Facebook
X
LinkdIn
Copy Link
Needless to say, there have been any number of thrillers that rely on what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: something, however random, that the goodies have to find before the baddies do. Less common are those where the MacGuffin is the mathematical formula for prime numbers — which is where Apple TV+’s latest show comes in.
His first thought on seeing a 204 bus was that 2042 is the sum of three consecutive cubes
Prime Target began in “Baghdad, Iraq” — and therefore in a bustling market. Or at least it bustled until a large gas explosion opened up a hole in the ground leading to a spectacular medieval chamber.
For a while, the chamber went unexplained as we cut to “Cambridge, England” — and therefore to eight strapping young men rowing on the river. One of the most strapping was soon revealed to be Ed Brooks (Leo Woodall, aka Dexter in One Day), a postgraduate mathematician so brilliant that his first thought on seeing a 204 bus was that 2042 is the sum of three consecutive cubes. After a couple of scenes efficiently establishing his not-unexpected social awkwardness, Ed spent the next few frantically scribbling equations in various notebooks on the impressive grounds that computers are “not fast enough.”
Alternately dazzled and intimidated by Ed’s genius was his PhD supervisor Professor Robert Mallinder (David Morrissey). Doing his best to like his star student, he invited the young man to dinner where the professor’s archaeologist wife made small talk by showing Ed photos of a spectacular underground medieval chamber that had recently opened up in Baghdad. Rather than murmuring politely though, Ed decided the chamber roof represented a mathematical formula for prime numbers and to prove it did some more frantic scribbling — this time on the Mallinders’ tablecloth.
Back in Robert’s university office, Ed clarified what he was up to: seeking to show that prime numbers are “the DNA of the universe.” Sadly, Robert’s response wasn’t entirely positive. Instead, he screamed at Ed to lay off such dangerous ideas, stole and burned those scribble-filled notebooks, and had a full-on nervous breakdown. All of which would have been mysterious enough if it wasn’t also clear that Robert was under surveillance by person or persons who remained unknown until the start of episode two when Taylah Sanders (Quintessa Swindell) of the US National Security Agency was seen hunched over a computer in the south of France. Luckily, when not watching footage from hidden cameras in Cambridge, Taylah proved a dab hand at exposition. As she explained, “Right now maths nerds are probably the most dangerous people on the planet,” given that the right sequence of numbers has the power to weaponize or disable everything in the world that depends on computers — i.e., everything in the world.
By this stage, Prime Target was definitely intriguing. But it hadn’t quite solved the difficulty of how to present this kind of material without overdoing the sight of people staring at numbers and screens. Presumably aware of the problem, episode two ended with a sudden cliffhanger featuring a man with a gun and Taylah fleeing for her life.
With six installments yet to come, Prime Target might yet find a way to convincingly combine its touching love of math with its job as a TV thriller. As well as that closing cliffhanger, there seems to be some commitment to the latter in the beauty of both the locations and the two main characters (Taylah is as implausibly good-looking a computer whiz as Ed is a math one). Likewise, in the occasional lurches away from smartness and towards The Da Vinci Code. So far, however, these feel like somewhat dutiful concessions to television orthodoxy in a show that essentially wants to tell us about the overriding importance of mathematics to a proper understanding of life.
