‘Prime Target’ Episode 5 Recap – Who’d Have Thought A Show About Math Could Be This Dumb?

If nothing else, Prime Target has a sense of irony about it. The Apple TV+ “thriller” has been dumb from the beginning, but it is perhaps the most stupid in Episode 5, “House of Wisdom”, which is the closest Season 1 has come to a joke. It’s not a particularly funny one, but I suppose it’s the thought that counts.

Unusually, though, it’s Taylah who is particularly stupid here, which is a shame since she has reliably been the best character. After our introduction to her boss, Jane Torres, we know something that Taylah doesn’t — that Jane is corrupt, or at least knows more than she’s letting on, and is in cahoots with the nakedly sinister Andrew Carter. This makes it particularly aggravating that it takes Taylah most of the episode to figure out what’s going on.

Fairly Godmother

There’s a brief flashback to 2019 at the start of Prime Target Episode 5 which reveals Taylah and Jane’s relationship goes back ages, to the former’s childhood, and that Jane was something of a lifeline to her in a time of personal crisis. As she later explains to Ed, she was driving a motorcycle that led to the death of the “person she loved”, and Jane, as her godmother, helped to coach her through it, bringing her into the NSA so she could make something of herself.

This goes some way towards explaining why Taylah struggles to accept Jane can’t be trusted, despite how obvious it is. As far as she’s concerned, Jane is looking out for her like always, and her claims that Syracuse has been compromised and Taylah is the only person she can trust about it — that old chestnut — puts her at ease. We aren’t given any more explanation about Taylah’s personal trauma; perhaps it’ll come up again later.

When Jane authorizes Kasim to eliminate Ed, though, she calls Taylah to tell her to allow him to meet Andrea on his own. It’s so obvious what’s going on that it beggars belief Taylah doesn’t spot it, but she later puts two and two together when Kasim is intercepted and murdered by a Serbian mercenary, and Taylah finds his earpiece, which still has Jane’s voice coming through it, asking him if he has managed to take out Ed yet.

Question: Does anyone in the intelligence community communicate like this during live missions? Just openly using everyone’s actual names and asking outright if they’ve murdered people yet? The NSA is surprisingly trusting in their security encryption given they’re in the midst of a leak.

Ed Finally Gets Checked About His Personality

I have been complaining about Ed since the premiere, but I was honestly starting to believe that I was the only one who had realized how awful he is, since nobody else bothered to mention it. Luckily, Taylah does in “House of Wisdom”, which I definitely appreciated.

Ed is totally unsympathetic about telling Andrea that Robert’s death wasn’t an accident; he’s just frustrated she won’t grant him access to the House of Wisdom, despite the fact she is not only learning that the love of her life was killed but also that the U.S. government had been spying on the pair of them for years. He’s utterly blase about Taylah’s tragic backstory, too, which is largely what she calls him out about. But some plangent music plays in the background while he confesses to knowing he’s “not like other people”, so Taylah just gives him a shrugging “fair enough” and they both get on with it.

Prime Target has no idea what it’s doing with any of its characters at this point. They’re just going through the motions for the sake of it.

Ali Suliman in Prime Target | Image via Apple TV+

Someone Else Is After the Prime Finder

Kasim’s counter-assassination proves to the NSA that someone else knows about the prime finder that Ed is working on and clearly doesn’t want him killed before he can create it. But they have no idea whether it’s an independent entity or a foreign government, which is a bit of a pickle.

Andrew’s solution to this is to allow Ed to complete his work under the “protection” of the NSA — via Taylah — and then control “the weapon” from there. This is apparently something that he and Jane have been working on for years, almost entirely in secret, so they’re taking it very seriously, but the success of the plan depends on Taylah being trustworthy, which as we now know she isn’t going to be.

Whoever killed Kasim is also most probably responsible for the explosion that uncovered the House of Wisdom, which it’s becoming increasingly obvious was intentional.

Missing Pieces

Eventually, Andrea allows Ed entry into the House of Wisdom, where she translates some of the writings that Ed can magically turn into algebra. This entire exchange is so comically vague that it’s really obvious the show has no idea what it’s doing, and that very much comes through for the audience.

But there’s a hiccup — water erosion has made a section of the text illegible, and without it, Ed can’t complete the work. Since there’s evidence French archeologists accessed the site hundreds of years prior, Andrea theorizes they may have made physical copies of their findings in the form of traces and rubbings. They’re able to track one down to France, which is where the gang is heading next.

As Prime Target Episode 5 comes to an end, Taylah makes it very obvious to Jane that she knows she sent Kasim to kill Ed, and Jane scrubs through the CCTV footage from Baghdad that shows Taylah discovering Kasim’s body and picking up his earpiece. So they both now know that the other knows they know, which is probably as dramatically complex as this show is ever going to get.