This Vigil season 2 episode 3 recap contains spoilers
After keeping very quiet for two episodes Sabiha Chapman finally reveals her part in the missing RPAS, although it looks like she's been used by a mysterious figure. She's not the only one, because back in Scotland it looks like someone coerced Ross Sutherland into killing her father under false pretenses...
DCI Silva dashes over to Sabiha following her attack on Barker and begs her to put down the knife, before soldiers arrive to restrain her. “He did this. He made me do it!” she says. Sabiha clearly blames Barker for her father’s death, but why? And what did Barker make her do?
Russell tells DCI Silva that Barker could be seriously injured and may never pilot again, before urging her to get control of her investigation and speak to Sabiha. DCI Silva seems to think it was Sabiha that stole the RPAS console and asks if Barker made her do it.
Soon after, DI Longacre calls her with news that Sabiha has been messaging someone who’s not in her contacts. The timings seem to line up with the period the console went missing, but was Callum Barker pressuring Sabiha to steal the console? DI Longacre asks Ramsay to do some digging on the flight lieutenant.
Was the UK air force behind the strike on Al Bidbiyat?
Meanwhile, DCI Silva confronts Sabiha with footage of her leaving the air base with a bag, which looks increasingly like it contained the console. Sabiha says she doesn’t know who picked the bag up after she left, but DCI Silva is getting increasingly frustrated by her intransigence.
Sabiha claims Barker wanted to help the people of Wudyan and needed her to get the console because he didn’t have the clearance, while her father did. It seems that when Chapman fled the country with his daughter after finding out what happened and how his daughter had been used, but not before he had a blazing row with Barker. Did he know the flight lieutenant had been coercing Sabiha?
It seems Chapman was killed by the dissident group after he found out about the plan and we believe Sabiha when she says she had no idea her actions would lead to her father’s death. She came back to Wudyan to confront Barker, who claims to know nothing about the whole thing.
Later on DCI Silva searches Barker’s room and finds a very well-hidden phone, before running a web search on the message Dr Rajab managed to scrawl for her. It turns out he wrote ‘Al Bidbiyat’, which refers to an air strike on the Wudyani border that killed several children, thanks to an “intelligence error”. Was the UK air force involved in this tragedy? And was it really an error?
Who’s using Ross Sutherland?
When DCI Silva confronts Barker, it’s clear he’s disturbed by how much she knows and that she’s found his secret mobile phone. She then asks if his squadron were involved in the airstrike on the children’s football team. Was that atrocity what made Barker betray the air force to the dissident group?
DCI Silva then calls DI Longacre to share the update and finds her having a scan in hospital, which is a lovely little moment in the middle of all the conspiracy. However she’s furious to hear about her pregnant partner’s run-in with Sutherland.
When she gets back to work, DI Longacre discovers Sutherland left the army in disgrace after shooting a friend rather than let him be tortured by the enemy. Later on he ambushes her and is furious to learn that Chapman was framed and he was being used. But he won’t tell her who gave him the orders to kill Chapman. Was it someone in Wudyan or the British government? Sutherland says he hoped killing Chapman would “make things better”, but is he referring to his discharge from the services? Or are there other secrets in his past?
Was the console being operated from Bahratwud?
Back at the Al-Shawka, DCI Silva visits RPAS technical lead Wes Harper, who tells him the console could have been operated anywhere within 20 miles of the air base. Could they have been Bahratwud, where the air force completed their recent operation?
Colonel Al-Bilali says they searched the area and found nothing, but DCI Silva fancies a gander herself. He also advises that Sabiha is going to be handed over to the Wudyani police for what she did to Barker, which is bad news for Silva — and probably Sabiha herself. The look Russell gives DCI Silva says this could have been avoided if Sabiha had been sent back to the UK, as she suggested.
The next thing on DCI Silva’s to-do-list is a trip to Bahratwud with Lawson to search for that console, yet a quick scroll through the car’s GPS system reveals a mysterious address that Barker might have traveled to. One for later!
Is Captain Kade using Callum Barker?
Meanwhile, DCI Silva goes snooping round before receiving clearance from the Wudyanis — such a maverick! — and finds a young man, who tries to escape, but not before she gets hold of his bag. She then discovers a map hidden in the back of the TV, before persuading Lawson to take her to that address in the GPS.
When she gets there it’s clear that Captain Kade has been visiting, although when she mentions Barker’s name he tells her to leave.
Later on, DCI Silva finally gets some answers when she learns that Kade and Barker are in a relationship, which they’ve been covering up due to Wudyan’s laws on homosexuality. Barker denies he had anything to do with the missing console and explains that he argued with Chapman because he’d found out about their relationship and was urging them to end it.
Later DCI Silva talks to Sabiha and reveals that it wasn’t Barker who’d been messaging her. But who else on the could have known enough to impersonate him? We wondering if Captain Kade could be behind this - has he been leading Barker down the garden path in a bid to get his help with Sabiha?
Is Captain Kade the traitor at Al-Shawka air base?
When Grainger arrives in Wudyan, DCI Silva explains how Sabiha has been groomed by a mysterious figure and urges him to pull some strings to get her out of the country, saying she’s the best lead they have on the attack at Dundair.
Yet there’s a new operation underway and it seems Abdul Ghazali, father of Faisal Ghazali, the young who DCI Silva bumped into at Bahratwud, is a target. It seems the files she recovered have been key to identifying him as a member of the dissident group. DCI Silva isn’t sure how she feels about this, especially when she learns that because this operation is outside the borders of Wudyan ,the RPAS programme is free to be used in the strike 😬 which makes DCI Silva very suspicious that British drones were involved in the strike at Al Bidbiyat.
However just as the strike seems imminent it seems someone warns the target what’s going on and they flee. But who is passing this information from within the mission control centre to the dissident group?
It seems Grainger has been successful in getting Sabiha out of the country, but after chatting to Russell, DCI Silva works out that Captain Kade told Sabiha to steal the console, on the orders of Abdul Ghazali, whom he knows from his studies at the University.
After leaving the base, Kade leads them to the dissident base — but it’s not long before they’re spotted and apprehended — leading us to suspect that Kade could well be the man who’s been passing them info from inside Al-Shawka.
