HBO’s Strike Back brings counterterrorism unit Section 20 to Southeast Asia
- Plus, BBC-Netflix co-production Black Earth Rising provides a timely riposte to rising populist sentiments
Confusion today surrounds the latest terrorist-terminating mission of Section 20, the peerless British military intelligence unit from HBO’s Strike Back, now operating undercover in Southeast Asia.
Having sprung from the imagination of novelist and ex-SAS sergeant Chris Ryan, Section 20 travels the world obliterating enemies of the good guys (the West), while fooling the felonious (and some viewers) by featuring a partly shifting cast for each season of its star vehicle. Which is also where the confusion comes in: HBO believes it is now screening series six of the show, while industry watchers everywhere are calling it series seven.
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No matter: Strike Back series 6.5, subtitled Revolution, begins with a covert operation requiring our heroic young guns to retrieve the nuclear payload from a Russian bomber that has crashed into the South China Sea. They are contractually obliged to empty every automatic-rifle clip and detonate every last grenade in reclaiming the warhead from criminal organisation Spectre, which stole it from the watery depths before 007 (Sean Connery) could … hang on a minute. Isn’t this just Thunderball, transposed from the Bahamas?
Well, now you mention it. But with a Kuala Lumpur-based Triad supplying the chief villains, the Malaysian police (led by Vietnamese-Australian Neighbours refugee Ann Truong) on the case and a corrupt Indian businesswoman joining the fun, the embroidery is new – not least when Section 20 operatives realise they must work with a treacherous Russian agent to avert catastrophe.
Strike Back is a superior sort of equal-opportunity all-action thrill ride that has proved sufficiently meaty to attract the likes of Michelle Yeoh, who made her television debut in series four.
Supplying the flinty-eyed female feistiness this time is Indonesian-Iranian-Australian Alin Sumarwata (coincidentally another Neighbours alumna), who’s tough enough to duke it out with Hong Kong’s own kung fu-fighting fiend Tom Wu (as a vicious Triad enforcer). And who would ever have thought that forehead-studded psychopathic punk Vyvyan Basterd of The Young Ones (Adrian Edmondson) would grow up to become a British high commissioner?
Filmed entirely in Malaysia, 10-part Strike Back continues on HBO Go and Now TV channel 113 at 11am on Saturdays, with 10pm repeats.
Black Earth Rising on Netflix – an articulate response to rising populism
Although populism’s rabid, snarling strain is today baring its rotten teeth from the Philippines to Britain to the Mexican border, articulate ripostes to the persecution of “outsiders” still flourish.
Black Earth Rising, a BBC-Netflix co-production now available for streaming, is a stark and timely reminder of how debased humanity can become when mob rule replaces reason; and of how difficult it can be, in the face of animosity, to identify where “home” is and what that idea means.
From populist rhetoric to genocide is but a small stumble and it is to survivors of the latter that we should look when we begin to falter. Here, Kate Ashby (played by luminary of sitcom Chewing Gum, Michaela Coel) survived the Rwandan massacres of 1994 to be adopted, as a black child, by a white lawyer (Harriet Walter) and taken to Britain.
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Now, as a legal investigator, tenacious Kate demands answers to questions of her own identity and past, as well as the truth behind one of history’s bloodiest atrocities – dangerous, when powerful interests are still trying to obscure their involvement.
Fittingly for today’s broadly xenophobic global climate, thriller-with-a-conscience Black Earth Rising even takes a swipe at Brexit. In eight weeks, more petrol will be thrown on Europe’s anti-immigration bonfire. Then what?
