Treadmill Reviews: The Last Enemy

Masterpiece, previously Masterpiece Theater, is, as far as I can tell, a PBS owned Anthology series which re-airs really awesome British dramas, among other things. I'm still not completely sure how this works, but the idea of a television anthology seems awesome enough for me to trust their judgement.

In my ongoing efforts to convince myself to use our treadmill more often, I turned to BBC/Masterpiece Contemporary's 2008 near-future drama The Last Enemy, a mystery thriller about a mathematician returning after four years to a Britain which is becoming hauntingly similar to Orwell's 1984.

OK I'm not going to lie - I chose this miniseries solely because Benedict Cumberbatch plays the lead role. This should come as no surprise; I mentioned in my Sherlock review that I wanted to see him in some different roles, to make sure he's as good an actor as I thought he was.

I'm happy to report that Cumberbatch did not disappoint. Here he plays Stephen Ezard, the genius mathematician who escapes to China before the start of the series in an attempt to isolate himself from the world. Stephen is introverted, socially awkward, and sensitive, with a very mild form of OCD, only returning to England to attend the funeral of his brother Micheal.

It's a difficult role but Cumberbatch fills it brilliantly; this is especially notable for someone like me who's primary experience with the actor comes from Sherlock, a character who's sorta similar to Stephen with a vastly different personality. That Cumberbatch was able to play both so believably earns high respect from me.

This show has a very political message, exploring the ethical problems with super-surveillance via Total Information Awareness (TIA), a database that gives authorities access to every citizen's personal data, monitors everyone's movements, and effectively wipes out anonymity. Generally I don't like political fiction, but I didn't mind this one too much; instead of being the focus of the series, the political message is more a background to the main plot.


The actual plot revolves around a vaccine administered by Stephen's brother Micheal, who was working as a doctor in the Middle East when his jeep hit a landmine. The vaccine, or at least a specific batch of it, seems to be spreading a deadly virus, and Stephen teams up with romantic interest Yasim Anwar, who also happens to be his brother's widow, to discover who is trying to cover it up and why.

The romantic subplot seems to be a major part of the story, but I'll have to admit that I was a little confused by it at first. The characters know each other for all of half a day before they're making out and sleeping together, and I know that I wasn't the only one who found that unbelievable (while unrealistic, I was happy to note that there wasn't anything explicit, something you're not always guaranteed in foreign television).

The next day Stephen is offered a job to publicly promote TIA, which he only accepts after returning to his flat and discovering that Yasim has disappeared, along with the body of the infected immigrant she had been treating the day before. Their romance is necessary to bring Stephen into the plot, and this is where the writers make up for the strange start; while Yasim might have been OK with a one-night stand, Stephen is sensitive and feels he needs to find her, going so far as to cyperstalk her with the TIA system just to make sure she's OK.

Despite being labeled as a thriller, The Last Enemy is paced pretty slowly, with little to no real 'action' scenes; I would label it more of a psychological mystery than anything else. The slow pacing seems to have turned a lot of people off, but I personally find it refreshing not to have another stereotypical guns-blazing car-chasing action piece. The characters were intriguing enough to carry the story until the plot became more apparent.

This show was heavily advertised as a thriller, however, so I can understand why a lot of people were put off, expecting something entirely different. The Region 1 DVD release even goes so far as to use, as cover art, a specific scene where the characters are running from a bomb explosion; the scene actually occurs, in the penultimate episode, but it's pretty minor compared to your average action flick and gives viewers to wrong impression of the show as a whole (and for those unfamiliar, DVDs are region-encoded to only be playable in specific areas of the world; Region 1 is the US and Canada, and Region 2 is most of Europe/Middle East).

If there's something in the series itself I feel the need to criticize it's how confusing the story can be at times. This show has quite a large cast and I found myself at times forgetting who certain side characters were and what their relationship to each other was. One particular character, played by Robert Carlyle, remained a complete mystery for the majority of the show, and even when he explained who he was to Stephen I still wasn't sure what exactly his goal was.

Viewers nowadays might recognize Carlyle from his role on Once Upon a Time.

I like complicated plotlines, but when they're this hard to follow I have to chalk it up to less-than-stellar writing or directing. I do have to give them credit for managing to develop these characters with only five episodes to work with; maybe if there'd been more time, they could have improved upon the plot as well.

If I can point out one minor thing I really enjoyed about this series, it would be the opening and closing credit sequences. I've already mentioned how much I like creative opening sequences, and The Last Enemy is no exception; each episode begins with a computerized voice saying "Start TIA," and behind the music and action shots it seems to me that the sequence is designed to look like the TIA program booting up on a computer. The episodes also end with a "Shutting off" voice-over, and while I'm sure some people thought it was gimmicky I found it really cool

(Spoilers for those who have already seen it or aren't planning to: it took me a few minutes to realize that the last episode didn't include the 'shutting off' voice, a minor detail which really drove home the message of the show).

Like any sane lover of fiction, I spent quite a bit of time trying to decide what the title of the series was referring to. 'The Last Enemy' seemed to be the beginning of a quote, but I didn't know what the quote was (I was imagining something along the lines of 'The last enemy is yourself', which seemed appropriate). I only discovered afterward that there is a popular passage in the bible that reads "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death."

It's possible the series creator had this in mind when choosing the title, but in one of the last scenes of the show they finally do a title drop, and it seems to imply a slightly different meaning. Part of me kinda wishes they'd done this in the first episode, because if they had the title would have been empowering; I don't dislike the last episode title drop, however, because it is wonderfully tragic and really accentuates the message.

Overall, I'll have to admit this wasn't a perfect show, but it was in my opinion a very good one, and I'm glad I was able to watch it. The plot and characters were intriguing and the message is definitely relevant to today, regardless of your opinion on super-surveillance. I'd definitely recommend this to anyone tired of mindless entertainment, looking for something intriguing that makes the viewer think (luckily, this series is available on both Netflix and Hulu).