A star rating of 3 out of 5.
It has been so long since the first season of The Undeclared War aired, you’d be forgiven for assuming that it wasn’t coming back for a second.
Yet four years on, here we are – with Peter Kosminsky’s cyber thriller somewhat inexplicably now returning to Channel 4.
There was hardly a large fanbase clamouring for the show to make a comeback. Season one had very mixed reviews and hasn’t exactly made its way into the cultural consciousness. So one has to wonder whether it was Simon Pegg’s star power alone that nudged season two into existence. Especially since the star-wattage has been dialled down somewhat with neither Adrian Lester nor Mark Rylance reprising their roles.
Anyway, Pegg is back as GCHQ Director of Operations Danny Patrick; as is Hannah Khalique-Brown as Saara (even if she’s now more of a supporting player) and joining the cast is Blue Lights actor Siân Brooke as Danny’s wife – and colleague – Barbara.
At breakneck speed, we pick up right where season one ended (and although this may make sense from a story perspective, it means the show, which was originally set in the near future, now takes place in 2024). The residual carnage from the first season’s finale, which saw Britain on the brink of war with Russia, is mopped up. However as tensions cool, a new threat emerges, which moves the drama away from the Russia plotline.
And not all the threats are external. It soon comes to light that someone on the inside must have been working with the Russian Federal Security Service to facilitate their attack. And so a mole hunt inside GCHQ begins, right as the slimy new Foreign Secretary Richard Marston (Ed Stoppard) aims to take control by assigning a member of the military to Danny’s team to mark his homework.
And in her role as ‘Head of Rapid Response’, Lt Colonel Roz Cavendish (Chloe Pirrie) immediately implements a more aggressive approach to the encroaching threats, in a manner Danny worries could prove disastrous.
This season proves significantly stronger than its predecessor. The first run was an underwhelming slog, and for a programme so rooted in the digital world, it felt fundamentally old-fashioned; routinely speaking down to its audience when it came to technical jargon, and the use of Sherlock-style mind palace visuals to represent coding was particularly groan-worthy. It also kept promising excitement before reneging at the last opportunity and drowned in quagmires of needless exposition.
Thankfully, that is all now done away with. This time around, the series could barely even be described as a cyber thriller. Instead, it is built around political and personal arenas. Creators Kosminsky and Colin Callender return only as executive producers, with Das Boot’s Colin Teevan on writing duties. Now, the dialogue is sharper and more naturalistic; the individual stories more engaging and the tone is more consistent.
The decision to pull Danny to the forefront is also smart. Where the first run chose to use Saara as our entry point, with her first day on the job guiding us through GCHQ, now we cut to the heart of the action.
Pegg is on fine form here, but it’s newcomer Brooke who is doing the heavy lifting. Far from just playing the ‘wife’ role, she is given her own prominent storyline, and her performance runs the gamut of complex emotional turns. The series would have been substantially weaker without her.
In sanding down some of the edges, the show has lost some of its urgency – along with its sense of dread about the state of the world. Unwilling or uninterested in taking on more timely fears surrounding AI and deepfakes, the series has decided its job is no longer to keep you up at night, pondering nightmare scenarios. Instead, it is simply to entertain.
The Undeclared War may have lost some of its ambition, but it now feels like a drama that appreciates that no catastrophe is as compelling as one driven by intimate, human stories. The big question now is: can we expect season three to arrive circa 2030?
Read more: Simon Pegg reveals how The Undeclared War has taught him to spot social media bots
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