Capture Review – This thrilling return of the deepfake conspiracy thriller is packed with truly outrageous twists | television

toLast month, The Guardian reported on a police arrest in Southampton. Automated facial recognition software has identified the likely perpetrator of a robbery 100 miles away in Milton Keynes; The cops had a photo of the thief, and now they’ve found a match. The problem was not only that the arrested man was not the real culprit, but that apart from being of South Asian descent, the two men did not look alike. Only one had a beard, and they were noticeably different in age. The algorithm cannot be trusted.

Fans of the BBC’s brilliant thriller The Capture may have read the story and let out a dry chuckle. Although it deals with problems bigger than one unfortunate man spending unfair time in a dungeon, the drama exists in a world plagued by murky internet systems and unreliable digital images. Every day there’s something in our modern reality that chimes with that, whether it’s dodgy data companies getting government contracts or AI videos of five-legged dogs taking over your mom’s Instagram. It’s the perfect time for The Capture to return.

Previously on The Capture… Season 1: CCTV on a London street clearly showed a man committing a crime that we knew he didn’t actually commit. Senior Metropolitan Police pilot Rachel Curry (Holliday Grainger), a sassy loner who thinks quickly and questions everything, discovers the existence of a practice called “correction” that uses deepfakes to bypass due process and criminalize those deemed enemies of the state. Carrie saw how dirty SO15, the elite counter-terrorism unit of the Metropolitan Police, was, but in a clear admission that its dark power could not be defeated, he ended up agreeing to work there. Season 2: The most terrifying deepfakes are deployed to fake entire live TV interviews with government minister Isaac Turner (Baba Essiedu), as part of a grand scheme to manipulate voters. Carrey, who has been on a long undercover operation the whole time, teams up with Newsnight presenter Khadija Khan (Indira Varma) to inform the public about the “correction” and expose SO15’s collusion.

It’s now a year later. Ishaq is the Interior Minister and is aspiring to be Prime Minister. Khadija is still strutting around the Newsnight studio, railing against the idiocy of BBC executives and acting as a conduit for the script’s sly gags about the media: “I’ll agree to feature these people on the podcast!” With her old superiors disgraced, Rachel becomes Acting Commander Curry and runs SO15.

In the post-correction era, where citizens are aware that videos can be faked, and even live images are not necessarily what they seem, Curry’s call is not to use correction, but to lead the fight against it. Scene 1: A new device known as the “Carry Camera” thwarts a Russian black ops agent who arrives at Heathrow Airport armed with a smartphone gadget that makes the airport security cameras, in real time, see a face that is not his own. But one of those cameras is a Curry camera with two lenses, one of which is offline. It cannot be accessed remotely. The intruder was detected and repelled.

A good conspiracy thriller is always several steps ahead, leaving us running to catch up. The Capture does it the old-fashioned way with its plot, giving us twists that are too quick to predict and a wide array of interesting characters whose agendas are expertly orchestrated by writer Ben Chanan: If this person here isn’t up to something, this person over there is. (By the way, Channan wrote every episode of The Capture himself and directed the first season as well, though his resume prior to this show was fairly limited. That’s a pretty impressive feat for a lone human, if he’s really just a guy and not a frighteningly advanced robot.)

But The Capture also has to keep pushing forward with its real-world context, and double down on its visions of techno-horror. It started with a simple warning about deepfakes, then augmented that with ideas about how machines that collect data could, on a large enough scale, understand the world better than humans. What’s next? In the Season 3 opener, there are moments when Curry and his teammates look back at the videos that lie to them; An admittedly brilliant scene, where the villain on the loose is not only armed, but stationed everywhere, as he has hacked into the building’s security camera, is a scene we’ve seen before.

No need to worry. The episode ends with some truly awful surprises that heighten our terror of an inability to believe our own lying eyes, and the traditional plot-thrilling feeling of being outmaneuvered by the stubborn hero, Carrie. Capture’s dystopia is still one you can believe in.