Welcome to an Orwellian dystopia. It’s not the future so much as an alternate present: Britain in the post-7/7 era (that’s post-9/11 if you’re American) has embraced a total relinquishing of privacy in return for the government’s promise of safety. No longer can you make the simplest monetary transaction, nor even enter a public building, without a state-issued ID card. Bands of riot-gear-sporting cops can stop you on the least pretext to run you through the system. Retinal scans are mandatory if you want to fly, and sensitive government areas are guarded by fingerprint-readers. Amidst this milieu of barely-civilized paranoia, an inexplicable plague has erupted among a group of recently vaccinated refugees, a well-loved British doctor who worked with them has been mysteriously killed, and his widow unites with his estranged brother to try and solve the mystery, their own footsteps often dogged by encroaching doom as well.
Having been watching Carlyle in glancing pieces of American television, I conclude he’s been diluting the brogue in recent years, which is too bad. At full tilt, a Scottish brogue is not just the sexiest way of speaking but wonderfully expressive: complete with roars and deep-throated trills, explosive stops and a full use of real vocal resonance, it’s enormously exciting after a lifetime of the flat, tiny sound originating from the very front of the face that we Americans tend to favor. Certainly it’s one of the best parts of this particular series, listening to Carlyle speak. His performance as a sphinx-like bad-ass is thoughtful and still, communicating utter confidence and easy menace. Good as Benedict Cumberbatch is (and this is, I assure you, the role that won him Sherlock Holmes: already he is fully at home as a socially graceless but brilliant and compulsive-obsessive scientist), the real joy is in witnessing Carlyle’s enigmatic and entirely fearless character unfold, then fold back up, then unfold again.
The rest (equal parts cautionary tale about sacrificing our privacies to Big Brother and childlike fascination with the power allowed once one does enjoy access to total information all the time) is not without merit, not badly written, not badly acted, but ultimately not entirely satisfying. There is a website which will elucidate the absurdities of the technologies vaunted in the series, and it runs maybe an episode too long… although my dissatisfaction may be due to watching these things in two-night chunks instead of spread in a leisurely fashion across a month as was intended. There are twists toward the end, some of them more gratifying than others, but the final scenes of the Cumberbatch character I found very lyrically melancholy indeed.
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