‘Secret City’ Episode 4 Recap: Conspiracy Theory

If there’s an upside to Peak TV, which is really nothing more than a savvy network executive’s synonym for “A Metric Shitload of TV,” it’s the average viewer’s increased chances of stumbling into casually lovely shots like these:

So kudos to director Emma Freeman and cinematographers Garry Phillips and Mark Wareham, Australian TV veterans all, for making this series so easy on the eyes, if nothing else. Fortunately, by its fourth episode (“Falling Hard”), Secret City is revealing itself to be something else indeed.

Caveat time: I’m still not hooked by the premise, at least not yet, though it’s easy to chart a path from the international-brinksmanship stuff it’s been doing to the anti-war, anti-surveillance agitprop it seems poised to become. And I still feel that as strong as some of the performances and characters are, they’re still secondary to the spy games; the best genre work, from the similarly themed The Americans to Netflix’s Italian crime drama Suburra: Blood on Rome, use revealing character as their plots’ primary purpose, rather than just allowing character to come through where the plot allows.

Still, it’d be churlish to deny that I’m now interested in seeing how things turn out for the individual humans caught up in the machinery of intrigue and stealth palace coups that’s been humming since the pilot episode. Chief among them, much to my surprise, is Defence Minister Mal Paxton. At first he just seemed like a lamprey-lipped phony, lying to protect his true paymasters in Beijing. But it seems clear now that this was misdirection, and he’s your basic tainted idealist, with all the human interest that entails. In this episode, centering on a mysterious cyberattack that shuts down Australian air traffic control, he straight up has a panic attack in the men’s room after the crisis passes because his teenage son is on one of the planes at risk of crashing. Can’t write a guy like that off as a one-dimensional nothing, even if you don’t particularly care for him no matter how many dimensions he has.

The contrast between actors Dan Wyllie as Mal and Sam Fraser as his son Dylan works well, too. Dylan’s as estranged from his dad as you’d expect the quasi-failson of a wealthy government official who sent him to boarding school hundreds of miles away to be. That this gets reflected in their physicality — Dylan is tall, lean, pale, thin-lipped, with bass in his voice; Mal feels napoleonic in dimensions and demeanor, with a big mouth, convex eyes, and a raspy tenor — is very smart casting indeed. So when they do bridge the gap, as when Dylan quietly insists on coming to work with his dad and Mal acquiesces, or when Mal gently ribs Dylan about his conspiracy-theorist, Walter White wannabe friends, or when Mal employs Dylan for a little surreptitious surveillance of one of the right-wing generals calling the shots in the government now that Mal himself has been marginalized, you feel it in a way you wouldn’t if they looked like two peas in a pod.

Of course, Dylan’s conspiracy-theorist friend turns out to have been correct about the cyberattack, and Mal realizes this quickly. (Another link to his son, even if Dylan will never know it.) The reason Attorney General Catriona Bailey was glad to have Mal in the situation room during the attacks wasn’t because she valued his input, it’s because she was happy his son was in danger, which might make him more pliant about the massive government spying and dissent-squashing program she wants to put in place. Mal also notices other “coincidences,” like the unexplained absence of technical staff who could have saved the day, and the unexplained presence of an American Coast Guard vessel that just so happened to be rerouted back to Australia just in time to save the day instead.

The final piece of that particular puzzle is Harry Dunkley. Quite unexpectedly, she gets a hot tip from Bailey herself that the airport delays being buzzed about on social media were the work of China. Dunkley breaks the story, thus saving her job, which was on the line thanks to her involvement in the SIM card fiasco last week. (Charges against her now-former boyfriend Felix will likely be dropped to spare the Australian intelligence community embarrassment, but no one will hesitate to come down hard on Harry.) But the resulting furor is exactly what Bailey, intel chief William Vaughn, General Ross McAuliffe, and American ambassador Brent Moreton (Mekhi Phifer!) need to convince Prime Minister Martin Toohey to go ahead and sign off on the Orwellian Safer Australia Agency. Chinese spies continue to chase her and her student sources throughout the episode, helping to cloud her view of the big picture until it’s too late.

But she shouldn’t be surprised. Secret City‘s premise is that when it comes to government chicanery, anything can happen…and usually does. In just this episode, the wife of the Chinese ambassador, who is herself both a spy and Paxton’s mistress, reveals that Sabine Hobbs can’t be repatriated to Australia in order to defuse the crisis…because she’s already in Australia, where as we saw last episode she’s being held prisoner by Australians! The episode ends with unknown assailants destroying Harry’s canoe, and quite nearly Harry herself, with sniper fire — attempting to murder a famous journalist who’d just broken a major national news story, in broad daylight, in the nation’s capital! Her panic after the attack is over is a mirror image of Paxton’s once his son was safe from harm, linking the two characters on an unconscious level — a strong final flourish.

The thing I keep thinking about while watching this show now is this: Secret City would be great for an American remake, with the governments of Russia or Israel or Saudi Arabia or any of the other foreign powers aiming firehoses of dirty money at the current regime standing in for China. But reality has clearly outpaced television. Secret City, a drama when it aired in 2016, feels more like a documentary from a slightly alternate reality in 2018.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Secret City Episode 4 ("Falling Hard") on Netflix