Summary
Prime Target Episode 1 is a little burdened with exposition and an extremely unlikeable protagonist, but the plot has underlying potential.
If Good Will Hunting had a child with Enemy of the State, it might look a bit like Apple TV+’s Prime Target. But maybe that’s overselling things. The pacey energy of a real conspiracy thriller feels conspicuously absent in Episode 1, “A New Pattern”, which mostly idles around with perhaps the least likable protagonist in recent television history.
I’m not one who buys into the notion that all protagonists should be “likable”, to be fair; requiring someone to root for to enjoy a story is for children. But Edward Brooks is actively off-putting. I don’t just not like him, I actively dislike him, and that’s a bit of a barrier to entry considering the fate of his research into hidden patterns of prime numbers that might unravel the deepest secrets of the universe is of obviously principal importance.
“A New Pattern” Earns Some Goodwill with A Captivating Opening
Credit where it’s due, though – Prime Target has a brilliantly captivating cold open. In it, a woman in Baghdad and her cute daughter Amira are caught in the middle of what is later revealed – or claimed – to be a gas leak. It’s horrifying and frantic, which makes it a bit weird when the camera lingers a suspiciously long time on the pile of rubble that Amira and her mother end up buried under.
The rubble isn’t important; what we’re actually being shown is the room, a deep, hidden chamber that looks a bit like an observatory and apparently hasn’t been touched since the ninth century. Professor Andrea Lavin is later asked by Baghdad’s Department of Culture and Antiquities to consult on the discovery, which she believes is connected to Harun al-Rashid, the caliph of the Abbasid Caliphate, and the Bayt al-Hikmah, otherwise known as “The House of Wisdom”, the “Grand Library of Baghdad”, or, in Andrea’s words, “the greatest library ever created.”
It takes a while for us to realize how this might be of any relevance to the main thrust of Episode 1, which of course it is. But we need to talk about Ed first.
Ed Brooks Is Awful and We’re Stuck with Him
Edward Brooks is a Cambridge mathematician who is conducting some private research into prime numbers, which he believes contain the secrets to unraveling the DNA of the universe, although it takes almost the entire premiere for him to lay his theory out and it isn’t entirely clear even after he has done so. This is a bit of a problem with Prime Target in general. It’s dealing with mathematics so impossibly complex that a layman can’t understand them, so occasionally it has to stop to lay out concepts in incredibly simple, sometimes lecturing terms. It’s like reading a Dan Brown novel.
You see this all over the place, but especially as it relates to Baghdad, which is generally speaking the cradle of contemporary mathematics. But Prime Target clearly expects people not to know this, and to some extent not to believe it when they find out, so a distractingly big deal is made of how brilliant Arab mathematicians were. Just roll with it.
But Ed, man. He’s awful. He’s socially awkward to a fault, paying no mind whatsoever to his friend Fiona, who is clearly in love with him, and treating Adam, a college bartender he has a one-night stand with, despicably for no reason at all. He’s very attached to Professor Raymond Osborne, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, but mostly in the context of having to settle for what he believes to be a lesser professor – Robert Mallinder, who just so happens to be Andrea’s husband.
As a consequence of all this – and what’s implied to be a very strained relationship with his father and a touch of made-for-TV neurodivergence, depicted rather ham-fistedly – Ed sulks all the time. And I mean all the time. The only time we see him with a bit of pep in his step is when Robert – at Andrea’s urging – invites him for dinner to try and repair their relationship a little bit, and Andrea shows him some pictures of the Baghdad discovery.
Leo Woodall and David Morrissey in Prime Target | Image via Apple TV+
Both Core Plotlines Are Neatly Connected
Surprising nobody, Andrea’s summons to Baghdad is connected to Ed’s prime number theory, which is in turn connected to a few more things that will become increasingly clear both in this episode and the next one. Ed notices immediately that the domed ceiling of the chamber contains a number pattern that he tries to decode on the tablecloth, but he doesn’t have the time or space to work it all out.
The prime number theory visibly rattles Robert, though. When Ed explains it to him, he rejects it outright and aggressively warns Ed away from pursuing the research. He then burns the tablecloth Ed doodled on, destroys Ed’s research, leaves his wife, and disappears.
Prime Target Episode 1 makes it clear that Robert has some kind of pre-existing connection to this theory. He mentions offhandedly to Ed that prime numbers have already destroyed the life of one researcher, and after returning home he’s greeted by a message from some mysterious interlocutor asking him why he’s working on prime numbers again despite some kind of longstanding agreement.
The premiere also makes it clear that Robert is under surveillance, though doesn’t reveal who by, or whether those people are responsible for his death. But he is nonetheless found dead at the end of the episode, having apparently committed suicide. Something tells me that the quietly whirring CCTV camera looking right at his vehicle will have something to say about that.
