SPOILER ALERT

My friend and I watched the final episode of "The Last Enemy" tonight - a five-part miniseries on PBS. It was entirely absorbing to watch, if much too long and drawn out. It was great to see Robert Carlyle again as he did his usual super job as a menacing (probably rogue) government gun-for-hire but most of the acting was cardboardish if not downright leaden.

The plot has been described as near-future fiction rather than science fiction because it starts from the five million surveillance cameras proliferated on the streets of London and other cities around the U.K. (one for every twelve residents, according to some). That amount of being watched is indeed horrible, unacceptable, beyond Orwellian stuff and if this movie helps to alert people enough to be sure to keep governments from going this far, then good for it. The fact that human inattentiveness and error would almost certainly prevent such eyes from working much of the time does not in any way mitigate the unacceptablenss, it just means that whatever does get done will not work as it is meant to.

My serious problem with the miniseries, however is that some plot lines were left dangling and the overall resolution was altogether lacking, unless my own i.q. points have fallen. Here are my questions for which I would be most grateful if any reader has answers and/or can make me feel less cheated. It's one thing to suspend disbelief because someone can hide, undetected, behind a door, and entirely another when things just do not make sense.

-- Why did they fake blow up Michael?
-- Why would it matter that Yasmin thought he was dead? Faking his death wasn't necessary to test his reaction to the "tag" and it seems like an awful lot of work to have gone through.

-- Why kill all those medical workers when they were supposedly looking for the doctor? Especially when it turned out in the end that he was working with them??!!

-- Why was Carlyle running his operation separately and seemingly in intense opposition and hiding from the government? Apparently he was working for - or with - James, Beasley and Harewood, given that they knew where his warehouse was and that he assisted James in that last scene with the Doctor, so that whole conceit seems utterly pointless.

-- Who was the black haired assassin? Who did he work for? What became of him?

-- At various moments, Stephen was highly aware of all the ways in which he was or could be watched - and yet at other times (as when he ran his assault on the Brompton hospital for blood samples), he was surprised that "they" knew where he was. As a savant who was so aware of what was going on, it seems completely nuts that he'd just forget about the cameras.

-- Why kill Michael? He's no longer any danger to T.I.A. or Project Tab since they can keep him out of England with his new tag. And, conversely, surely they should have killed Stephen since he knows everything and can join or even arouse resistance. It's not as if they were reluctant to knock off pretty much anyone.

-- Most importantly: who is the grand manipulator running James, Beasley and Harewood?

Labels: complaints, movies, tv