Summary
Prime Target isn’t just boring in Episode 4, which would be expected – it also treats the audience like we’re complete morons.
With a remarkable lack of self-awareness, Apple TV+’s impressively boring thriller Prime Target bases Episode 4, “Kaplar”, around a twist so laughably obvious that when it was eventually deployed as a last-minute cliffhanger, I laughed out loud. How ironic that this show about ostensibly clever people thinks we’re all complete idiots.
If you thought the previous episode was boring, you haven’t seen anything yet. With Ed and Taylah having turned up a lead pointing them directly from Safiya to the Kaplar Institute, here we see Ed trying to infiltrate the place and making a pig’s ear of it, Andrea heading out to Baghdad to find out what happened to Charan, and Taylah offering information so readily to her boss, Jane Torres, that you’d quite easily believe she’s not in the midst of what is quite obviously a global intelligence conspiracy.
Andrea Visits the House of Wisdom
We’ll start with Andrea, not that there’s much to recount, because the Baghdad subplot is remarkably thin and mysterious despite obviously being connected to the overarching plot in significant ways. Charan had a mare there in the previous episode, and Andrea arrives in the immediate aftermath of him being stabbed to death outside a gay bar in what is being disguised as a hate crime despite clearly being an assassination.
Andrea doesn’t know this, though, so she takes Akram’s insistence that he’s ill at face value so she can take a tour of the gobsmacking House of Wisdom, which tickles her intellectual curiosity enough that Charan’s mysterious absence gets put on the back burner. It isn’t until she later returns to her hotel that she’s informed Charan has been murdered.
Akram plays dumb about it and suggests Andrea gets a flight back home because the one-two punch of losing her husband and then her friend is a lot to be dealing with. It probably says a lot about Prime Target that I’m not entirely sure how much it expects us to trust Akram and to what extent it expects us to believe that Charan’s death was a random hate crime. Needless to say, we don’t trust Akram or believe in the cover story at all, not one jot, and you’d think that would be obvious.
Ed Is the Worst Undercover Agent Imaginable
I’ve thought about it, and I can safely say that Ed Brooks is the worst possible candidate to infiltrate a secretive mathematics institute. He’s so stubborn and abrasive that he can’t keep up appearances for even a minute without drawing attention to himself. But the truth about what connects his work to Safiya’s, and prime number theory to the House of Wisdom and the NSA, is clearly squirreled away in the institute’s comprehensive digital archives, so him playing double agent – as he discovers Mallinder was doing for three decades – is the only option.
Just watching Ed snoop around and interact with people is actively irritating. His cover story of working on algebraic number theory isn’t well thought-out, his interactions with everyone are painfully insincere, he looks up sensitive topics really obviously, and he just has so few redeeming qualities that it beggars belief anyone thought it would be a good idea to build a show around him.
This is perhaps why Ed’s relationship with Adam rings false. It’s clear that the version of Ed who threw him out of this dorm after their one-night stand is his default setting, so any extent to which he softens feels like a transparent ploy to make Adam’s eventual betrayal – convincing him to turn his smartphone back on? Come on, dude – more painful. But painful to whom? At this point, nobody cares.
Ali Suliman and Sidse Babett Knudsen in Prime Target | Image via Apple TV+
Black Hat
With all of Kaplar’s secrets on their database, designed by a private security firm in cahoots with the U.S. government, all that’s required to break in is a tech expert with access to U.S. intelligence, which luckily Ed has to hand. Isn’t that fortunate?
The database reveals that the NSA’s Syracuse data – that’s the project designed to monitor prominent mathematicians – is being leaked from within, but it also contains pretty intense information about people who have looked too closely into prime numbers, including Safiya and Ed, whose bio includes some rather personal dalliances with Adam. A mathematics institute backed by a private security firm keeping what is quite clearly kompromat on anyone who researches a particular subject? How very thriller.
Ed copies the data to an external hard drive and legs it, with he and Taylah now bound for Baghdad, which seems to be where all of this conspiracism overlaps. And the NSA is well aware of this because the entire time Taylah has been feeding everything back to her direct superior, Jane Torres.
Sleeping with the Enemy
It’s painfully obvious that Jane is up to no good the second Taylah starts revealing stuff about her discoveries, and it’s ridiculous that Taylah wouldn’t have been cautious to share her precise location and planned movements with someone in the agency given how quickly they were compromised in Cassis. Nevertheless, she does.
Taylah and Jane presumably have a closer-than-usual working relationship; there’s a mentor-mentee vibe that implies a personal connection, which would go some way to explaining why Taylah would trust her so readily, but I’m still not buying it. Given the obvious connection between Kaplar and the NSA and the fact that everyone who looks into prime numbers ends up dead, Taylah should know better.
Prime Target Episode 4 ends with the confirmation that Jane isn’t to be trusted, since she’s now worrying that Taylah is “further ahead than she thought” and has uncovered the truth about someone within Syracuse leaking its information outside of the NSA. Since Taylah has revealed exactly where she and Ed are going, it looks like Baghdad has suddenly become more dangerous than ever.
