The State Within: Episode Two

(S01E02) Well folks, if I was confused last week, I'm positively perplexed this week -- but I still can't say I'm not enjoying this political conspiracy drama from the BBC.

It simply wouldn't be entertaining enough to have a basic hit-and-run plot where X marks the spot and some Tricky Dicky figure is behind the cryptic series of messages being delivered by a guy in an underground car park.

Complex is good, especially when it's well-executed and ticked down at a rapid pace like this is.

So what happened this week to pick up where we left off last week?

For a start, the Governor of Virginia decided to start rounding up British Muslims, and after a young couple died in a roadblock shooting in last week's episode, the traveling and indigenous Muslim community in Washington started to panic and demand help.

Sir Mark Brydon decided to hold the course, and persuade a Chair of the Senate Security Committee, Madeleine Cohen, to defer a law change which would effectively commence the elimination of all civil liberties, based entirely on paranoia and the incipient terrorist threat.

Meanwhile, Sir Mark's right-hand man started investigating suspicious arms procurements, while dropping anonymous tip-offs to an FBI agent called George Blake (a woman) about the possible origin of a dead soldier found floating in a Virginia river and then making a quick trip over to London to burgle the house of a company CEO killed in the plane bombing at the start of last week's episode -- who just happens to be the father of Caroline Hanley, Senior Analyst in Foreign Relations and sometime partner of Mark Brydon.

Then Sir Mark found himself caught in a dilemma with his old friend James Sinclair when he and Gordon Adair (the CEO of Armitage Corp, a large arms dealer with Pentagon connections) attempted to persuade him to sign up to a proposed regime change plan in Tyrgyztan.

Then we have the situation with the former Falklands war hero, Luke Gardner, still on death row, and the attempts of human rights lawyer Jane Lavery to obtain a stay of execution on his behalf, which ultimately failed -- then we soon discovered a connection between Luke and a mercenary called Gary Pritchard.

I probably didn't mention it before, but Pritchard is the man who killed the soldier in last week's episode, and with a team of for-hire soldiers, he set about planning a military coup in Tyrgyztan, but ended up foiled by Brocklehurst's tip-off to the FBI.

Unfortunately. Pritchard and his team are British, which is really going to cheese off Secretary of State for Defence Lynne Warner when we see her next week.

So who's on whose side? Who knows?

Not me, that's for sure - but all I can really say is that this show is pretty thrilling stuff.

Sure, it's a little over-complex, and at times badly lacking in the dialog department, but it's quality drama from the BBC at its best, nonetheless.

I guarantee Steven Soderbergh, or someone of his ilk already has plans to make it into a feature-length Hollywood movie.