It was back in 2019 when The Capture made its debut on BBC One, with writer Ben Chanan skilfully exploiting the sinister potential of deep-fake technology and ubiquitous mass surveillance conducted by the authorities. But if it seemed like sci-fi at the beginning, the new third series lands in a world where ever-evolving gadgetry has made all this stuff not just entirely feasible but almost commonplace.
In the opening episode we got a quick warm-up about the marvels of identity-snatching and image manipulation in a scene at Heathrow airport where a suspect kept changing his appearance before our very eyes, but DCI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) – the Acting Commander of the SO15 counter-terrorism unit – was able to zero in on the miscreant before he could get away.
However, the going was about to get a lot worse, when Home Secretary Isaac Turner (Paapa Essiedu), who was tipped to be the next Prime Minister, addressed a press conference about the introduction of new “smarter surveillance” cameras that can detect deep-fakery. This was part of Operation Veritas, an initiative designed to counteract the “Correction” programme used by shadowy covert agencies to manufacture an alternative “truth” for their own ends. But Turner’s remarks were rudely interrupted when he got a bullet through the head, from a stone-faced gunman who for a moment seemed about to blast Ms Carey into oblivion too.
In this series, Chanan doesn’t just play with the theme of people being tricked into believing faked images, but flips it over so that witnessing the truth earns the truth-sayer scorn and disbelief because it’s too outlandish. Oh, the irony. Specifically, Carey got a long, close-up look at Turner’s assassin while he pointed a gun at her, and was therefore aghast when said assassin was subsequently presented to her as Noah Pierson (Killian Scott), the newly-appointed boss of SO15. Not only had he almost slaughtered her, but was adding insult to injury by taking her job.
You could say there was a bit of a yawning plot-hole here, since the shooting was carried out in front of a room full of journalists as well as numerous police and security officials. It’s scarcely credible that it was only Carey who got a look at his undisguised face.
Anyhow, even though Carey subjects him to extensive vetting procedures to try to crack his brazen protective shell, Pierson proves to be an astoundingly ruthless and focused operator, whose motives are tightly bound up with a complicated back story that encompasses special forces activities during the war in Ukraine, and how they were betrayed. Meanwhile, a bit more digital jiggery-pokery has generated a convenient scapegoat for the killing in the shape of James Whitlock (Joe Dempsie, pictured above). He’s been exposing the way the Home Office have been releasing fake statistics about cross-Channel immigrants, so can easily be passed off as a far-right nutter.
When Carey finds she’s banging her head against a brick wall when she tries to convince her colleagues who Pierson really is, she takes the off-piste option of bringing in her old CIA buddy Frank Napier (the bear-like Ron Perlman). He subjects Pierson to a ghastly smorgasbord of “enhanced interrogation” techniques which would have killed the average citizen, but he has a supernaturally steely inner core which helps him survive it.
We subsequently learn that Pierson is a member of a unit called The Increment, a bunch of super-tough recruits cherry-picked from the SAS and SBS. They seem to be the executive arm of a secret cabal of deep-state insiders who are hell-bent on pushing the “Correction” programme as far as it can go, and to hell with the legal niceties.
It’s tense, rapid-fire viewing, absorbing enough to let you gloss over some riotous implausibilities which sometimes threaten to tip the entire production over a cliff. For instance, I can’t decide whether Indira Varma’s Khadija Khan is a parody of a self-important BBC newsreader or merely a self-important BBC newsreader (Varma and Grainger pictured above). But Chanan has created a digital hall of mirrors where everything or nothing might be real, which rings disturbingly true.
- The concluding Episode 6 is on BBC One on Sunday 12 April at 9PM. The series is also available on iPlayer
- More TV on theartsdesk
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