Red Eye (ITV1)
What happens if you open a window on a private jet at 30,000ft? I only ask because this seems the obvious solution to the bomb crisis in Red Eye.
This slick, fast-moving thriller, which launched on New Year’s Day and continues on Monday night, has the head of MI5, Madeline Delaney (Lesley Sharp), and the Defence Secretary, a stuffed shirt called Alex Peterson, trapped on a private jet over the Atlantic with a bomb.
If the plane loses height or deviates from its course to the UK, the bomb – a dollop of C-4 high explosive squished into a laptop – will blow them out of the sky.
The jet has jolly good wifi, fortunately, and Madeline is able to video-call a bomb disposal expert. Dropping bits all over the place, she tries to follow his instructions to defuse the device.
But her hands are shaking so much, she can’t unhook a wire, and the bomb goes into countdown mode. Peterson (Nicholas Rowe) has to reach over and yank the connection out.
Mortified at his own rudeness, he gasps, ‘Sorry, I panicked!’ Good job he did, really. Mansplaining is a terrible social crime, but sometimes a chap has no choice.
The bomb is still liable to explode, though. Surely, the answer is to smash a window or unlock the door, and jettison the lethal laptop. It might be risky – but Madeline has just given a self-sacrificing order for the RAF to blast them out of the sky before they reach London. I’d rather suffer a nasty draught than a mid-air missile.
Implausibility isn’t a problem in Red Eye, because it moves so rapidly. So far, we’ve seen a U.S. diplomatic courier poisoned at an airport coffee bar, a security agent shot dead inside the ambassador’s office at the American Embassy, another man hurled over a balcony and a businessman getting his neck snapped.
Richard Armitage as Dr Matthew Nolan and Jing Lusi as DC Hana Li in the ITV crime thriller Red Eye
Each new murder changes the direction of the plot, and every episode ends on a dizzying cliffhanger. This time, we left maverick policewoman Hana Li (Jing Lusi) fighting a Russian assassin in an embassy lift. She’s kicked him black and blue, and he’s about to do some mansplaining with a silenced pistol.
I can’t believe he’ll kill her, because her relationship with Brody, the head of embassy security (Martin Compston), has reached the stage of flirtatious banter. They are old enemies and could barely share a civil word at first, but now every exchange has a smouldering subtext.
Brody throbbed with admiration as she reconstructed how she would propel a drunken engineer from a fifth-floor walkway to the lobby below, and leave him with no visible defensive wounds. ‘Remind me,’ he growled, ‘which one of us was in the SAS?’
Meanwhile, at MI5 HQ, the acting chief of the secret service (Jonathan Aris) has his knickers in a twist. ‘The clock is literally ticking,’ he howled, pointing at the one on the wall. Clocks will do that, of course.
