Gosh, I need more episodes. Did this really end this way? Is there going to be more? Please! I am still not sure who to trust. Thank heavens for Jane. I suppose the Ambassador (who is rather free to roam around and participate fully in life as a spy/ agent) will eventually get to Tampa and they will determine their future. The acting was terrific, some of the graphic details I thought were unnecessary, but added humanity to the account. I could have done without the execution itself. I am so proud of Jane for being sufficiently suspicious that she made copies. Go Jane.How complicit is the Secretary of Defense? She does seem to have issues. Is Gordon a fall guy or the true initiator? Who was the Middle Easterner on the plane? There seem to be so many points not resolved.

Such political fiction is flabbergasting. War has become a business in the hands of private interests. Armed and security forces have been privatized and today companies deal with war in order to make a profit out of it. They can't succeed without the right politicians in the right places, but that is always easy to get if these politicians are demagogical enough to flatter public opinion and to manipulate events to create the proper public opinion among the people, a public opinion they can easily use in order to move to the war they need to make some hefty profit. Who cares about the many million people that may die in the process. Actually they will get into the undertaking business to make a profit on the casualties too. That is the first interest of this miniseries. But there is plenty more. If the state can be colonized by the death peddlers, what happens internationally and hence to diplomacy? Diplomacy becomes, from that point of view, the right way to assassinate the right people after trapping them in some cage. A plane for instance that will be exploded at the right time and at the right moment to cause the horror and hate these businessmen need. Too bad for the victims who are not innocent in the eyes of these war mongers because innocence is cowardice and blindness and that is from this point of view the worst guilt you can imagine, unconscious guilt, the guilt of playing innocent, because that can only be a game, an illusion, a make believe. Throw all the innocent people in the world down some kind of chute without a parachute. Flush the world of all these cowards who may, if they are not manipulated, prevent a war, stop a plot, invert a scheme, a malefic scheme of course. But the film goes slightly further than that cynicism. Some people and even forces are against these plotters known as the neo-conservatives today, the Nazis some seventy years ago. The aim of these people and these forces who do not want to use war to benefit the petty interest of a few and to impose death and suffering to the vast majority of the people is always vastly insufficiently articulated and un-enlightened because too much is out of their reach. Some believe the state is the power OF the people FOR the people BY the people, but they have to bring hard evidence to convince the decision-makers to stop the plotters who do not need that kind of evidence since they use the gut reactions of the people moved by the sensational news brought to them by the media. And to get that hard evidence you have to get down into the gutters of life, down into the sewage of hatred, down into the darkest seepage of the endocrinal perspiration of the money-aiming egocentric criminals that are driven by both fear and greed. The film shows marvelously how the real manipulators at the top of the plot, or at the bottom if your prefer, are moved constantly by greed that is unspeakable and the fear that this greed nourishes, nurtures and grows in their logic that knows the profit of this greed might be denied at any time. They turn paranoid because of their greed and they start making mistakes. Politicians in that field are slightly more complex because they become addicted by being under the influence of their ambition to take power, to keep power and use power in order to satisfy their vengeance somewhere, their lust for power somewhere else and their total disregard for others everywhere because they are locked up in their schizophrenia, but a schizophrenia that has managed to get rid of the positive side of the double or triple personality and that has only retained the negative megalomaniac side of it. They may even think they are inspired by some god, that they may be, that they are god himself, or herself, who cares, since after all he or she may be gay. A diplomat then has only one advantage in that situation: he is covered by some real security, independence and freedom and he can use that to get to the root of the evil and to manage the truth to come out. And yet he cannot protect all his friends, all his associates, who will be seen as accomplices if he fails, and who are the first targets for the plotters. The film yet is optimistic somewhere, maybe even naïve. Yes the warmongers were stopped before they could enter Iran. But the war mongers are still here and are still plotting. They even use all kinds of social or ethnic problems in the world to put those who would oppose their ambition ill at ease and in a difficult situation. Even the present economic crisis is used in that direction, and now those who were supposed to suffer most are getting through, not unharmed but unscathed, they try to get things back on rails and move to another provocation, who knows what. They used Al Qaeda in Afghanistan against the Soviets and they are ready to use, and they have already vastly infiltrated them, Al Qaeda tomorrow anywhere it could be useful to block those who are not playing their game, to impose havoc and chaos anywhere they can. They will even manipulate elections in order to bring social upheaval here and electoral discredit there. It is the state within. This film is a masterpiece because it shows western private companies are hiring mercenaries in one western country in order to destabilize and manipulate another western country in order to get the war they want in some far away oil heaven and underdeveloped country. Only the BBC can come up with such political fiction.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID

