The attic was staged. MI6 had placed Alex in that trunk, and when he awoke to find himself there, Frances (Charlotte Rampling), the woman who’d raised him to be a spy, had to … DANNY’S APARTMENT.
Instead, he wipes it away. (“SEX GAME GONE WRONG?” blares a tabloid headline.) Probably not too thrilled, in all likelihood. Just below that it reads "Ticket Confirmation#:" followed by a 10-digit number. She says he was “as precocious sexually as he was intellectually.” Danny politely tells her that she’s full of it — you can’t fake the kind of inexperience Alistair had in bed. Both men were gay.
And both men were found dead in similar conditions. There’s even a claustrophobic hedge maze. Their scene is filled with even more vague dialogue. The percentage of users who rated this 3.5 stars or higher.A new side of Alex's life surfaces that undermines Danny's relationship with him, but Danny soon discovers evidence he had overlooked.If you're like me, you'll also be enthralled by the show's intensity, by a lingering emotional undertone that makes perfectly plotted thrillers seem as heartless as algebra.Please reference “Error Code 2121” when contacting customer service.In the series premiere, Alex, an undercover spy, is killed, revealing his cover to his lover Danny, a young man stuck working dead-end jobs, forcing him to investigate the facts behind Alex's death.Danny meets Alex's parents, who were presumed dead, and begins to unravel Alex's true identity.The spycraft is all offscreen, seen only in its devastating effects on Danny's life, and drama is about the heartless destruction of innocent lives to protect embarrassing truths from coming to light and the sacrifices that individuals make out of love.It's a handsome looking mystery that won't demand a longtime commitment.2020's Most Anticipated MoviesMore News & FeaturesLondon Spy is not an easy viewing experience. The inquest found that his death was "unnatural and likely to have been criminally mediated." The love story comes to an abrupt end when Alex suddenly disappears and Danny, having been given the key to his apartment, finds his dead body locked in a trunk. The conversation is played to evoke racy noir; at one point, a looming Frances is reflected in a gleaming black mantle that seems to pop up out of nowhere.
The common assumption seems to be that he died after some horrible mishap. (He doesn’t know the right numbers, so it’s socked away in a secret porthole in a random pipe room. Danny studies the flyer. The dialogue. A subsequent Metropolitan Police re-investigation concluded that … “Is that the murder weapon, dear?” “No, Mum, that’s a butt plug.”)But London Spy isn’t sensationalist. Spies can get themselves into serious trouble.You get the sense that we’re being put through these machinations purely for the sake of what happens nest, when Danny realizes that he’s talking to frauds. He’s being approached by strange men like Clarke Peters’ unnamed character, who approaches him at the episode’s end, makes cryptic comments about saving his life, and hands him a piece of candy with a pill hidden inside.He and Frances then have the kind of heart-to-heart a crocodile might have with an especially intelligent puppy. When Frances finally meets him, she pronounces herself impressed by his sharp instincts, which she chalks up to something like “female intuition.” Danny’s ability to suss out the truth certainly belies his down-and-out naif image.Danny’s arrival at this most novelistic of scenes is preceded by a lengthy (and ultimately pointless) stint at the house of two people who present themselves as Alistair/Alex’s parents, but turn out to be Frances’s employees. Both men were child maths prodigies.
Writer and creator Tom Rob Smith seems to be under the impression that scripting acres of conversation wherein characters never respond directly to each other is a good idea. Even within the slog of London Spy, there are plenty of times when they do.