An opening sequence of a drone flying over a busy street in Baghdad, followed by a huge explosion that leaves many casualties and a gaping hole where a row of buildings used to be, suggests that Prime Target is going to be another special forces, war-on-terror type of drama. Refreshingly, that first impression is quickly dispelled as the action abruptly detours to bucolic Cambridge, where we meet brilliant PhD student Ed Brooks (Leo Woodall), who lets off steam outside the groves of academe with a blast of power-rowing on the Cam.
But his real mission in life (we will learn) is his fascination with algebraic number theory and his quest to crack the secrets of prime numbers. His idol is the ancient Greek polymath Pythagoras, and he’s particularly intrigued by the number 204, described by experts as “an even composite number”. He is assisted in his endeavours by Professor Robert Mallinder (David Morrissey), who knows the boy is a genius but sometimes finds his single-minded determination and severely deficient social skills a little difficult to cope with. Mallinder is married to another academic, Professor Andrea Lavin (Sidse Babbett Borgen Knudsen), an antiquities expert.
But things start becoming not only baffling, but considerably pear-shaped. The Baghdad explosion has revealed a previously unknown underground chamber dating back to the 9th Century, and photos of some of the patterns on its walls inspire a kind of creative frenzy in Ed. Suddenly he’s drawing long strings of equations all over Prof Mallinder’s tablecloth and rambling on about “the DNA of existence”. Then we discover that Mallinder is under video surveillance in his study by agencies unknown. Then the Prof goes nuts, seizes all Ed’s research and burns it, and commits suicide by inhaling the exhaust fumes from his Porsche 4X4 (in retrospect, he should have gone for the Macan 4 Electric). And that’s just episode one. Blimey.
It may not be a huge surprise to learn that Ed has inadvertently blundered into a tangled minefield of conspiracies, paranoia and strategic power-games. It emerges that America’s National Security Agency is keeping close tabs on a number of influential mathematicians around Europe, Mallinder being one of them, and Ed’s research also happens to put him in their cross-hairs. Why? Because, as every computing and mathematical whizz knows, this prime numbers malarky potentially holds the key to cracking every computer network in the world, with potentially apocalyptic consequences (according to Steve Thompson's screenplay, anyway).
But the Americans aren’t the only players in the global game, and in due course several of the characters are assembled at the excavation in Baghdad, while a selection of shifty-looking assassins and mercenaries tiptoe around the backstreets. Ed finds an ally in Taylah Sanders (Quintessa Swindell, pictured above), an NSA agent who’s been carrying out surveillance duties from a base in picturesque Cassis, in the south of France, but who comes to realise that people she assumed were good guys are operating on a rather different agenda than she’d been led to believe.
Prime Target is an unusual beast, being a thriller with some intriguing (not to say mind-bending) intellectual preoccupations, but it’s a difficult feat to pull off. Being told that finding patterns in primes is “the cornerstone of digital security”, for instance, is a grand claim but it isn’t likely to set the viewer’s pulse racing. Nor is it easy to squeeze many thrills from academic analyses of inscriptions in a dead language on a thousand-year-old wall, though I suppose you could say Indiana Jones managed it. But I still want to know how it ends.