This is one of the best TV conspiracy series ever made. For six episodes it is edge-of-your seat, and the performances are staggering. Ben Daniels does a spectacular job of dominating the entire series with his enigmatic and shifting intensity as the head of security for the British Embassy in Washington. We don't know for several episodes whose side he is really on, so complex is the web of political intrigue, and so many are the bluffs and double-bluffs of the story line. Another massive presence on the screen is the overwhelmingly powerful Sharon Gless, who plays the American Secretary of Defence. Rarely has an actor or actress in a TV series so completely portrayed a ruthless political operator so sure of power and not afraid to use it every minute of every day. When she looks at people, they generally curl up like fried strips of bacon, just in sheer terror. The series is a very thinly veiled attack on former Vice President Dick Cheney and the company Halliburton, of which he had previously been CEO. In the series, he becomes the woman played by Sharon Gless, and Halliburton becomes a sinister company named Armitage, of which she had been CEO. A disclaimer at the beginning of the series saying that no real company is portrayed is not so much an act of protection against law suits as an 'up yours' act of defiance, since any discerning person can see at once what the series is about. Instead of provoking the invasion of Iraq and the overthrowing of Saddam, the series is about the provoking of an invasion against the Central Asian country of Tyrgyzstan, whose oppressive dictator also rants on television all the time. Once again, we have the 'weapons of mass destruction' which don't exist, and all that goes with it. As a study of the corruption of power and the ruthless pursuit of international power politics by scheming defence companies and what Eisenhower called 'the military industrial complex', TV series don't get any more gripping or convincing than this. The series opens with a fantastic scene where a jet plane explodes in the air because of a bomb, and the wreckage showers down on a motorway. The series's hero, the British Ambassador to Washington, played convincingly and with every nuance entirely perfect by Jason Isaacs, is in a car directly below at the time and tries to save a woman from a burning car, but it explodes and she is killed in front of his eyes. And that is only the beginning of the first episode. The excitement mounts from there. The series is produced by the glamorous Grainne Marmion (pronounced 'grahn-yah', and she's unmistakably female), who has spared no effort, and the direction shared by Michael Offer and Daniel Percival (he also co-scripted with Lizzie Mickery) is terrific; the scripts are brilliant. Genevieve O'Reilly, always a favourite waif (who came into her own the next year as the star of the series 'The Time of Your Life'), does an excellent supporting job with her sensitive face and trembling voice, which probes possibilities like a hand reaching for a glass of water by the bed in the dark. Really, they are all so good, the menace and the anxiety and the danger are so palpable, that there is no room for any hairs to rise on the back of your neck, because the series has gripped you so tightly by the throat.

This is something of a departure for British TV (being rather less in the clover than TV moguls Stateside) because the productions values are VERY high for UK homegrown produce. I imagine they are hoping (or were hoping) to sell it in the U.S. too. Whatever, it has set the yardstick high and so has set itself a lot to live up to. Will it do it. I have a sneaky suspicion it might (even though much of the excitement is just down to fancy editing). Somewhart trendy in its choice of subject matter, but then these days that"s the name of the game. But as I say, if they carry it off they carry it off. If they don't — well memories are short. So either way it's a sure bet.