The intern is Saara Parvin (Hannah Khalique-Brown) and the craziness around her character just keeps on coming. She makes such an impression on the GCHQ boss, Danny Patrick (Simon Pegg), that he takes her – already on her first day – to a COBRA meeting with the Prime Minister. When she finds a message hidden in the code, ahead of a meeting at a cyber conference in Harrogate, does he come up with a high-level response? No! He tells her she can come to Harrogate if she feels like it, and when she returns with some more information from a Russian whistleblower, they casually discuss it in the cafeteria.
Anyway, things improve in episode three when we move to Russia to meet the whistleblower. While it might just seem better because the dialogue is in Russian and the setup is less well known – as far as I know, Russians might find these episodes hilarious. But the plot moves with a nice sense of urgency. You’ll often wonder if these things are really possible, like when someone from British intelligence suggests they can send Putin a warning by remotely taking control of his plane mid-flight and dropping it 20,000 feet.
At this point, we’re also introduced to Mark Rylance as John Yeabsley, a veteran GCHQ guy who’s been around since the Cold War and downright ignored by the agency’s bright young stuff. It’s a nice characterization of a lone figure, and one could wish Rylance was in more scenes.
Later episodes move the action back to Britain and the offices of a Russian news agency – well, a fake news agency, which organizes demonstrations and broadcasts manipulated images to give the impression that Britain is on the brink of collapse. Kosminsky says he has done his homework here too, although the British woman who is leading this operation (Kerry Godliman) feels like a crude caricature.