Certainly intriguing: Apple TV+’s Prime Target reviewed

Needless to say, there have been any number of thrillers that rely on what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: something, however random, that the goodies have to find before the baddies do. Less common are those where the MacGuffin is the mathematical formula for prime numbers – which is where Apple TV+’s latest show comes in.

Prime Target began in ‘Baghdad, Iraq’ – and therefore in a bustling market. Or at least it bustled until a large gas explosion opened up a hole in the ground leading to a spectacular medieval chamber.

For a while, the chamber went unexplained as we cut to ‘Cambridge, England’ – and therefore to eight strapping young men rowing on the river. One of the most strapping was soon revealed to be Ed Brooks (Leo Woodall, aka Dexter in One Day), a postgraduate mathematician so brilliant that his first thought on seeing a 204 bus was that 204² is the sum of three consecutive cubes. After a couple of scenes efficiently establishing his not-unexpected social awkwardness, Ed spent the next few frantically scribbling equations in various notebooks on the impressive grounds that computers are ‘not fast enough’.

Alternately dazzled and intimidated by Ed’s genius was his PhD supervisor Professor Robert Mallinder (David Morrissey). Doing his best to like his star student, he invited the young man to dinner where the professor’s archaeologist wife made small talk by showing Ed photos of a spectacular underground medieval chamber that had recently opened up in Baghdad. Rather than murmuring politely though, Ed decided the chamber roof represented a mathematical formula for prime numbers and to prove it did some more frantic scribbling – this time on the Mallinders’ tablecloth.