Bomb disposal clearly isn’t a job for the faint-hearted, but Vicky McLure’s Lana Washington, who heads the specialist Metropolitan Police bomb squad known as SO15, continues to stride boldly into the fray, even if the emotional toll is cranking itself up inexorably. This fourth season of Trigger Point kicks off as Washington and her team track the progress of a truck driving into the City of London, which they have reason to believe is crammed with explosives. Its target is the Bank of England.
Their task isn’t made easier by the fact that the truck is being monitored by a drone overhead, but Lana cooks up an ingenious ruse to stop the vehicle inside a tunnel and replace the driver with one of her team while the drone is unsighted. The Bank is saved, but the cops barely have time to breathe a sigh of relief before two huge explosions go off in the distance, throwing up vast and ominous clouds of smoke over the London skyline. Even worse, their colleague DCI Batra (Maanuv Thiara) is killed by a booby-trap bomb while searching an address linked to the truck driver.
This attempt to wreak havoc on London’s financial district is only the start of a labyrinthine sequence of events which all begin to point, unnervingly, to the fact that a terrorist mastermind is in the process of preparing a nuclear explosion in the British capital. It’s the truck driver once more who supplies a critical clue, when he throws up while being interrogated. Analysis of the vomit reveals he’s suffering from radiation sickness, caused by exposure to uranium 235.
You might consider the plot to be somewhat fantastic and improbable, but these days, who knows... At any rate, Trigger Point’s creator Daniel Brierley (under the mentoring eye of Jed Line of Duty Mercurio) has an enviable knack for keeping the action rattling along quickly enough that you barely have time for second thoughts (especially when an ITV hour is only about 44 minutes after you take the ads out).
Alarming and traumatic events keep leaping out of the woodwork and socking you on the jaw like rocket-assisted boxing gloves. There’s a ghastly scene where a police officer is found to have a spring-loaded detonator stuffed into his mouth. If somebody pulls it out it will trigger an explosion, so Lana (pictured) has no option but to slice the victim’s cheek open with a scalpel to neutralise the offending object.
Other characters are found to have been fitted with explosive devices attached to their backs, liable to be detonated by motion sensors. The terrorist mastermind also has a knack for setting car bombs which lock the driver inside the vehicle before exploding, though how he manages to organise all these macabre stunts in apparently no time at all is beyond miraculous.
Something we might have done with a little less of is Lana’s ongoing treatment for PTSD, traceable back to her military service in Afghanistan, in which she’s quizzed by an army veteran called Eddie (Chris Reilly). He tends to deal in shrink-esque platitudes like “it’s time to face your fear”, even though Lana seems to spend most of her waking hours facing her fear and trampling it underfoot. One might also grow a little weary of the show’s blizzard of acronyms, like COBRA, EXPO, CTFO, IED etcetera. Nonetheless, if you watch episode one, you’ll probably find yourself bingeing all six.
- Trigger Point is on ITV1 and streaming on ITVX
- More TV on theartsdesk
