![]() "You've still got her blood on you." After a great stand-off with Lee in Arby's hospital room, it feels like Jessica actually ends up in a warmer, almost human place. "Piss on his bed!" Wilson is really a stickler for the Network playbook. It's hard to think of a UK show that's so full of loopy details or makes so much of an effort to try to do something different. If there was less of a sense of mystery and revelation this time round, because we'd uncovered the big conspiracy (in all its confusing, keep-up-at-the-back detail), there's still been so much to enjoy, from the performances to the styling, the use of locations like the Farnley Hey house or the North Yorkshire moors near Grassington, and the idea that the Network gave us Thatcher. It would be great to see more of Jessica's unorthodox childhood, and to know exactly how Christos knew who she was, and what his relationship with the Network was. I'd love to see them return to the 1970s again, or even move to the 1980s if we get another series. What did you make of this ending? Jessica, Ian, Becky, the Dugdales and Anton rounded up, Wilson running the Network with Leah, and only Arby left on the outside. He saves her – just in time for them all to be rounded up by Wilson's goon squad. Nothing more than a mild opiate, it turns out, which is why she's been tripping out with visions of the dead translator Marius. With just four days worth of Thoraxin pills left, Becky is desperate, looking for a dignified way out Ian remembers that they've been hanging out with Anton (aka a genius scientist) and asks him to try to figure out what she's been taking. Revenge was enough of a reason, after all. It's not the only showdown in the episode: Dugdale piles into Geoff in a field, Grant gets an earful from Mrs Dugdale (and then does the dishes all by himself) and Wilson chucks a spoon at Lee – before shooting him. "We're not killers"įor all his insistence that killing isn't an option, it's Ian who stops Terrence with a bullet, saving the world (for now) in a car park. He didn't get to keep his "shitty life" after all. After years of burger-flipping, Terrence is on a roll, dispatching another agent whose cover is a fishmonger (love the yellow kippers), chucking a radio into a bath (what kind of a sicko eats lemon curd in the tub?) and then pulling off an ingenious assassination by pouring petrol into a police cell to set Dobri Gorski on fire. ![]() In one of those scenes that Utopia does so well, Terrence really makes the most of his mission, menacing a mum who's trying to do her bit for the environment by taking the coach to Europe instead of flying. The secondary protocol is in place – release immediately – and the hunt is on to try and track down the chosen sleeper agent. "Nothing wastes carbon like a first world human" You just need the fear of a pandemic: a refined version of the idea, mutating, just like a virus. You don't need a pandemic to convince people to take the vaccine, he tells Michael. He's listened to the arguments, drunk the Network kool-aid, and now he's signing up wholesale, fully committed, as he carves the Chinese character for "rabbit" into his chest: a bloody signature on the Janus contract, just like the Assistant before him. With Milner gone, Wilson Wilson steps into her position - he's a true believer. We see how someone like Milner could dedicate their life to doing whatever is necessary to make it happen – a mixture of secret agent cool and years of heartbreak how a genius like Carvel/Anton could be driven mad by the idea and how it could keep spreading out, warping the lives of his children Jessica and Arby, and then infecting people like Ian, Becky, Grant and Wilson, drawn to the idea of a cool comic with its whacked-out paranoid vision of the world, and then finding their lives thrown off kilter by a reality that's far darker (or should that be brighter?). ![]() If the first series was about revealing the Network's ruthless plan, this second has had time to really milk the concept of global population control, to explore how and why they'd put it in motion. Somewhere in this final episode, I started to wonder if the real virus wasn't so much the Janus pathogen hidden in canisters in secret locations around the country, but the very idea of Janus itself.
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