‘Secret City’ Episode 6 Recap: My Idols Are Dead and My Enemies Are in Power

The fate of Canberra, the Secret City, has been decided. And for some of the players in this complex game, that fate is grim.

Take Weng Meigui, for example. Wife of the Chinese ambassador, mistress of the Australian Defence Minister, secretly a high-powered operative of the Chinese intelligence service MSS, she overplays her hand by relaying the identity of the new Defence Force Chief — selected by her lover Mal Paxton and approved by Prime Minister Toohey — to her bosses in Beijing, who in turn pass the info on to their catspaw, Attorney General Catriona Bailey. In theory, this gives Bailey time to concoct a way to discredit the appointee and implicate her in a conspiracy with Paxton to create the “false” story that Sabine Hobbs had been held prisoner in-country. Typical honeytrap stuff.

But in practice, it was all a ruse by Paxton using a burner cellphone in the apartment he and Weng share for their assignations; he never actually made the recommendation, and the Prime Minister certainly never signed off on it. By falling into Paxton’s trap, Bailey looks like a fool, as well as more than a little bent, while Weng reveals her identity as a rat to her lover, who gives her the boot, and looks incompetent to MSS, who call her back home to China but kill her before she ever gets there. She learns her fate the old-fashioned way: Her car to the airport pulls over, her driver gets out, and the murderous MSS enforcer Zheng gets in. It’s a strong sequence of events, with easy-to-clock cloak-and-dagger maneuvers and a denouement straight out of a gangster movie.

I spelled all that out in part because the other major revelation that takes place this episode — the revelation of the entire series, in fact — is harder to follow.

This final hour charts the final days of Harry Dunkley’s career as a journalist, a career she willingly torpedoes when she breaks the law in order to break the news that the Chinese government has been disappearing dissidents on Australian soil with impunity. Meanwhile, she discovers that the murdered Aussie student “Max Dalgetty” was in fact an Australian intelligence agent — if not an agent of the CIA itself, since he trained at Langley in the States.

Once Harry tricks her paper’s website into publishing the story, the clock starts ticking. Operating under the assumption that both Dalgetty and her ex, Kim, were murdered by Australians rather than the Chinese, Harry tries to ID the killer by playing Sabine Hobbs a recording of ASD head William Vaughn giving a speech in Mandarin, in hopes that Sabine will recognize his voice as the one she heard when she was transferred to Australia while still being told she was in China. Harry’s cop friend Sean Brimmer, meanwhile, tracks down the motel room where Kim holed up to decrypt the SIM card Dalgetty died to protect, and discovers a laptop she stashed away before fleeing and getting killed. Simultaneously, they learn that the Aussie operative who oversaw Sabine’s imprisonment, and was thus Kim’s killer…is Kim’s boyfriend, and now Harry‘s boyfriend, ASIO agent Charles Dancer. Only quick thinking by Harry and Bremmer, who shoots Dancer in the head as he corners Harry in the same remote stretch of woods where Kim died, saves her life.

But it’s a twist too far, for obvious reasons: Dancer has saved Harry’s life, or at the very least had the chance to kill her and not taken it, at least as many times as he supposedly has tried to do her in. Harry accuses him of both the sniper attack that nearly drowned her a couple episodes ago, and of orchestrating the break-in and staged suicide that nearly killed her earlier in this episode — a staged suicide Dancer himself hurried over to prevent! Why would he do that, or shepherd her around Canberra when half the world is hunting for her, if he’s the big bad guy? There’s even reason to believe, given the contrast between the viciousness of his assault on Kim (seen in cross-cut flashbacks) and his chase of Harry, not to mention his expressed reluctance to kill her when he’s ordered to do so by Caitriona Bailey’s ASIO Director-General ally Paul Wheeler, that he didn’t plan to kill her even now. He’s too aggressive if he’s trying to avoid harming Harry, and not aggressive enough if he is. It’s a poorly motivated mess of an ending, especially for a show for which a firm grip on its characters was secretly the saving grace.

But then it’s not an ending, is it? Secret City Season 2 has recently been announced, and this season leaves plenty of loose ends flapping in the Canberra breeze. Harry’s in prison for her “crimes,” and Paxton is paying her legal defense, a classic “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” maneuver, as they both describe it.

Paxton himself, meanwhile, is in an open-air prison of his own. He’s been boxed in by Bailey, whom he knows is a Chinese asset but who’s got leverage over him in the form of copious photos of his meetings with Weng. If it comes to a he-said-she-said situation, Catriona’s rabidly pro-American, anti-Chinese public persona gives her far more cover than Mal’s own left-wing, detente-driven approach to the issue. Thus the authoritarians in both Washington and Beijing are calling the shots in the increasingly authoritarian Canberra, while Paxton can only play along.

The episode ends with Mal visiting Harry in prison, as they begin their first friendly conversation…ever, I assume. That’s an enormously tantalizing note to end on. Yet I can’t help but wish it really was the end. I know that political thrillers tend to be endlessly iterative, and detectives and spies are as franchiseable as superheroes. But Secret City already started stumbling over itself here in the end, and now we know it’s done so without the satisfaction of a self-contained story to compensate for it.

No one’s going to complain about seeing more Anna Torv, a natural-born leading actor for this sort of story, that’s for sure. There’s a throwaway moment in this episode, when she has a tension-breaking laugh about Brimmer’s target-shooting prowess in which she jokes she’ll safe as long as all their attackers are made of paper, that’s as human and incisive as anything you’re likely to see in a genre work this year. But Torv, and Harry, deserved a conclusion as well-drawn and decisive as Harry herself. I wish they’d gotten it.

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 6 ("The Light On The Hill") on Netflix