The Undeclared war (2026) – Season 2 – More absorbing (than S1)

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3–5 minutes

Genre: Spy Thriller

Platform: Jio Hotstar

Time: 6 episodes x average 48 minutes

Cast: Simon Pegg (Danny Patrick). Sian Brooke (Barbara Napier). German Segal (Vadim Trusov). Danny Sapani (Charles Francis). Cloe Pirrie (Lt.Col. Roz Cavendish). Jason Tobin (Nicky Chan). Hannah Khalique-Brown (Saara Parvin). Ed Stoppard (Foreign Secretary Richard Marston).

Plot:  Danny is now on an almost non-stop treadmill of preventing Russian cyber-attacks against the UK civil and military infrastructure. His wife Barbara, ex MI6, is also in GCHQ in the East Asian (read Chinese) linguistics department. Multiple leaks of data point to an obvious mole at GCHQ. Meanwhile Vadim who had vanished, gets in touch with Saara and states that he is in China, along with fellow Russian hackers, planning an even bigger attack against UK, the seeds of which are already there as some innocent garbage in the earlier codes. Given that Danny is advocating caution, Foreign Secretary Marston sends an Army cyber warfare team headed by Lt. Col. Cavendish to oversee an aggressive response …

WARNING : MILD SPOILERS (shouldn’t still prevent you from watching the series😊)

Season 1 ended on a note where it was clear that Vadim is out there and Saara desperately wants to contact him (check out my take on Season 1 here ) Season 2 makes it clear why – Vadim gets in touch with Saara through a commercial videogame chat box and announces his presence in China along with fellow Russian hackers. That in itself is a giveaway that “more the merrier” seems to be the approach of the writers. You already have Russia as a suspect. So why not add China too? Thankfully the Chinese puppet North Korea didn’t make an appearance 😊.

There is a somewhat masala feeling about the series in that various strands are added one after the other. In episode 1, Barbara’s relationship with the Chinese ‘dissident’ Nicky Chan is revealed and anyone who follows any kind of spy serial will surely guess that this is NOT going to be what it seems and that is exactly what happens. By episode 2, it is clear that Barbara has been truly and well trapped by Chan who is an MSS operative, who had played the long game – pretending to be a Chinese dissident in the democracy movement in Hong Kong while secretly sharing all the information with his MSS masters. This is an excellent view of how the Chinese play ‘the long game’ in real life; one hears of Russian spies being caught regularly while there is hardly any information on Chinese spies being caught.

Back to the serial. There are some huge ‘are you kidding me’ moments and the biggest one is how Vadim escapes from the airtight security of the Chinese apartment because his Chinese handler is a secret pro-democracy dissident! Really?  What follows however shows how the oppressive surveillance in China takes a toll on friends and family and how “maintaining good social credit” is a big thing in China – anything not sanctioned by the Government and your social credit comes down with one being unable to travel or sometimes even buy daily groceries. Check out this wiki link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit_system

That said, there is enough masala in the series to keep everyone engrossed . Mostly the “what will happen to Barbara” angle is the one that takes up more time as she literally is forced to do tasks ordered by Nicky Chan while Danny soon notices changes in her behavior. This part plays out extremely well as it’s a classic long term espionage trap practiced by any intelligence agency. This is the angle that keeps us interested through the series and we feel for both Danny and Barbara, each knowing that the other can’t take the deceptions.

There is also the subplot about the shitty Foreign Secretary who wants his own purely Army team inside GCHQ but that too soon takes an interesting turn as they start working along with GCHQ after the initial chill vibes. Saara Parvin is relegated to a minor character and this series is all about Danny and Barbara.

Like I said, there is enough masala to keep you interested and since its only 6 episodes, it moves at an even pace to its final conclusion.  You can overlook the somewhat ‘are you kidding me’ moments to do with Vadim and focus on the rest of the story which is top notch.

Script – 4 out of 5

Story – 4 out of 5

Direction – 4 out of 5

Photography – 4 out of 5

Total – 4 out of 5

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Secret Service (2026) – Superb

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Genre: Spy Thriller

Platform: Amazon Prime – paid (thru BBC Player)

Time: 5 episodes x average 45 minutes

Cast:  Gemma Arterton (Kate Henderson). Rafe Spall (Stuart Henderson). Alex Kingston (Rose Trewen). Galaxie Clear (Fiona Henderson). Avi Nash (Ravindra “Rav” Sangvhi). Mark Stanley (Ryan Walker,  MP and Foreign Secretary). Alexander Terentyev (Sergei Malinski, SVR operative).

Plot:  Kate Henderson is an SIS officer tasked with surveillance of a Russian Oligarch Mikhail Borodin who finances SVR operations. Kate persuades Lena, Borodin’s nanny to bug Borodin’s yatch in Malta, in exchange for political asylum for her and her brother. She and her colleague Avi hear Borodin and SVR officer Sergei. discuss the upcoming resignation of the Prime Minister due to health reasons. When the PM’s resignation resignation is announced, the duo are sure that there is a high level Mole in the Cabinet or somewhere in the higher offices of the Government…

Right from the word go, the series is superb and taut, with hardly any time wasted on establishing the characters. She is an MI6 officer and that means that half the time she cant talk about her job at home, except to her husband, who works with the Home Secretary and is aware what she is doing. The leak clearly points out that there is a high level mole and it is this high level mole hunt that takes up most of the time. The obvious candidate is the ambitious shit of a Foreign Secretary who is hardly modest and is clearly arrogant about his plan to move to No.10 Downing Street, health issues of the earlier PM be damned and uses every dirty trick in the book to foil the chances of the other incumbents for the PM’s post.  So like anyone investigating the higher ups, Kate has to tread very carefully.

The mechanics of the investigation along with the “I don’t care a damn” behavior of the Foreign Secretary point him out as the obvious suspect. The inconclusive final shot shows he still may or may not be the SVR mole.

Unfortunately the Series has couple of cliched stereotypes and anyone who watches films or TV series with a female protagonist knows that the lead character will have “family problems” , usually meaning a rebellious teenaged daughter. I do not know why this stupid trope is being repeated in series after series so much that we can predict how the daughter will ‘go straight’ once she hears what her mother is doing for a living – in this case defending Queen and Country. Naturally the mother says “its not James Bond and I rarely carry a gun” and so on.  Again, naturally, when we learn the identity of the Mole, we are really surprised how that turned out to be.

International locations add to the overall stylish look of the TV series . Hopefully Kate Henderson will return as she is based on a book trilogy written by writer Tom Bradby who has a cameo as a TV presenter , discussing the shenanigans of the Cabinet.

This is as taut as they come and even allowing for the cliched “family life’, couple of chases and one scene of gunplay, it is still a superb absorbing series and at 5 episodes , hardly takes up one’s time.

Highly recommended.

Script – 5 out of 5

Story – 4 out of 5

Direction – 5 out of 5

Photography – 4 out of 5

Total – 4.5 out of 5

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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

2 responses to “The Undeclared war (2022) – Season 1 – Predictable but interesting”

  1. Robin Bhat avatar
    Robin Bhat

    HI Rammesh,

    Excellent review, as always.
    Have not watched this and adding to my ‘KV’ list!
    The plot seems to be extracted from current news headlines. And somewhere there, Putin is laughing ?!

    Warm regards,

    Robin

    Reply
    1. Rammesh avatar
      Rammesh

      Robin

      well – season 2 has XI and Putin combined – judging by the first episode out.:)

      KVR

      Reply

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