Summary
Prime Target is excruciatingly dull in Episode 3 and only livens up towards the very end, which feels like too little too late.
Apple TV+’s Prime Target didn’t exactly get off to a rollicking start in a well-made but ultimately off-putting two-part premiere that introduced a deeply insufferable protagonist and then showed us a much more interesting version of the show that was about someone else. Episode 3, “The Sequence”, rids itself of the advantage of Taylah’s charisma and energy by saddling her with Ed, as the two of them are forced on the run together.
If it wasn’t for a late chase sequence it’d be remarkable how little happens in “The Sequence”. It’s a brutally tedious episode of television that spends all of its runtime on characters glacially figuring out something that the show’s plot synopsis already revealed ages ago. A dual timeline structure feels gimmicky, and the Baghdad-set subplot doesn’t have enough meat to it yet to get invested in – plus our POV character there is Andrea’s friend Charan, whom we’ve met, like, twice in passing.
Flashbacks Add Some Context About Safiya
Prime Target Episode 3 frequently revisits Cambridge in 1994, when Safiya was working on her prime pattern thesis. It’s a nice idea, but it feels pretty pointless considering we already know what happened to Safiya and can easily intuit why.
There’s a very early scene that deliberately juxtaposes sexy half-naked partying with intense frantic maths and it’s just delusional that anyone would make that correlation. It doesn’t matter to the plot at all, but it’s a stylistic flourish that speaks to a broader sense of self-satisfaction that this show has in spades. It’d be off-putting even if Ed wasn’t, but he is, so it annoys me twice.
Anyway, Safiya gets increasingly paranoid about her thesis, working on it obsessively and believing people are after her. Luckily, she starts recording little missives revealing the truth about what’s going on if the worst should come to pass, which of course it does, though the show is still being deliberately cagey about whether her suicide was really a murder. You’d expect so, but the way the discovery of her body is framed in a closing flashback doesn’t leave many potential avenues for a killing. Perhaps she just went mad.
Something’s Afoot in Baghdad
This bit scarcely warrants mentioning for now, but Charan is in Baghdad for all of five minutes before someone tells him that all is not what it seems. For now, we have no idea quite what’s afoot, but by my count, we’ve definitely had an implication that the explosion in the premiere was deliberate and that someone has a vested interest in keeping exploration of the chamber contained.
Charan starts noticing odd stuff immediately, but when he comments on it he’s asked to leave. Seemingly his only confidante, Hassan, also goes missing immediately after, and it seems like Charan is being surreptitiously observed too.
This is plenty mysterious, but again, who cares about Charan? We don’t even know this guy.
Sidse Babett Knudsen in Prime Target | Image via Apple TV+
Meet Cute
After briefly getting a shower at the pad of Cassis’s most eligible bachelor, Taylah steals his sporty car and races all the way to Cambridge to figure out why Ed’s research is going to get her killed.
This is perhaps just as well since Ed isn’t getting anywhere on his own. He and Osborne try to puzzle through the scraps of Safiya’s work that they have, but they can’t figure out why she seemingly amended her correct answers so they were no longer right. It’s Taylah’s sarcasm that inadvertently gives Ed a realization – the mysterious number pattern he has been trying to figure out is an ISBN number for Sophie Germain’s The Unsolved Riddle.
When Ed and Taylah check the hefty book out of the library, the latter finds a handwritten note stuffed in the inside cover (mustn’t be a popular read if nobody has found this thirty years on.) It’s from Safiya and gives some vague indications of what’s happening to her, but they don’t have time to finish reading it. Cambridge’s fire alarm goes off, which apparently never happens, and suddenly they’re being chased by a few goons.
Once Ed and Taylah are free, it’s once again Taylah who explains to Ed the significance of his research. All digital “locks” operate on the basis of random prime numbers. If there’s a pattern within those numbers, the implications for digital security are huge. Ed could have potentially stumbled on the skeleton key for the world’s entire digital infrastructure.
With this in mind, Ed and Taylah finally get to the end of the letter and find a folded summary of Safiya’s thesis and a torn flyer for the Kaplar Institute, who pitched Ed at the end of the previous episode and the start of Prime Target Episode 3, and whom Ed believes have been following him ever since. They might have even robbed him. And now it looks like he’s going to have to join up.
