If you like a good thriller but are tired of spies or police officers, then Prime Target is here for you; this new conspiracy tale centers on mathematicians and a big secret they've discovered.
Debuting on Wednesday, January 22 onto Apple TV Plus, Prime Target is about a mathematics student who discovers a formula pertaining to prime numbers.
However these sequence of numbers could affect global security, embroiling him in a conspiracy of people trying to stop him.
As with any good thriller there's a lot going on in the show, so here's our Prime Target episode 1 recap so you can follow along. Spoilers ensue.
The two professors
We begin our story in Baghdad where a woman takes her daughter for an ice cream. However the ice cream shop explodes, and during an attempted rescue both woman and child fall through the floor into an old-looking ruined building below.
Next we travel to England where our main character Edward (Leo Woodall) is practicing as part of the University of Cambridge's rowing team. He cycles home to change before a lecture, where a girl called Fiona has cooked for him and invites him to drinks later for her birthday.
The lecture is a post-grad math one with Professor Robert Mallinder (David Morrissey) who chastises his students for Cambridge falling down the university rankings. He says it's because the mathematics department hasn't produced any breakthroughs in a long time.
Afterwards Edward visits his former professor, who's ailing with Alzheimer's. Edward wants him to help with the research, expressing skepticism for Mallinder, but the old professor insists that Mallinder is a good professor.
Next Edward visits Mallinder to have a paper marked; the professor expresses that Edward is too smart to cover topics like the one he's picked. Edward has the number 204 in his head, after seeing it on a bus, and tells Mallinder that there's a pattern behind it, but Mallinder already knows what it is. As the conversation ends we see that someone is watching the two on a computer.
Friends and enemies
We meet Professor Andrea Lavin (Sidse Babett Knudsen) who we'll later learn is married to Mallinder. She's been sent a video of the antechamber (from the first scene) and later she tells a colleague about it. She thinks this is the Bayt al-Hikmah, an ancient lost library which you can read about on Wikipedia here. She's been invited by the Iraqi government to consult on its exploration.
Over dinner Mallinder complains to Lavin about how standoffish Edward is, and the latter suggests that Mallinder invites Edward over for dinner.
At the birthday drinks Edward seems miserable to be there, and insults a girl who tries flirting with him about her choice of degree. Edward seems more taken with the man tending bar, and later he takes him up onto the roof to see a murmuration of swallows. Edward expresses that he's trying to work out the sequence to their movements.
That night Edward wakes up to do more work, and when he pops to the toilet the bartender man has woken up and is examining his work. Edward makes him leave. The next morning Edward's family is visiting and we learn both that his mother is dead and that he has a terse relationship with his father.
Dinner with destiny
Over dinner that evening, Edward tells Mallinder and Lavin about his work, which he claims is about trying to discover numbers which haven't been discovered yet. He uses as an example the number 0, which spurs Lavin to tell them about her excavation in Baghdad.
She shows Edward pictures and he sees patterns of numbers carved into the roof. He scribbles loads of equations on their table cloth and then leaves, prompting Lavin to say Edward reminds her of "her".
Mallinder takes the tablecloth to his office and writes the equations in a book. He works out it has something to do with primes... all while still being watched by the person on the computer.
At lunch the next day Edward apologizes to the bar tender, and then Mallinder comes to him, wanting to know more about Edward's research. Edward tells him that he's working on prime numbers, and how everything in the natural world is linked to them. He thinks that the dome carvings are some sort of "prime formula". However Mallinder becomes enraged, telling Edward that it's stupid and how he should drop it.
Later, when Mallinder gets home, he seems paranoid. He receives a coded message on his computer asking him why he's working on prime numbers again. Edward continues his research into prime numbers by searching on a computer at the university library, but finds that all the papers relating to them have been removed.
When Lavin gets home later, she finds a metal container in her garden that's on fire. In it, she sees the table cloth with the equations.
Edward returns to his university dorm to find that his research has been taken, and he's told that Mallinder went into his room. Edward calls him and tells him not to go near the research, and how they'll talk about it later. However Edward cycles to his home anyway.
When he gets there, Lavin has just received a phone message. It's from Mallinder, telling her that he's leaving. However we then see him... dead in a car, with police investigating.
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