'COBRA's Premiere Plunges The Tories Into Darkness

The first words of COBRA's opening episode are “Mayday, mayday” from the cockpit of a passenger plane in desperate trouble. Systems are failing, the fuel tank is empty, and air traffic controllers work frantically with the crew to find a landing place. As we’ll see, it’s just the beginning. We first meet Prime Minister Robert Sutherland (Robert Carlyle) at his daughter Ellie’s college graduation, a brief respite from his many concerns as leader of the country and the Conservative party. As his Chief of Staff Anna Marshall (Victoria Hamilton) puts it, he is a decent, principled man and not a representative of “the nasty party.”

Robert has an imminent crisis on his hands, necessitating a return to London soon after the ceremony and convening a Cabinet Office Briefing in Room A (otherwise known as COBRA) for the next day. The universe is acting up, and it’s not playing cricket. An extreme space weather warning could either “fuse a few kettles or send us back to the stone age.” It’s refreshing to see a government that takes science seriously. Reference is made to the Carrington event, a major electromagnetic storm that knocked out telegraph communications in 1859. 

Solar flares on the right side of the sun are expected to initially damage flight safety and satellites and will be followed by a geometric storm, the size and danger of which are not yet known. There’s evidence by the afternoon that the threat level has been raised to severe, and planes cannot land in Paris. Robert decides not to ground all flights, a decision he'll regret. Anna reports that so far all is well, there is no panic at the gas pumps or civil unrest. Although the threat level has been raised to severe, the Cabinet awaits satellite data that will indicate the storm's direction, a crucial factor in the damage that will result.

While they’re waiting, let’s look at some storms of a different sort in the protagonists' lives. The most impressive of the Cabinet is Fraser Walker, the Head of the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (Richard Dormer), whose calm and intelligent demeanor mask unrest in his family life. His staff is amused by his absences from the office to walk his father’s dog while he is in a care home. While Robert may represent a kinder breed of Conservative, not all party members are on board with him, including his Home Secretary Archie Glover-Morgan (a scenery-chewing David Haig), an old-school Tory.   

Archie is almost certainly behind a leak to the press on Robert’s immigration policy, for which Press Secretary Dominic Knight (Sam Krane) takes the rap. Archie loathes Anna, whom he describes as “Lady Macbeth,” despises Robert, and is incandescent with rage when he hears who she is planning to recruit as her new Press Secretary. Anna’s choice of a new staff member is Francine Bridge (Marsha Thomason), a former Labour MP, brilliant but burned out and disillusioned with her own party. Robert approves, though surprised by her choice (she’s already arranged a meeting). It is a significant step forward for a government that doesn't seem to be particularly interested in diversity.

She and Francine meet for drinks, and it’s more like a courtship than a job interview. Francine refuses the position, saying the only job she’d accept is Chief Advisor to the republic of Narnia, and the two wander along the Thames, sparring and obviously enjoying each other’s company. Accept the position, Anna tells her, and they’ll have “such larks!” (quoting Dickens’ Great Expectations). Anna confides in Francine about a troubling recent event. When she was a war correspondent in Bosnia she became involved with Serb Edin Tosumbegovic (Alexandre Willaume). He had gone to look for his sister, and Anna had never heard from him again until he suddenly turned up in London at her house. And when she returns home that evening, there is a jar of her favorite Serbian preserve and a note from him on her doorstep.

Robert and his family also face a crisis that could destroy his career. After he left his daughter Ellie at college, she and her friends partied and took a drug that she described as “riding down a river on a swan.” Now, her friend Georgia (Ruby Dixon) is in a coma. Robert tells his wife, Rachel (Lucy Cohu), that he has no time to deal with their daughter. So, while he has a country to save, Rachel will save the family.

We return to the doomed plane as it follows the M1 motorway, passing low over the car of Chief Constable Stuart Collier (Steven Cree) before crashing into a bridge. Collier takes charge at the crash site and, in a suspenseful sequence, rescues a baby that has been flung down the gangway of the plane. In a phone conversation soon after with Fraser, he reveals how shaken he is and concerned that both parents of the baby need urgent surgery. Despite the difficulty of ambulances getting to the site, the local hospital is already swamped. 

After five hours of waiting for the satellite, information indicates that the electromagnetic storm is from the south, which is the very worst scenario. Spain and France are blacked out, and soon Britain will be too. The Cabinet Office Briefing Room screen flickers as the emergency generator kicks in. Robert leaves the briefing room for Buckingham Palace to get permission to authorize an Act of Emergency while Francine is home having second thoughts about refusing the position with Anna. She watches as the lights of London blink out, and her turntable slows, and the sound dies as power is lost.