug for having clocked his Russianish accent and wondering.
On top of that, the retaliatory cyber strike the PM had made the security services launch hadn’t provoked a reaction or been all that damaging, apparently.
Episode 3
On a personal note, ugh at the subtitles that involved contortions to read, unless if they were the despised white on white (why is that still a thing?), and a big dose of a poor little rich boy’s daddy issues. Furthermore, as the ep started fifteen months ago, we were a step ahead of Vadim and it turned out the big message was that…there was another, third attack in the malware, it was a bit of a letdown. It also occurs to me, given the equivalencing between Vadim and Saara – we got to see a visualisation of what he was doing with the code too – that it would have been more balanced to have one episode about her, one about him. Two to one in her favour feels unbalanced, especially as we’ve got a chess motif, although it’s a British show, and it’s the other side who attacked first.
There was the moment at the lecture about how what Vadim would be working on fit into war plans (one could both jeer that this doctrine hasn’t worked out well this year, and hope that all the other Channel 4/All4 viewers were joining the same dots about what was probably in the writer’s mind about UK history over the past seven years or so) and we could see, even if Vadim perhaps hadn’t fully, that he, his family and Russians were trapped in this thinking and what it would bring.
Poor Vadim, the romantic who was all for the forbidden lecturer/student love, who just wanted to draw, not study computer science/maths, who abhorred what his arms dealer father did for his wealth/illusion of power, but got recalled home to end up trolling for Russia for the pay, then got ’kidnapped’ so he’d end up having to work for the FSB and slowly catch up on what they were up to.
He seemed very naïve. (Well, maybe we all were until Feb 22, but since then it’s become apparent that well-educated young Russians wouldn’t be THAT naïve.) Ditto hard-bitten Marina. (We knew she was hard-bitten because she had tattoos.) Her working for an independent news website made me sigh – alt world, so the reference to the dead photojournalist babydaddy dying in ‘the war in Ukraine’ was post Crimea at some point, yes? Or given Mina’s age, was it an attempt to reference this year’s invasion? I spent all episode wondering and doubting that they filmed in the real St Petersburg given the content of the drama, let alone the timing of the shoot.
But it’s fairly obvious that the job offer in the UK for Marina is going to be used against Vadim, right? I mean, he’s terrible at hiding his reactions, and keeps talking to people, which works dramatically, but is probably terrible on the secrecy front. But the lovers seemed not to see that.
Yes, learning the FSB had sight of the inside of GCHQ was shocking, and I snorted because it was the American lady who was being British intelligence, but seeing the troll farm they’d shut down and all we learned about some of what was going on in the other side felt a bit thin for the whole episode to be devoted to it.
[Edited for typos 29/1/25.]
Prescience points for the throwaway(?) suggestion about SWIFT!
But I felt thumped over the head by Saara’s lack of conventionality, despite sticking to halal foods, for most of the ep. Then right at the end there was a neat twist to a flashback that had just felt like another hammer blow to give us the cliffhanger.
Before that, Saara was suffering from being the golden girl who’d showed up her colleagues at work and got ditched with a rubbish job, until she found something and despite/because of pushback, reached out to Gabriel, a new father figure (hello, Thomas Cromwell, I mean, Mark Rylance) and the American lady, ignoring GCHQ’s compartmentalisation and security clearances to get the help she needed. Because she’s not one for conventions! The encrypted message she’d found led to a plausible place and she got permission to go there.
Before that, she got advice from The Pedant, who I liked solely for said pedantry, to cherish her family, even though things remained difficult. I don’t know enough about Islam to know how suicide is generally considered and whether the words spoken at the funeral are the words that are always said or had a special significance.
There was more attention on Saara’s boyfriend, who I at first thought was a teacher who took his kids to climate protests that Saara didn’t approve of. Things got complicated when she revealed that her interviews for GCHQ had mostly been about his politics, and we learned that he’d been her lecturer (okay, teaching your students to potentially break the law is dubious but not as dubious as if they were school pupils) and they’d presumably struck up their relationship then. (Dubious.) And she dropped the bombshell that she wasn’t thinking of having his babies, thanks.
She then continued to emote at American lady, who was going to the potential meet with her. We learned she had an ex-girlfriend and a living dad (and I clearly haven’t absorbed what her name is.) I was glad she had the sense and maturity to stop Saara once she started kissing her, because that was just screaming ‘Bad idea’ (and I’d started half shipping Saara and Gabriel based on very little, myself). Good for her for calling Saara out for starting to apologise just before the potential meet or trap was about to happen.
Except it was Vadim from the flashback – I felt smug for having clocked his Russianish accent and wondering.
On top of that, the retaliatory cyber strike the PM had made the security services launch hadn’t provoked a reaction or been all that damaging, apparently.
Episode 3
On a personal note, ugh at the subtitles that involved contortions to read, unless if they were the despised white on white (why is that still a thing?), and a big dose of a poor little rich boy’s daddy issues. Furthermore, as the ep started fifteen months ago, we were a step ahead of Vadim and it turned out the big message was that…there was another, third attack in the malware, it was a bit of a letdown. It also occurs to me, given the equivalencing between Vadim and Saara – we got to see a visualisation of what he was doing with the code too – that it would have been more balanced to have one episode about her, one about him. Two to one in her favour feels unbalanced, especially as we’ve got a chess motif, although it’s a British show, and it’s the other side who attacked first.
There was the moment at the lecture about how what Vadim would be working on fit into war plans (one could both jeer that this doctrine hasn’t worked out well this year, and hope that all the other Channel 4/All4 viewers were joining the same dots about what was probably in the writer’s mind about UK history over the past seven years or so) and we could see, even if Vadim perhaps hadn’t fully, that he, his family and Russians were trapped in this thinking and what it would bring.
Poor Vadim, the romantic who was all for the forbidden lecturer/student love, who just wanted to draw, not study computer science/maths, who abhorred what his arms dealer father did for his wealth/illusion of power, but got recalled home to end up trolling for Russia for the pay, then got ’kidnapped’ so he’d end up having to work for the FSB and slowly catch up on what they were up to.
He seemed very naïve. (Well, maybe we all were until Feb 22, but since then it’s become apparent that well-educated young Russians wouldn’t be THAT naïve.) Ditto hard-bitten Marina. (We knew she was hard-bitten because she had tattoos.) Her working for an independent news website made me sigh – alt world, so the reference to the dead photojournalist babydaddy dying in ‘the war in Ukraine’ was post Crimea at some point, yes? Or given Mina’s age, was it an attempt to reference this year’s invasion? I spent all episode wondering and doubting that they filmed in the real St Petersburg given the content of the drama, let alone the timing of the shoot.
But it’s fairly obvious that the job offer in the UK for Marina is going to be used against Vadim, right? I mean, he’s terrible at hiding his reactions, and keeps talking to people, which works dramatically, but is probably terrible on the secrecy front. But the lovers seemed not to see that.
Yes, learning the FSB had sight of the inside of GCHQ was shocking, and I snorted because it was the American lady who was being British intelligence, but seeing the troll farm they’d shut down and all we learned about some of what was going on in the other side felt a bit thin for the whole episode to be devoted to it.
[Edited for typos 29/1/25.]
