PRIME TARGET Review: Summing Up? Numbers Equal Danger.

Smart people are needed to save the world. Especially mathematicians.

Prime Target
The first two episodes premiere January 22, only on Apple TV+ . Subsequent episodes premiere weekly, every Wednesday. I've seen all eight episodes.

Frankly, I flatlined in my high-school geometry class, leading my teacher to suggest kindly that I consider a career in manual labor. I knew how to type, though, which is how I ended up where I am today.

Edward Brooks (Leo Woodall) has no such problems. As Prime Target begins, he is a whip smart postgraduate student at Cambridge, writing his thesis on prime number patterns under the direction of Professor Robert Mallinder (David Morissey), a published academic of some renown who is smart enough to recognize that Edward's brilliance may soon eclipse his own.

Handsome enough to draw the sexual attraction of strangers, Edward is so preoccupied by his thesis that he kicks out a friendly one-night stand in the middle of the night so he can get some more work done. His mathematical genius is equaled by his arrogance, which fuels him further, manifested in a meal shared with Professor Mallinder and his wife, Professor Andrea Lavin (Sidse Babett Knudsen).

What Edward doesn't notice are security cameras, which are recording Professor Mallinder for undisclosed reasons. By the end of the second episode of the series, prime numbers are shown to be the key to unlocking security systems around the world, which means that Edward and an NSA agent named Taylah Sanders (Quintessa Swindell) must team up to save it.

Created and written by Steve Thompson, and directed in its entirety by Brady Hood, the series begins on a supremely sour note that almost kept me from watching any further. Once past the offending sequence, though, it becomes clear that Thompson himself is primarily concerned with building a narrative framework for a series of chases that are the definition of a thriller series.

For the most part he succeeds, though he again stumbles when fudging the specifics of what it is that the U.S. National Security Agency is permitted to do in non-U.S. territories, which is limited to "electronic communications, such as email and telephone surveillance." (I'm not an apologist for the U.S. Government, but if Thompson wants to claim the NSA is going beyond those restrictions, fine, but he needs at least to acknowledge it, and then make his claims of overreach by the principals involved. Like the opening sequence, then is tangentially mentioned later, without much import given.)

Really, I understand: a thriller needs to keep moving, without leaving much, if any, time to reflect or consider. On the plus side, Brady Hood's direction effectively showcases a great variety of moving parts, the stunt people perform amazing stunts, and the production swiftly moves from country to country.

Quintessa Swindell is excellent, conveying moral outrage, courage, and amazing flexibility, and so is Sidse Babett Knudsen, who captures the nuances of a range of emotions. Leo Woodall is sometimes annoying, but always convincing as a distracted genius.

Future episodes will uncover three more roles that feature excellent performances. The first two episodes are strong enough to hook viewers who are primarily interested in a bit of light entertainment about the possible end of ordinary life as we know it; it's fun and twisty.

We've seen mathematicians in features such as Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting (1996), Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind (2001), and Theodore Melfi's Hidden Figures (2016), but my immediate thoughts carried me back to the personally beloved Numb3rs (2005), starring David Krumholz as a brilliant mathematician who helps his brother, an FBI agent, to solve crimes.

The executive producers for that U.S. broadcast television series included Ridley Scott and David Zucker, who are also among the Prime Target executive producers. Mathematicians will love it. And so will people like me, who have trouble balancing our checkbooks.