The terrorist plot foiled in London this summer bore eerie similarities to that illustrated in Showtime’s “Sleeper Cell,” down to the presence of Western converts to Islam.
To travelers, that string of arrests meant increased security precautions – ditch the liquids in your carry-on.
To television viewers, the bust provides reason to trust the creative community for clues on how to defend against terrorism. Maybe the CIA and the FBI should tune in too.
“Sleeper Cell: American Terror” begins a new miniseries tonight at 7 on Showtime.
Last year’s frighteningly realistic “Sleeper Cell,” about a gang of anti-American terrorists operating in Los Angeles, depicted the extreme care the cell’s members take with secrecy, anonymity, covering tracks and leading multiple lives while operating in our midst.
Tonight’s launch of a second season continues the taut drama, widening the scope to include the love lives of the terrorists and the undercover agent who has infiltrated the cell.
The relationships raise multiple questions. Is secrecy possible between partners in a primary relationship? Are undercover agents any different from terrorists when it comes to their private lives? And is repressed sexual energy a potential inducement to terrorism?
All eight hours of the fresh “Sleeper Cell: American Terror” are available on demand to Showtime subscribers starting today, as is the entire first season.
The early hours suggest the characters aren’t the only ones who should take more care; the writers should be more exacting as well.
In the original miniseries, the precautions taken by an extremist Muslim terrorist sneaking past U.S. law enforcement officials (in addition to fooling the members of a synagogue in his guise as a Jew), were tracked in mesmerizing detail. The plotting seemed equally exacting.
At the start of the new season, the writing at times feels as patched-together as the characters’ cover stories. Just as an FBI agent’s cover is nearly blown when a cell member bumps into him at the zoo, our willingness to go along with the story is almost blown when a young FBI agent in charge of the protagonist is given too many flaws to be credible.
The coincidences, near misses and haphazard nature of both the cell’s dealings and the Americans’ response seem a bit far-fetched. The cell is depicted as disorganized and inept, and the FBI operations are characterized as equally random. It all begins to feel like Keystone Kops playing with rocket launchers.
Thankfully, Michael Ealy (“Barbershop,” “Their Eyes Were Watching God”) and Oded Fehr (“Resident Evil: Apocalypse,” “The Mummy”) return in the key roles as the cop and the cell mastermind, respectively.
Ealy plays Darwyn, an African-American undercover FBI agent and practicing Muslim who barely survived the Dodger Stadium attack at the climax of the first season. As this film opens, Darwyn is on the verge of moving on with civilian life when he’s sucked back in.
Fehr, an Israeli playing a radical Islamic terrorist, is at the center of a story line calculated to make us consider U.S. policies on torture. His character, Farik, is in prison – stripped down, interrogated, beaten and subject to humiliation, emotional and physical torture in the first few hours.
Farik bends, but will he break? And how far is too far for a democracy intent on squeezing information from enemies?
This is fiction treading startlingly close to fact, drama daring us to see current headlines in flesh and blood. The difficult scenes invite shifting responses to distant political questions once they become visceral and oddly personal.
Just as last season chronicled the passion of true believers with unflinching detail, this year “Sleeper Cell” imagines how different personalities might be drawn to such a mission. Some of the conspirators break stereotypes, notably Mina (Thekla Reuten), a Dutch woman who converted to Islam, and Salim (Omid Abtahi), an Iraqi expatriate reared in the U.K., whose parents want to arrange a marriage for him.
We shudder to imagine; we don’t dare look away.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
