Holy crap. THIS is good Star Wars Universe content. As my colleague put it, “It doesn’t have space wizards” – what it DOES have is intrigue, politics, characters you give a shit about, and storyline that it’s foregone conclusion EVEN
The Undeclared War
Utterly compelling and well-referenced techno/political thriller featuring Simon Pegg and Mark Rylance in supporting roles. I loved the visual metaphors employed for computer hacking (clear fantasy extensions, as opposed to furious typing & bystander peering), and also that they’d gone
COBRA: Cyberwar
6 part followup to the surprisingly good COBRA – this once again pits Robert Carlyle and his inner circle against a national disaster; in this case what turns out to be a cyber-terrorism threat which wreaks havoc on the UK
Vigil
Ooh, I loves me a bit of bleak submarine-based drama – and the UK can be really good at doing bleak, although in a different way to Das Boot. This was a gripping 6-parter which had us counting down the
Homeland – Season 8
The final chapter in Carrie Matheson’s Crazy Adventures, in which Claire Danes has buried the image of the impish smile from Romeo+Juliet & replaced it with a kind of gorilla-like gurning… but then, I guess the content’s rather different. It
Condor
More compelling CIA action (who knew we liked spy stuff so much!) which was all the more baffling for being totally un-putdownable for around 7 of the 10 episodes, but finishing in a way so ambivalent that neither of us
Homeland – Seasons 1 to 7
Compelling CIA thriller following a sometime-unbalanced agent in her counter-terrorism work, in which she becomes very personally entangled – and also caught in the machinations of higher-level Machiavellian scheming by career spymasters. Famously slow in seasons 3 & 4, taken
The Sinner – Season 2
Following season 1’s captivating “reveal by numbers” tale of a murderess who has no recollection of why she did it, we were excited to latch on to Season 2… A very different pace, but still following the “seemingly open-and-shut case”
Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan
Could have so easily trodden into the tedious path of prequels and “Chubby… Hmm…” moments, but turned out to be a quite well thought out & detailed plot, and not *too* much “GO USA!”. A relatively nuanced view of the