7 /10 1 Votes
Written by Peter Berry Composer(s) Magnus Fiennes First episode date 17 February 2008 | 7.1/10 IMDb Directed by Iain B. MacDonald Country of origin United Kingdom Final episode date 16 March 2008 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Genre Drama
Thriller
Science fiction
Adventure
Mystery Starring Benedict Cumberbatch
Anamaria Marinca
Max Beesley
Robert Carlyle
Eva Birthistle
Geraldine James
Chipo Chung
Tom Fisher
James Lance
San Shella
David Harewood
Christopher Fulford
Paul Higgins
Nick Sidi Nominations Satellite Award for Best Actor – Miniseries or Television Film, Satellite Award for Best Miniseries Cast Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Carlyle, Anamaria Marinca, Max Beesley, Eva Birthistle | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Last Enemy is a 5-part BBC television drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch and featuring Robert Carlyle and Max Beesley. It first aired on 17 February 2008.
Contents
Plot
Set in a recognizable but vaguely near-future London beset by terrorism and illegal immigration, it features the introduction of "TIA" (Total Information Awareness), a centralised database that can be used to track and monitor anybody, effectively by putting all available government and corporate – i.e. credit card and bank activity, phone use, internet use, purchases, rentals, etc. – information in one place. The script-writers borrowed the term from the US Department of Defense and exonerated convict Admiral John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness system that he set up in the DoD. The outcry in the US forced the shutdown of Poindexter's operation, under that name, at least, and the name migrated to England and The Last Enemy.
The story deals with a political cover-up centred on a sanctioned but secret medical experiment run amok with key members of the government trying desperately to hide all evidence of their experimental batch of vaccine that seems to be causing a deadly virus. The complex story unspools to reveal the moral, social and privacy concerns of this hypothetical TIA system in a post-7/7 world, including such control mechanisms familiar to both real life and science fiction as retinal scans, fingerprint identification and ubiquitous camera and cellphone surveillance footage.
The story is told through the eyes of a mathematical genius, Stephen Ezard, who is portrayed as a recluse showing some signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder. But the shy genius, played by Cumberbatch with many pre-echoes of his later, celebrated Sherlock Holmes' brittle reclusive, overcomes his own inhibitions to burrow into a highly compromised British government using his brilliance and their TIA system only to find himself ultimately trapped by the people he most trusts, and to learn he is a pawn in manipulative Security State machinations which take the people he most loves from him and compromise him forever.