Undercover: Assembling the puzzle pieces

Two episodes in, and you have an uneasy sense that the lovely, happy Johnson family will soon find their world torn apart in Peter Moffat’s taut BBC One drama.

A deep secret unravelling over the next few weeks will see Maya’s (the peerless Sophie Okonedo) belief in everything she knows shaken, when the man she trusts with her life will likely break her heart.

An impassioned speech at the interview for the DPP job shows us exactly why Maya is the last person certain members of the establishment want, and why everyone else will be urging her on. Including Nick (Adrian Lester, simultaneously macho and sensitive), struggling with divided loyalties.

With the measured pace of the first episode setting us up in the present, this instalment took us back to where it all began, 20 years previously. We see Maya’s flame begin to blaze, while Nick, having built a detailed yet false backstory, ingratiates himself into her life.

Apart from the meetings with handler Carter (Vincent Regan) we have just one glimpse into Nick’s real life - being given his father’s ashes, whose funeral he was unable to attend. We found out the answer to why Nick’s children didn’t know their real grandfather: his abysmal childhood at the hands of drug fuelled parents - all fabricated.

The pieces to our puzzle are piling up and ready to be assembled: the cover up of Michael Antwi’s death, his introducing Maya to the Rudy Jones case, the role Leanne Best’s drug addicted ex-undercover cop, Abigail Strickland, will doubtless play. One of the few who knows who Nick really is, talking to him got her fired instead of the help she needed. She’s unlikely to be friendly.

A blistering, contrasting end to the episode, featuring the violence against Antwi and the melancholy of Strickland interspersed with the lovemaking of Maya and Nick, showed just how conflicted these people are going to be.

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