The Undeclared war (2022) – Season 1 – Predictable but interesting

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Genre: Spy Thriller

Platform: Jio Hotstar

Time: 6 episodes x average 48 minutes

Cast: Hannah Khalique-Brown (Saara Parvin). Simon Pegg (Danny Patrick). Maisie Richardson-Sellers (Kathy Freeman). Edward Holcroft (James Cox). German Segal (Vadim Trusov). Tinatin Dalakishvili (Marina Yeselova). Mark Rylance (John Yeabsley.

 Plot:  As part of her University Computer science course, Saara Parvin gets a job experience placement for a year , at GCHQ Cheltenham. Her father is happy but not her family. She is in a relationship with her teacher James. Once inside GCHQ, she is posted in the “Malware Department’. With the help of a male cipher specialist who topped a hackathon, she traces the source code of a Cyber Attack on Britain , that does lot of damage. There is a national election and Danny Patrick is asked to find out if the voting system is hack proof. Vadim , who had been Saara’s fellow student, returns to his native Russia and is appalled at the attacks carried out on Britain…

Sir Alex Younger, the SIS Chief ‘C’, who died on June 2,2026 shared some interesting videos on You Tube about his work. In one video , he shares “our enemy had to physically visit our country to do harm; now they need not,” pointing to the vulnerabilities on The Net

If we keep that in mind then the series is extremely interesting ; if not it will be ‘just another one about a young fresh recruit finding out / stumbling upon dangerous plots‘.

As always with any such series, the first episode takes time to establish all the characters – who does what and why . It is soon clear that Saara’s household is orthodox Muslim, to whom , she hasn’t mentioned her live in relation with her professor James. At GCHQ, it is pretty clear that she will receive minimum help and has to do as she is told. Predictably she goes outside the chain of command and spots the source of the major Russian origin cyber attack. The COBR – Cabinet Office Briefing Room – is in session and Britain’s first black PM wants options for a reprisal attack on Russia.  Saara seeks the help of Kathy, on secondment from the US NSA, the super secret SIGINT agency.

We soon know where all these strands are going and it is the somewhat predictable nature of the series that takes away much of its promise and even some tense moments. If anyone’s idea of spy thrillers is kaboom explosions, moles, counter moles and so on, then that too is unavailable. Instead like any good counter espionage work, it’s the assembly of pieces of the puzzle that proves the juice to Saara’s quest for the source of the attack. We also know that since she is a “fresher” , she will see stuff that the “experienced” “older hands’ cant or don’t want to see.

Nowadays it’s a given that any TV serial or film , especially a spy film, must have some kind of relationship troubles for the main character. We can guess that these will stem from her being “Young, Brown, Muslim”. Somewhat confused and naïve , and so on. As for the hacking, by this time, we know that it will be a series of ASCII characters and symbols scrolling on the screen that denotes the serious business of ‘hacking’(on film).

Addressing the “vote stealing” by the Conservatives against the ruling Labour is also a contemporary topic. Except that here Russian intelligence FSB (it should have been SVR which is the foreign intelligence agency) is the agency doing all the disruption and this puts everything in perspective as to what GCHQ (and similar agencies) do.

At 6 episodes, it is fairly fast and leads from one problem to another , though the scenes with Vadim do drag a bit but are essential to show the other side of the story – how the Russians plan an offensive cyber attack on Britain. FSB, Putin, Russia is explicitly mentioned as the source of all cyber attacks on Britain.

So, is this worth your time? Certainly. The episodes pick up after E3 and lead to the climactic finale from which it is clear that there is a Season 2 on the horizon  (Actually August 2026, with two episodes already out)

Script – 3 out of 5

Story – 4 out of 5

Direction – 4 out of 5

Photography – 4 out of 5

Total – 3.8 out of 5