Summary
As expected, Prime Target‘s ending is dramatically inert, unsatisfying, and incomplete, setting up a second season that — surely! — nobody wants.
Prime Target has been impressively bad throughout, so I wasn’t expecting its ending to magically turn things around, but Episode 8 is rubbish even by the show’s own low standards. The character drama is laughable. The plot is uninteresting. The entire thing’s dramatically inert. Nothing comes across in the manner it’s obviously intended. This is the finale of a show that quite clearly misunderstood the assignment every step of the way.
But some stuff happens, of that there can be no doubt, and we’re kind of obligated to discuss that stuff, so we might as well do so. It’s also important to note that at least some of the stuff that happens is clearly in service of setting up a second season, which is a horrifying thought, but I digress. Here’s what went down in the Prime Target finale.
The Alderman Code
Like several of the previous episodes, “The Key” begins with a flashback, this one to Stanford in 1975. A much younger James Alderman is giving a lecture about public key cryptography — a method of encrypting data requiring two keys, one public and the other private — that is supposed to function like a villain origin story. But even by the end of the finale, it isn’t entirely clear what his endgame was.
What’s for certain is that, as he explains to Ed later, Alderman doesn’t love how his advances in this kind of digital security have been misused in obscuring all kinds of governmental misdemeanors. His pitch is essentially to use the completed prime finder to “send a message”, crashing Wall Street and engineering a societal soft reboot to teach the powers that be a lesson about how comfortable they’ve become and how quickly the fortress they’re hiding in can all come crashing down. Something like that, anyway.
Stephen Rea is really quite good here, but his character is profoundly underwritten and beyond an imperious sense of old-fashioned Englishness he doesn’t really have a great deal going on. And he’s not very intimidating, even to Ed, as we’ll see.
Taylah and Ed Go On the Offensive
After Osborne’s death in the penultimate episode, Ed is pretending to be really torn up about the loss, but unfortunately, he doesn’t tell his face so he just seems like he can’t be bothered. For once, though, Ed and Taylah decide to take the initiative and use the prime finder, which is now contained to Taylah’s phone, to take the fight to Axiorn.
Luckily, Ed’s friend Fiona — do you remember her from, like, the first episode? — just teleports back into the plot again so that she can walk in on Ed while he’s hiding out and be given an assignment to log into the college computer system so that Taylah can have some fun. With the college’s system as cover, she breaks into Axiorn’s database using the prime finder, sending Jane and Nield into a panic. Nield is able to backtrace where the breach is originating, but by the time Jane gets there, Taylah has already left. To add insult to injury she snaps a photo of Jane and immediately — I mean immediately, like two seconds — mocks it up into a fake scandalous headline about a high-ranking government official betraying her country.
Seeing the obvious threat here, Jane agrees to meet Taylah in the middle of nowhere and they have a really tedious go-nowhere argument about who’s right and who’s wrong when it’s really clear that the person authorizing off-the-books assassinations of innocent mathematicians is clearly wrong. But she does make some decent counterpoints about how Taylah isn’t that much better in how she has made Ed a fugitive. Although, to be fair, if she hadn’t done that he’d be dead.
Quintessa Swindell in Prime Target | Image via Apple TV+
Into the Lion’s Den
While this is going on, Ed goes to see Andrea and tells her about Axiorn, hopefully delivering some of that closure she said she was looking for about Robert’s death. And credit where it’s due, Ed does show just a tiny bit of warmth here, enough that you could almost believe he was a functioning human being with real emotions. Almost.
Alderman just so happens to call Andrea at that very moment looking for Ed, and she rats him out immediately, still none the wiser about the Master in College’s dark ulterior motives. As Ed saunters straight into the lion’s den, though, she does eventually figure it out when she runs into Akram, who reveals his daughter has received a Cambridge scholarship despite there previously not being any available. Only one man has the authority to pull those kinds of strings.
This is where Alderman tries to explain his motivations to Ed, playing nice to trick him into using the prime finder to Alderman’s ends, but even Ed sees through his ends-justify-the-means rhetoric eventually. This is supposed to be the culmination of Ed’s character arc, the point where he stops viewing the prime finder as “pure mathematics” and realizes that its implications have serious moral weight, that there are people, like Alderman, who would do all kinds of heinous things to control it. So, Ed shoots him in the head.
Please Tell Me It’s Over
I mentioned at the top that some of Prime Target‘s ending seems designed to set up a second season, and most of that stuff emerges at the very end. Enough is left unresolved that the show certainly could continue, but I can’t imagine very many people wanting it to.
Either way, following Ed turning suddenly murderous, Taylah spirits him away and decides to turn herself in to give him a chance to flee with the prime finder. They’re still fugitives, after all, and Taylah still feels like she should be made to pay for causing her lover’s death. This is her way to atone for that. It’s deeply unsatisfying.
But Ed nonetheless goes free. Episode 8 of Prime Target ends with the NSA giving a press conference announcing they’re opening an investigation into corruption that will be conducted by none other than Andrew Carter. Ed, who now wears his hood up so you know he means business, gawps into Andrew’s eyes through the screens in Trafalgar Square — I think? — and pushes the button on the prime finder. What’s he hacking into? What’s he shutting down? Who knows.
Honestly, though, who cares?
