As before, writer Ben Chanan proves good at giving us shocking scenes where deepfake videos and audio are used both to conceal what's really happening from security cameras and police radios and to replace broadcast video, totally twisting the content of a political interview. This seems to be intended to ruin rising political star Isaac Turner's career - though in reality things are far more complex.
We get the same state actors - MI5, CIA and SO15 - as in the previous season, plus Truro Analytics (surely not a name that is supposed to bring Cambridge Analytica to mind?), a political media manipulation agency.
Apart from a rather saggy fourth episode, Chanan keeps up the pressure and makes this a very engaging thriller that has significantly more at stake than the first season. Featuring as it does a government minister, the stakes are higher and the addition of the diva Newsnight presenter Khadija Khan (as before, hardly any of the characters are likeable) is a brilliant move.
It was, without doubt, my favourite TV watching of the last few months. In terms of its political message, I just wish it had explored the shades of grey more. The central technology to do those deepfakes, Correction, was being used by the government to manufacture evidence where they had good intelligence that there was terrorist activity, but not evidence that could be used in court. This is clearly the start of a very slippery slope (as this season shows) - but when the MI5/police operative DSu Gemma Garland is trying to sell it to our heroine DCI Rachel Carey, she just says what they are doing and why, which isn't convincing.
It would have been much more interesting to produce a hierarchy of moral/ethical decisions. Would Carey support killing terrorists in a war? Assassinating terrorist leaders (e.g. Osama bin Laden)? Police shooting to kill where it's necessary to preserve lives? Security services shooting to kill when it's necessary to preserve lives? Faking evidence to convict terrorists where there is clear evidence such as phone taps that can't be used in court for some reason? I'm not saying Correction is a good idea - but rather that knowing exactly where to draw the line is genuinely difficult decision.
However, that sort of moral consideration is perhaps too much to expect from a fast-paced thriller. The fact remains, this was excellent TV.
I'm going to finish off by pulling apart the last episode in some detail, as this is where the credibility issues that did irritate me loom large, so don't read on unless you've watched it all or don't care about spoilers.
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For me, there was a feel of desperation about the final episode, as a sort of happy ending was shoehorned in at high speed - and it also left a lot unexplained. One problem was trivial - the head of Truro Analytics, Gregory Knox was seriously beaten up by Carey in the process of arresting him - but in all shots after this he didn't have a bruise on him. But the bigger problem was the way the denouement worked.
The show ends with an interview between the Newsnight presenter Khadija Khan and Isaac Turner - but Turner pulls out and the interview goes ahead with a deepfake of Turner being interviewed (with Khan's compliance), which is then used to unveil Correction to the world when Turner is shown to be actually in Piccadilly Circus, not in the studio.
One oddity here is that Turner is not in on the trick - so what would have happened if he hadn't pulled out of the interview? Of course, the whole thing could have then been a deepfake, but they couldn't do the reveal in Piccadilly Circus.
A second problem, once it's all explained is the incredible ability of Truro Analytics, which goes far beyond anything even vaguely feasible. The very premise that somehow you can improve someone's ratings by showing different aspects of them to key target audiences is fine on social media, but doesn't work on broadcast media. But also, it seems highly unlikely that Knox's company, which was no Google or Apple, could both do the social media manipulation and create perfect deepfakes in real time. Most painful was the company's ability to do full blown psychohistory - predicting what will happen down to the behaviour of individuals. This shows a total lack of understanding of chaotic systems.
And finally there's the big finish. The fake interview is taken over by replacing a huge chunk of the fake Turner's script. Carey is shown to be introducing the change with a click of the mouse. But we have been following her pretty well in real time, and at no point did she have the chance to write this script or somehow insert it into the system. What's more, once it is in play, it is somehow locked in - yet in an earlier scene they showed how easy it would be to edit the script on the fly - where has this ability to lock it in come from?
This didn't entirely ruin the ending - we did get our 'goodies triumph over the nasty intelligence people' moment. But it left it feeling a bit contrived.
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