Trigger point (ITV)
Short of one stranger spaceship lands on the roof of Buckingham Palacewith the Thames catching fire and the London Eye panicking as a giant Catherine wheel, it’s hard to imagine how the first two episodes of Trigger Point could have been more feverishly dramatic.
From the first five minutes, as ‘Expo’ bomb squad officer Lana Washington (Vicky McClure) and her team smashed their way through steel barriers as if they were made of cardboard, the action was non-stop.
In fact, it has continually escalated, with each tension putting Lana in even greater danger.
After defusing a bomb in the back of a truck racing through the City of London, she raced down the river in a speedboat and freed a guard with not one but two explosives.
She then sprinted a mile in full gear to rescue a young cop who was locked in the trunk of a car with a spring-loaded bomb crammed into his mouth like a deadly gobstopper.
To defuse it, all she had to do was take out the battery, but that meant cutting a hole in his face with a scalpel.
Brave boy, his eyes don’t even water. Mine does.
Whether writer Chris Brandon can keep up this fast pace over six episodes remains to be seen, but the sheer speed of the plot makes it impossible to look away.
This explosive thriller moves so fast there’s no time to think about the plot holes: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Trigger Point (photo Vicky McClure)
More importantly, it doesn’t give us time to think about the improbabilities. Why did that highly trained (and now deplored) bomb disposal expert just open a door in a terrorist den instead of looking for an obvious booby trap?
Is it likely that after two colossal explosions rocked the capital, the roads will be gridlocked and motorists will sit there quietly as if waiting for the lights to go out?
How is it that that super-sensitive tilt switch on a hostage’s bomb belt is about to explode just because she’s shivering, if it wasn’t activated during the hour she was tied up and writhing on the ground?
And most baffling of all, why have the maniacs trying to blow up the Bank of England have half a ton of military-grade RDX explosives wrapped in shrink wrap and Styrofoam nuggets, which make such notoriously bad shrapnel?
Running through all of this is a theme about the psychological costs to Expos of living in constant danger of violent death.
Lana’s colleague and former love rival Helen Morgan (Natalie Simpson) is clearly a nervous wreck, although that doesn’t fully explain why she lies to her new boss, Commander Quentin (Julie Graham).
And Lana herself is in therapy, which is seen in flash-forward scenes that spoil the tension somewhat because they imply that she will survive any unexploded bomb.
Although I wouldn’t be surprised if her therapist also turns out to be a terrorist in a suicide vest.
