As the exclamation mark icon would suggest, Smithereen produces some kind of Twitter-like Social Media product.
The Premise
Rideshare driver Chris Gilhaney takes a man hostage in an effort to speak with the founder of Smithereen, Billy Bauer. That's pretty much it; this is, in broad strokes, what takes place. The rest of it is in-character drama and backstory.The tragedy itself is a commentary on the addictve nature of Social Media.
The Characters
Andrew Scott as Christopher Gilhaney. At first we think he's an unkempt cab driver with an unusually intense stare. We later find out that he's extremely stressed and has a hair-trigger temper, but ultimately a decent chap at heart. He's also got a fair amount of tragedy in his life which leads him to do this.Damson Idris plays Smithereen intern Jaden Tommins as a scared kid taken hostage. He does this wonderfully too, and really elicits sympathy here. At the end, the character exhibits loads of empathy with his kidnapper Chris and even tries to stop him from killing himself.
Topher Grace as Smithereen CEO Billy Bauer. Grace appears like I've never seen him before - as a new-agey man-bunned hipster out on a "silent retreat". Pretensions aside, he's entirely sympathetic as a tech geek who begins building his product with benign intentions but ends up creating a monster.
Calum Callaghan as male cop, Damien Cullen. Slightly goofy, but the portrayal of a stodgy cop seemed entirely authentic.
Ambreen Razia as female cop, Najma Haque. Portrayed as the more on-the-ball and alert partner.
Amanda Drew is Hayley Blackwood. She is a grieving mother whose daughter took her own life, and has a one-night stand with Chris. I liked her in this role, but I'm not sure if her inclusion was necessary at all.
Caitlin Innes Edwards as Hannah Kent from Smithereen HR. Nothing much to see here, really. Honestly didn't do much. I get that the plot warranted her inclusion; she just wasn't that interesting to watch.
Maggie Bain as Maryam, who appears to be in charge of Smithereen in London. Another superfluous role.
Ruibo Qian as Penelope Wu, COO. She acts as the counterfoil to Billy Bauer's empathetic nature, mostly cold and calculating and concerned with the less human side of things.
Monica Dolan as Chief Superintendent Linda Grace, who tries to take charge but does a really bad job of it.
Daniel Ings as David Gilkes, negotiator. Another role that felt superfluous.
Quincy Dunn-Baker as Don from legal and Mirirai Sithole as Shonelle from Analytics. Fucking superfluous. FFS, they should have just combined the two roles with no loss to the story. Were they trying to set some kind of record here?
Jorge Cordova as Ernesto Cruz from FBI. Wow, this is Superfluous with a capital S. What did the character contribute here, really? Neat pornstache, though.
Adam McNamara as Harris the sniper. Alice Bailey-Johnson as the other sniper. Supremely incompetent at their jobs, considering how much they missed and how little distance it was.
Crystal Clarke does a decent job playing Tipi. Upbeat and earnest. Clarke made the most out of the limited scope of the role as the staff member sent to alert Billy Bauer.
The Mood
It looks like a typical dreary day in London but soon (after an unneccessary sex scene) the action picks up and becomes some kind of hostage thriller. Doubles as tragedy when one realizes what led Chris to take such extreme measures.What I liked
I really enjoyed the fact that this episode was all about existing tech. Smithereen was like a real-world Twitter (now X), Persona the equivalent of Facebook or Instagram, and Hitcher like Uber. It made it all the more relatable, especially since the bleakness was a dark (or black, hur hur) mirror to the all-too-real ills of Social Media today.
The transcriber being a prude as it recorded Chris delivering a cluster F-bomb, substituting all instances of "fuck" with "duck". I probably shouldn't find it that amusing, but I did.
What I didn't
The cast just felt unnecessarily huge. There was a number of speaking roles in the episode that felt like they were there just to make up the numbers. The characterization for these roles were just flat.The plot was bloated beyond belief. A lot of it felt like meaningless waiting. Did it ratchet up the tension? Maybe a little. But not enough to warrant sitting through a whole lot of stuff that could have been cut out.
For example, Hayley's subplot. Near the end, we see that Billy Bauer has called in to Persona to request that they give Hayley her daughter's password. But anyone who works in tech (or even has the faintest idea how this shit works) knows that passwords have not been stored in cleartext since the last decade. Basic web security. There is no way for anyone to go into the database and search for a user and simply retrieve a non-hashed password. The best they could have done was reset the password or send Hayley a link to do so.
Now, normally I could have overlooked this... if it weren't for the fact that this password was a plot point (the password apparently matched the number of the boat in a photo that Hayley and her daughter took together), which resulted in the password thing being a gigantic fucking plot hole.
Cut out this entirely, and we would have eliminated Hayley and her one night stand with Chris -and- the plot hole. Though it would have been a pity because I actually liked Amanda Drew as Hayley.
All in all, this amateurish error ruined the episode for me. You want to make a show about tech, get a writer who actually understands tech. Jesus!
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