TV review: Maths thriller Prime Target turns a decent premise into thin gruel

It's like they crossed The Jackal with the The Da Vinci Code and took out half the thrills

Leo Woodall in Prime Target. There’s a good story in here, but at eight episodes it’s stretched beyond breaking point

Prime Target (Apple TV+) starts quickly. And then it stops.

The opening scene is a crowded street in Baghdad with a mother buying ice cream for her daughter. This is the Middle East in a TV thriller, so we all know the explosion is coming. When it does, mother and daughter plunge into a hidden crypt, which turns out to be the legendary House of Wisdom, buried after the siege of Baghdad 900 years ago.

So far so thrilling, even if they don’t bother telling us what happened to the mother and daughter. Instead, we’re off to Cambridge, where brilliant maths student Edward Brooks (Leo Woodall) is more interested in prime numbers than proper human relationships.

His supervisor’s wife is an archaeologist who shows him a number pattern on the wall in the House of Wisdom. Brooks gets very excited about this. I don’t. 

We’re 30 minutes into the first episode and all the energy of the opening scene has disappeared, replaced by clunky dull scenes full of urban eye-candy and exposition. Cambridge is a lovely town but it’s falling behind other universities; Brooks’ supervisor feels over-shadowed by his wife; Cambridge is still a lovely town; the cast is quite famous.

I was going to give up when the narrative takes off. There is some kind of daft global conspiracy to prevent research into prime numbers. Brooks’ supervisor knows more than he’s letting on. He’s being watched by hidden CCTV cameras. There’s a tragic cliff-hanger ending.

So I turn on episode two. Maybe they’ll tell us what happened to the mother and daughter.

No such luck. We’re introduced to the person scanning the CCTV footage of Brooks’ supervisor and other mathematicians. She’s attractive and living in a beautiful village in the south of France. It’s all eye candy. It’s like they crossed The Jackal with The Da Vinci Code and took out half the thrills. There’s a good story in here, but at eight episodes it’s stretched beyond breaking point.

The spool spying on top mathematicians says, “Right now, math nerds are probably the most dangerous people on the planet.” It’s not just annoying that she says math instead of maths. They took a decent premise — prime numbers could destroy the planet in the wrong hands — and turned it into thin gruel.

Prime Target isn’t bad-bad, it’s passable enough if you fancy background TV in late January. But it could have been a lot better.