A Review of 'Secret City' Season 2 Episode 2 - “The War Zone”

First off in this episode, we hear some more about the operation that went wrong in Pakistan. Meanwhile, our heroine Harriet (Anna Torv) is busy trying to find out where the classified document sent to Mina (Louisa Mignone) came from and tries to get help from signals analyst Thomas Maher (Aleks Mikic) who, this season, is giving off a smart Ben Whishaw vibe. He refuses to help at first, being a goody two shoes and then is persuaded to change his mind when Harriet gets Mina's husband, Sami (Robert Rabiah), to threaten him. This seemed a bit far-fetched, to be honest. Thomas could easily have simply have reported the incident and seen Harriet carted off back to jail. Most of the story in this show is admittedly preposterous, but still it tends to have a ring of truth to it, whereas this seems a bit contrived, since Sami didn’t really seem to like Harriet in episode 1.

Moving on, Harriet gets sent in Karen's place to visit the boy, Robbie Lambert (Frederick Banks du Rietz), who survived the bomb blast. He is in detention and tries to take her hostage. Robbie gets tasered and Harriet scurries off. For some reason she then tells Karen it all went well, a decision which of course comes back to haunt her. I am not sure why she thought it wouldn't.

The plot thickens.

Keeping busy as always, Harriet also carries out a nighttime break-in into Bailey's old office with Thomas remotely opening the doors in order to try to find the document, which of course cannot be found in the system. She does, however, stumble across some interesting phone records.

Harriet then ends up seducing the special ops hunk. I wasn't sure how much of an act she was pulling off to do this since she appeared to be pretending to be more drunk than she was (but what's the difference, anyway). However, having found an airplane ticket that put the guy in Adelaide and presumably at the bombsite, then having ascertained from the phone logs she saw in Bailey's office that the soldier was talking to Bailey directly, she runs away from the hotel room. This is a nice twist since a more predictable TV show would simply show her spending a night of softly lit passion with the hunk.

Meanwhile, the random runaway woman has turned up at General Lockwood’s house and he promptly calls the boys on her. What a great “dad” he is for her. So the hoped for renegade soldier enforcing justice plotline just hit a big snag. I suppose she could escape again, though.

Endgame

Overall, it’s been a fast paced episode and the end is pretty shocking. Harriet goes rogue in her usual style and ignores Karen's calls in order to visit the bombsite in Adelaide instead. Having spoken to the neighbours, with her unerring instinct for trouble, Harriet gets her hands on a film which clearly shows the bomb was not a bomb. It was actually a precision missile strike!

Thoughts and Predictions

Oh gosh, Catriona Bailey (Jacki Weaver) really is dead! Her funeral features in this episode. Or is it like Red 2 and she is merely going deep cover?

So presumably this drone strike was a tragic internal error rather than an attack by a foreign power, but who knows for sure at this stage?

And of course drones can be hacked. So who is pulling the strings? The Chinese? The Rabbit? Mr. Robot? It's all up in the air right now.

I am totally hooked for episode 3 and beyond.