SPOILER ALERT: This recap is for people watching The Little Drummer Girl on BBC One in the UK. Please do not add spoilers from the sixth and final episode. You can read previous recaps here.
Bait, not bombs: when Kurtz (Michael Shannon) was lobbying to get his superiors to buy into his theatrical scheme, he argued that, when it came to neutralising terror cells, infiltration could be a more effective counter-terrorism weapon than death from above. “Let us be surgeons this time, not butchers,” he implored. If his strategic advice won him a little operational latitude when recruitingCharlie (Florence Pugh), his bosses reverted to their old ways in this episode. After a terror cell bomb killed an Israeli journalist in Lyon, retaliatory air strikes were ordered on various camps in Lebanon – including the one where Charlie was deep undercover.
Despite these high stakes, which felt particularly emotional after seeing Charlie bond with the people she was essentially there to betray, this penultimate episode also managed to also feel a little loose, as if operating on the margins of control. With various plot threads rapidly converging ahead of next week’s finale, there were some unpredictable but not unenjoyable lurches in tone and even some proper old-school spy business involving wigs, codebreaking and the surreptitious swapping of identical briefcases. The standout, though, was an unexpected guest star last seen operating in Westeros, another far-flung realm notorious for its ruthless realpolitik.
Having seemingly passed muster with Khalil’s tough younger sister Fatmeh, Charlie was promptly ditched at a rough-and-ready Palestinian boot camp for foreign volunteer fighters. Park Chan-wook may be a visionary auteur with a stylised eye for colour and imaginative staging, but he also clearly appreciates the effectiveness of a good old-fashioned training montage. In short order, we saw Charlie in shapeless fatigues having rocket launcher basics thrashed into her while also learning the meatier points of hand-to-hand combat by getting chucked about by a gigantic wrestler.
For Kurtz and Becker (Alexander Skarsgård) in their London safe house, it was mostly a glum waiting game, tracking the slippery Swiss lawyer Anton as he toured the city and attempting to unravel the secret messages embedded in his handwritten postcards. After hearing news of the Lyon bombing – implied to be the work of another cell – Kurtz attempted to dissuade his higher-ups from targeting training camps in Lebanon just as Charlie, having proven herself among the foreigners, was upgraded to Fatmeh’s own settlement. There, she was welcomed as a “martyr’s widow” while her supposed revolutionary lover Salim was commemorated on screen-printed T-shirts. A defiant but joyous parade and party was cut lethally short by an air strike and although Park clearly had the budget to convincingly stage such a devastating assault, he chose a different path.
As the dust settled, Kurtz’s team belatedly made some progress. After their earlier success cracking Anton’s ASCII key code, they narrowed down the target of the next attack to England, a threat deemed plausible enough to touch base with the locals. If their star asset was recruited because she was a potential scene-stealer this week she faced some stiff competition from another Charlie: Charles Dance, guest-starring as senior UK military intelligence officer Commander Picton.
In a wonderful sidebar, veteran spooks Picton and Kurtz – again operating under a pseudonym – fenced and parried over intel and insight. While Picton’s aide-de-camp Meadows struggled to find a shred of useful background on Kurtz’s persons of interest, his boss seemed to intuit exactly what the Israeli spymaster was up to, even if he saved his more colourful turns of phrase – “I bet you’re chuffed to the bollocks with yourselves, aren’t you?” – for a non-official walkabout. There was also the slightly surreal sight of Picton recalling his own misadventures in the Middle East as a junior officer in 1947, a wily old fox literally pacing round a chicken coop.
Meanwhile, Becker’s dogged detective work had come up with a target (Professor Minkel, an Israeli lecturer), a venue (the “Polytechnic of Greater London”) and a date: 15 May, the anniversary of the outbreak of Arab-Israeli war in 1948. For once, Kurtz and his team were one step ahead of the bombers. They also monitored the return of the newly trained and battle-hardened Charlie to London, an asset now so focused on her mission that she knocked back the casual offer of a threesome with her local handler Helga and Rossino, the leftwing journalist with an unconvincing moustache.
Then there was the clever bait-and-switch. A day early, Charlie – in character as a campaigning South African student – approached Professor Menkel and distracted her while Rossino swapped her briefcase. For the hovering Becker and his team, the threat seemed imminent (and oddly similar to a key plot point from Bodyguard) but, after whisking away the suspect case, they discovered it was explosive-free. In all the misdirected potential bomb-defusing excitement, it was easy to forget that we still had not met the mastermind behind it all, until Charlie’s fateful van journey brought her abruptly face-to-face with the man she had been created to bring down. She managed a whispered “Khalil?” but the unstated question was surely: what now?
Park’s performance review
If director Park Chan-wook did not shy away from the terror and sudden violence of an air strike – with one poor girl literally vaporised before our eyes – he also accompanied it with an otherworldly fantasy sequence of sworn enemies Becker and the late Salim, both in military fatigues, walked up to each other and shaking hands, only for Salim to burst into flames. A waking nightmare, it seemed to be taking at least some inspiration from Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album cover, created by Storm Thorgerson.
Spy notes and observations
The messy business with “Comrade Abdul” – an out-of-his-depth American who seemed to be losing his marbles at boot camp – seemed to come out of nowhere and escalated so quickly that I would have gladly ditched him for more Charlie training montages.
If her acting to date has mostly been playing a radicalised version of herself, this week Charlie got to don wig, glasses and an Afrikaans accent as “Imogen Baastrup”, even if she ended up mostly looking like Lynda Day from Press Gang.
The Little Drummer Girl screened in the US in three double-bills last week. Highlights of the preview coverage included this thoughtful analysis of Pugh’s performance as Charlie plus Park Chan-wook discussing his use of vivid colours.
What did you make of Picton’s recollection of interrogating a young Israeli boy in 1947? Was it implied that it might have been a young Kurtz whom he battered but failed to break, therefore turning him into “a little drummer boy”?
“The pieces are falling into place,” muttered Kurtz when he heard Charlie was returning to London. With one episode to go, is that how you feel?
