Design: Tina Tiller

Pop CultureAugust 16, 2022

New TV thriller The Undeclared War is a love letter to computer brainiacs

Staff writer

Design: Tina Tiller

Ever wished there were more dramas about geopolitical cyberterrorism? British thriller The Undeclared War is here to make all your infosec dreams come true.

This article contains mild spoilers for episode one.

What’s all this about?

Written and directed by Bafta award-winning Peter Kosminsky (Wolf Hall), The Undeclared War is a new six-part political thriller set in post-pandemic Britain in 2024 in the lead-up to a general election. Think Spooks, but with computers and coding and stuff.

At last, a show that gives malware the spotlight it deserves.

The computer brainiacs of Britain are about to save the world, and thank goodness for them. It’s talented university student Saara Parvin’s (Hannah Khalique-Brown) first day of work experience as an analyst at Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), the intelligence and cybersecurity organisation responsible for protecting Britain from digital espionage. While Saara has secured a highly sought after position, she’s mysteriously kept it secret from most of her family.

Nothing exciting ever happens during work experience, right?

Just the Russians launching a cyber attack on Britain, no big deal. Saara has barely set foot inside the GCHQ building when a routine stress-test of telecommunications infrastructure goes haywire, bringing down over half of Britain’s internet. GCHQ quickly discovers the problem wasn’t caused by the stress-test, but by a virus launched by an unknown (but presumed to be Putin) cyber attacker.

While all the intelligence experts are busy working out how security was breached, genius coder Saara dives into the malware and prevents a second hidden virus from spreading. This feat of coding brilliance gets her invited to a meeting with the prime minister, which isn’t a bad way to end your first day of work experience.

I struggled to find the toilets on my first day at work. I hope she’s getting paid.

Payday is the least of Saara’s worries, because after a hard day fighting international cyber crime she learns something terrible has happened to her father. Things were already tense with her family, and even though Saara just saved Britain’s entire infrastructure from collapsing, now everyone is mad at her.

This sounds serious. Who knew the internet could be so stressful?

There are a lot of serious people in The Undeclared War, staring at a lot of serious screens and saying a lot of serious things. It’s no wonder. As Britain faces political unrest and the nation’s infrastructure is repeatedly compromised, they retaliate against Russia by commencing a secret cyberwar. Saara uses her unique set of skills to stay one step ahead of the attacks, even though nobody realises that simply turning the entire internet off at the wall and waiting a few seconds before switching it on again would probably fix everything.

A cyber war? More viruses? Great, more stuff to worry about.

The Undeclared War is a cautionary tale about what could happen during a geopolitical cyber attack, reminding us how much we rely on technology in our everyday lives. It’s about the challenges of modern intelligence and the impact of misinformation, and while the show is slightly futuristic, being set in 2024 and all that, references to the pandemic and Boris Johnson no longer being prime minister make the series feel like it could be happening today.

Who will I recognise in this drama?

There’s plenty of star power, including Simon Pegg (The Boys, Hot Fuzz) as head of operations at GCHQ and Mark Rylance (Wolf Hall, Bridge of Spies), a former GCHQ employee who comes out of retirement after the cyberattack. Adrian Lester (Hustle) appears as Conservative prime minister Andrew Makinde, Andrew Jennings (The Crown) plays one of the GCHQ bigwigs and the fabulous Kerry Godliman (Taskmaster, After Life) features as well.

What’s the verdict?

The Undeclared War feels like a dystopian mix of Spooks and Bodyguard, but the first episode moves slowly. Watching actors stare at coding on a screen isn’t always exciting, but with a promising cast and an intriguing plot, The Undeclared War might just be the dark political thriller to get you through the rest of winter.

The Undeclared War streams on TVNZ+ from Wednesday 17 August.

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Pop CultureAugust 15, 2022

A League of Their Own is so gay and so good

Madeleine Chapman

Editor

Finally a show that gets straight to the point with its queer protagonists, writes Madeleine Chapman.

The lowdown

A League of Their Own, created by Abbi Jacobson (Broad City) and Will Graham, follows the Rockford Peaches as they compete in the first professional women’s baseball league. Released in its entirety on Amazon Prime last week, the show’s first season runs at eight hour-long episodes.

The good

Movies and TV shows about female athletes are rare. Movies and TV shows about the queer communities within women’s sports are virtually non-existent. So much so that the original A League of Their Own movie from Penny Marshall (which is excellent) is a queer classic, despite having no openly gay characters and Marshall apparently being staunch in her position that even Rosie O’Donnell’s character was straight (lol).

The new series takes the subject matter – women playing baseball in 1943 – and draws a reasonable conclusion: extremely gay. (Since the real-life league folded in 1954, several of its players have come out as gay.) What that means is there are no extended glances from across the room in episode one, with a brief handhold in episode three, and then a confused kiss in the season finale. That storyline, so often dragged out for whole seasons in other shows, begins and ends in the first episode when it is made clear apparent that a lot of these women are gay as hell.

So with that out of the way, the series is able to look into the lives and struggles of women who, for a variety of reasons, feel they can’t be entirely themselves all the time. What has potential to be an earnest and bleak look into the sexism and racism of the time is instead a joyful peek into queer culture in the 1940s, with a little baseball on the side. Seeing women tentatively discover themselves, and then excitedly discover their own community, in real time is so fun to watch, whether you’re into sports or not.

Fans of the original will remember the scene when an unnamed black woman returns a practice ball to the Peaches with an impressive and powerful throw. She’s then never seen again. Now, that woman is Max Chapman, an aspiring pitcher who isn’t allowed to try out for the league or play in her local men’s team. Her story is even more tumultuous than the Peaches’ (and she forms a stumbling friendship with Jacobson’s Carson) but operates largely in a parallel universe, where playing at all is the main struggle. It’s a welcome widening of the lens to include the realities of those who weren’t included in the history-making women’s league.

Ps. Rosie O’Donnell makes a sweet cameo as a bar owner that very much could be her own character, Doris, all grown up.

The not-so-good

The set pieces are done well and most of the characters are established enough early on to support their various storylines, but some of the plotlines jump around in ways that made me wonder if scenes were cut at the last minute and then not patched over.

Animosity between team-mates explodes for seemingly no reason. Decisions are made that don’t align with how a character has behaved for half the season. Even one of the core relationships within the show – and one that viewers naturally cheer – becomes a bit tiresome by the end, with each character becoming reactionary in ways that feel only just believable.

‘Love The Spinoff? Its future depends on your support. Become a member today.’

Madeleine Chapman
— Editor

Chapman’s storyline is necessary for a show being made today, but in order to not rewrite history, the creators were required to essentially make two shows: the Peaches, and Max Chapman. While the Peaches are trying to win a championship, Chapman is trying to play any game at all that will have her. It was probably the only way to do it but it does, at times, come at the detriment of the show as a whole to be operating with two leads, two sets of supporting talent, and effectively two worlds, all within the same town. As the show goes on (I hope it does), the sooner the two storylines can merge, the better.