Prime Target, the mathematical thriller with Leo Woodall is half a missed opportunity
From January 22nd, with the first two episodes out of eight in total, Target, a British-American miniseries of the thriller genre (therefore there will not be a season 2), will be released on Apple TV+ Prime. The word “prime” in the title is not a reference to Amazon’s streaming platform, but a play on words between “prime objective” and “prime number objective”, because the protagonist Leo Woodall, known for One Day (again a numerical reference) on Netflix, he plays the role of a brilliant young mathematician. But, to stay in the mathematical field, Prime Target is half a missed opportunity: before explaining why, here is the spoiler-free summary of the plot. Without spoilers compared to the trailer that you can find at the bottom of the review, at least.
What Prime Target is about
The series begins by showing us a mother and daughter walking through the streets of Baghdad, but don’t get too attached, because it only serves to show us an explosion that reveals an ancient room underground, about which we won’t reveal any further.
Instead we move to Cambridge, where we meet Edward Brooks as he does, for the only time in the entire series, something very Cambridge: rowing. Ed is not a sportsman, he is a PhD student in mathematics and is such a brilliant mind that he is bored by the new mathematics professor who replaces the one he considers his true teacher, suffering from Alzheimer’s.
The new professor, Robert Mallinder, is instead very fascinated by Ed’s genius, and at the suggestion of his archaeologist wife decides to get to know him better and ask him to tell him the theorem he is working on. But when Ed reveals that his plan is to look for a pattern in the prime numbers, Professor Mallinder urges him to abandon it immediately.
Too late, because Edward Brooks’ research attracts the attention of prying eyes and ears, sparking a manhunt and the formula that could shock the world. Helping Ed will be Taylah, an American NSA agent in charge of surveilling mathematicians, but Ed will have to learn that he can’t completely trust even himself.
Prime Target wastes a great premise with a complex but unoriginal plot
As shamefully ignorant of numbers as we unfortunately are, we hoped that Apple TV+ would offer us with Prime Target the possibility of filling some of our gaps, showing us some applied mathematical formula, or in short some almost magical calculation in our algebraically limited eyes.
Instead, all the mathematics of this series consists of explanations seen in the trailer that prime numbers are the basis of digital cryptography, and in scenes with Leo Woodall writing incomprehensible numbers and symbols on notebooks, blackboards, walls and other surfaces.
Prime Target is not a bad series in an absolute sense: it keeps the tension high, intelligently mixes twists and turning points, fascinates with its Middle Eastern stories from the invention of zero to today, and the protagonist is a nice character, for how sometimes he seems a bit naive for a genius when he answers the questions of the most shady characters without thinking (or is he the classic genius who is a bit ditzy?).
In the end, however, this phantom lethal weapon of prime numbers becomes just a MacGuffin, a narrative tool to move the story forward but which in itself adds nothing. And so Prime Target is just a very complex thriller series (perhaps too much, for a series that releases one episode a week), well directed and well acted, but no different from many other manhunts and fights between bad guys and bad guys which we have seen many times on the screen. We would have preferred to see a few more numbers, literally.
PS: We are instead decidedly more knowledgeable in the study of etymology, and although the word “mafia” does not make linguists agree on its origin, it certainly has nothing to do with the expression “don’t touch my daughter” of which a character from this series speaks.
Rating: 6.6