If any writing team were after pointers on how to write a season premiere followup hour, the should turn to the crew who produced last night's hour of Sky1 and Cinemax's Strike Back: Legacy.
It most likely helps to have also written the premiere, however. Director Michael J. Bassett wrote the episode alongside Tim Vaughan & James Dormer - the same trio who helmed last week's premiere.
Episode 2 continued with the superb production quality I commented on last week. Proceedings resumed immediately after the embassy explosion, with a slightly injured Philip Locke making it out alive along with the bomber, ambassador Robin Foster. Daughter Chloe and his wife were reunited before Foster departed in an ambulance, but worse was still to come.
Having rescued Chloe only a few moments too late, Damien Scott and Michael Stonebridge attempted to rendezvous with Locke, Julia Richmond and Kim Martinez having captured Ray McQueen, but their plans were derailed by the Thai police who took McQueen back. Cue the following between the two leads:
Stonebridge: "Brilliant. There goes the one link into finding out who's behind all this."
Scott: "You know what Mikey? I predict this is gonna end in some big gunfight. A lot of bloodshed. You and me stuck in the middle. As always."
Stonebridge: "Well, what are we waiting for?"
This was my favorite piece of dialog from the episode, but there were numerous others that had me in fits of laughter. There's a great deal of television series that try to be witty or drop one-liners. Only a few truly nail it, and Strike Back is unmistakably one of those.
The hour gave a bit more time to the characters than last week. We saw Locke on the phone back to London defending his team's actions while continuing to care about ambassador Foster. We also learned Scott has a son, who looks set to interfere with next week's action thanks to a drunken 16th birthday resulting in him boarding a plane to Bangkok.
The call from Scott's ex came while riding on a tuktuk with Locke and a hilarious driver who helped him and Stonebridge out again later on. Locke ventured onto the front line with Scott who commanded the operation to reclaim McQueen, with Stonebridge sidelined due to a bullet wound. Cue the first big action scene of the hour in a quarry where Locke and Scott used a front end loader to advance on the Thai police and recapture McQueen.
Back in the new crib, McQueen stonewalled the team until his wife was safe. This was promptly seen to by Martinez and Richmond, with Scott taking charge as a joke while playing Solitaire. Scott and Stonebridge shared a nice bit of dialog relating to the future of the team and who was being groomed for leadership. With the wife safe, McQueen opened the season's storyline up by revealing he was employed by the North Koreans, with a man named Lee at the helm, who is a member of Office 39, the North Korean sponsored crime syndicate.
In a flash, Scott and Stonebridge set out to disrupt Lee's operations. After leapfrogging up a skyscraper, the pair uplifted the intel from the servers before making a spectacular parachute-aided escape amid a meth-fueled fireball. No wonder the boys were so relaxed about climbing up two dozen or so floors without ropes.
Meanwhile, the rest of the team were compromised once more, and the Thai police rushed the crib. McQueen bowed out in spectacular suicide by cop fashion, but took the police commander with him with a grenade. However things went downhill further as the wife of ambassador Foster rather predictably took her mask off and revealed herself to be a mole for Office 39 and injected a lethal cocktail into the IV line of her wounded husband. As is standard in such situations, she played the grieving widow in the presence of her daughter and Scott, Stonebridge and Locke. The assistant is a bit dodgy too, but we never got to see what became of Scott and Stonebridge's conversations with her.
That was where the curtains fell on the second episode of the final season of Strike Back. Like the premiere, the production quality was outstanding, but the noticeable increase in one liners and good banter was the highlight for me. This series really excels at that, so it's great to see the form is still there. The storyline is beginning to expand too, with some exciting scenes shown in the promo. I'm really looking forward to seeing how Scott's son will disrupt things, and whether he involves Julia as he hinted last night.
Thanks for reading! Be sure to share your thoughts on the hour in the comments below!
