The Capture review: an intriguing but rather flawed Big Brother thriller

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Lance Corporal Shaun Emery (Callum Turner) must be the unluckiest squaddie ever. First, in BBC series The Capture, he is wrongly convicted for the murder, in cold blood, of a surrendering Taliban fighter during a skirmish in Helmand province. The MoD, useless and unsympathetic as ever, bangs him up for six months. Then, thanks to a resourceful solicitor Charlie Hall (Barry Ward) and super-smart barrister Hannah Roberts (Laura Haddock), he finds himself freed, the legal team having discovered that the “incriminating” headcam video footage from the battlefield is faulty and out of sync. Thus, the expert evidence demonstrates, the incriminating words – “Get back” – were in fact not uttered after he shot a prisoner-of-war, but beforehand: case dismissed, you may walk free.

Everyone goes down the pub to celebrate, but outside, after offering his brilliant barrister a lift home, he is spotted on ever-watchful CCTV beating up and then abducting her – though key moments are obscured by a bus and gaps in coverage. Emery is charged with assault, kidnapping and perverting the course of justice. The young barrister’s body is not found. A clever, self-confident police officer DI Rachel Carey (a first TV lead for Holliday Grainger) turns up to take charge of the case.

So here we have an intriguing, but rather flawed sort of Big Brother thriller set in our contemporary world of digital snooping, near constant surveillance and (a topical touch) widespread use of facial recognition technology. “The capture” in the title refers to the various video “caps” used to identify witnesses and suspects, including the ill-fated Lance Corporal Emery. They seem much more efficient and reliable than the ones apparently trialled at Kings Cross in London recently, but you take the point; you are being watched. The Capture is, thus, like a very slow-moving Bourne movie – not necessarily a bad thing, but something it’s fair to say we have seen before.

We don’t know enough, yet, about Emery to feel truly invested in his fate, but what we do learn about him is sometimes so far-fetched as to be preposterous. For a start, having been released from confinement, he spends the evening in a pub in a Croydon housing estate totally sober. This sets him up as being a peculiarly disciplined member of our fighting forces, even off duty, and places him nicely for the innocence we are being invited to believe in. Sober, it also renders him well placed for plot purposes to actually drive the car he supposedly uses for the kidnapping/possible murder of Hannah Roberts. Lance Corporal Emery also persuades his posh legal friend that they have much in common with one another, when they really don’t, apart from perhaps some nascent physical and romantic attraction. Emery is also an unusually “woke” sort of soldier, I’d imagine, taking one of his boozed-up mates to task for Islamophobic remarks. He doesn’t seem at all the type to want to see the world and kill people; more your primary school teacher sort of bloke.

I get that he is so indignant and traumatised at the accusation that he tried to harm Roberts that he lamps a couple of the coppers (adding to the sense of a man wronged), but beyond that, much of the Emery character, despite Turner’s best efforts, seems contrived.

The same, I’m sorry to say, goes for his new potential ally in the search for justice, DI Carey, who we sense is impressed by his violently impassioned denial of the charges. Carey is a “graduate princess” police trainee, the sort of spoiled fast-track “draft dodger” resented by the plods in uniform, and it’s obvious she knows what she’s doing and is destined for great things in counter-terrorism. She’s got a hard edge to her, too, when some of the older subordinates get lippy. All fine. However, for some reason we find her in bed with her much older (and married) senior officer, Commander Danny Hart (Ben Miles). It feels ineffably creepy, strange and gratuitous. Unprofessional and ill-judged, obviously, but also I think the kind of thing that might be going out of fashion these days?

Still, despite all of the holes in writer/director Ben Chanan’s script, I still want to know where Hannah Roberts is, whether she is alive and whether Emery has been framed for her disappearance, or did it without realising he is doing it, as is suggested, like a kind of Manchurian Candidate figure. But it’s more like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle or a crossword than feeling some great emotional pull.

The support of some familiar and extremely talented dramatic talents such as such as Ralph Ineson (as old-school gumshoe DCI Alec Boyd) and Nigel Lindsay (wizard of facial recognition DSI Tom Kendricks) helps things along. We still have another five hour-long episodes to develop some involvement with the two curiously bloodless beautiful young characters at the centre of the action. That may in fact be too much.