The Hunter Becomes ... Oh, I See What You Did There

In addition to the Chinese takeaway mentioned yesterday, Chrissi and I also sat down for a marathon TV watching session - catching up with the current BBC TV series Hunted. I'd kept meaning to watch it, but hadn't gotten around to it yet, which meant that there was four episodes on iPlayer to catch up with by the time we started.

Overall the show was entertaining enough and fun to watch, if taking increasing leaps of reality with each episode. Featuring operative Sam Hunter who works for shady private-spy business Byzantium, she has various unconvincing tasks to carry out on her mission while carrying out various unconvincing accents - all the while being stalked and hunted by enigmatic we-don't-quite-know-what-it-is-yet Hourglass (Is it a person? An organisation? A giant eggtimer?). Yes, they really did set up the character's name as Hunter and get her to be hunted.

Sam's task is seemingly to go through every grey hat in the BBC costume department, while sneaking about the house under the pretence of being the nanny to a child - offered this position because she saved his life (in an engineered setup by the rest of her Byzantium team) and saved kid said her name once. Between switching hats she heads to her flat and sneaks into her hidden room (only visible to every passenger on the train that passes by) to think deeply about who set her up and tried to have her killed a year before.

The rest of the team sit holed up in a building watching cameras of her operation, apart from when they take it in turns to wander off privately to shag various hangers-on. Occasionally they confront each other in a passive-aggressive manner, asking the other dramatically if they heard there was a mole in the team while studying them keenly for clues in their reaction. One manages to ingratiate himself with the gangster's friend merely by rolling a cigarette for him.

An illustration of the silliness so far is Sam's cross-London chase when her apparantly turbo-powered bicycle kept pace with (and occasionally has to wait for) gangster Jack Turner's Range Rover over a distance of several miles. After four episodes of seeing her casually kill people without much thought, she is then haplessly ambushed and collapses in a heap to an assault by Blank Face Man (his actual credited role) who may or may not work for or be or be in cahoots with the enigmatic Hourglass. We are left with the cliffhanger as to whether he was or was not successful with his kill attempt via his preferred method of inserting a syringe of poison through their eyeball.

So in the cold light of day it's remarkably silly, but I'll definitely be tuning in on Thursday for the next episode to see what happens next.