The Day of the Jackal

[Smidge001]

Anyone watching? So far I'm really liking the lead actress.

But they keep talking about a Northern Irish weapon-maker bloke being British. I thought Northern Ireland was part of the UK, but not part of Great Britain? Isn't that why our passports say great Britain AND Northern Ireland? Annoying.

On the upside, I loved it so much when the lead lady said "pre planning? Isn't all planning pre ?!"

OMG I hate all this "pre" business, "pre" ordering etc. It's already in advance! (Probably a thread for the pedants section)

I love the lead actress though.

I found it disappointing - all surface, no depth. Pretty clothes, gorgeous views, lots of chasing and slashing and bloodletting - but in the end there was …nothing.

While I’m disturbed by the almost universal hatred for Bianca on this thread (I was interested in her and her dishy husband and they were far more believable than the Jackal and his lovely wife) she was poorly served by the writers. As a pp said: She was so obviously set up by her boss that it was difficult to believe she would fall for it. And she obviously didn’t deserve to die, so the whole narrative was ultimately unsatisfactory.

The wiping out of the entire Irish family one by one - hard to know how one’s supposed to react to that, as a viewer, so that was a bit wasted.

The show must have cost gazillions to make - I don’t feel I’ve gained anything from the hours invested in watching.

That's a shame, I really enjoyed it! As did my DH and my DD has watched it and did too!

Series 2 isnt obligatory by the way....
Me, I'm looking forward to it!

Loved it all & want to time travel back to my youth and go inter-railing around beautiful Europe immediately.

I was on edge for a long time because when he forced that young chap in Hungary to drive him, he used the young lad’s phone to call his wife direct! I was sure they were going to trace all calls made from that phone & find him that way!

SO many phones dumped in bins, handbags, taxis, etc.

Somewhat disappointing final episode - suspense difficult to maintain by the announcement of a series 2. What could have been a tight, resolved story watered down by the need to exploit the material again. Plotholes increased towards the end, continuity and momentum dispersed, the last-minute mission where MI6 killers end up just wandering about a deadly assassin's house like local coppers on a house call ...

I think a key problem with the Bianca character is she's not properly in the same genre as the Jackal et al. The decision to have her be both a top-level license to kill superspy and a suburban mum with 'realistic' relationship problems didn't work, it drags you out of the story world and was boring. If she's an MI6 fantasy super-skilled spy, she needs a Bond lifestyle and persona. Or they could have made her a 'realistic' lowly weapons nerd who sticks to her specialism and gets dragged into the action without any other skills, then maybe she can have a family and you can feel sorry for her.

Just finished it. Too many episodes and, bizarrely, not enough tension. It needed tighter storytelling and I struggled to discern one episode from the next.

I found myself rooting for the Jackal, which I don't think I was meant to. In the last episode those stupid pensioners thinking they can take on a maniac with a gun who's half their age.

And then there was the very beige Bianca played by the very wooden and miscast Lashana Lynch, who was hopelessly out of her depth in this series. I was delighted when her character was murdered! I felt embarrassed for Lia Williams and Eddie Redmayne having to act with her. Yes, she was served badly by poor writing, but a good actor can make any role watchable and bring some light and shade to it.

Loved it so glad they killed off biancs

Late to the party, I finished this last night

it was really good fun but more full of holes than a pair of fishnets

My main issue was why if the jackal was so super elusive were Charles Dance’s lot able to find him with a few clicks on the computer – surely Bianca could have done the same and set up a trap?

And he wasn’t as clever as he thought he was if he was simply a fall giy for a bunch of billionaires and the secret services throughout, who were playing him all along. The idea that at the end of all this you’d return home to your wife and kid, so you could all travel to the airport together and bord a plane to the Maldives, and expect to get away with it, was daft.

Plus his handler popping up and surprising him all the time didn’t exactly speak of him being the Scarlet Pimpernel.And why – apart from plotting – didn’t he take his 10 million disguises with him to shoot from the boat so he was 💯 recognisable.

Bianca wasn’t great, but I think that was down to the part being badly written in comparison to the Jacksl’s which was well written.

The Spanish family were incredibly annoying, but Nuria at least redeemed herself at the end.

The original film is brilliant – I’d rewatched it last year, things like the Rasmus character are homage to that, it must’ve been incredibly shocking at the time to have seen this gay transactional relationship played out.

A watch a second season probably but I was losing sympathy him btowards the end when he was killing sweet old couples and Bogdan the boat guy. Eddie R did a good job of keeping him likable, despite being a psycho, but the plot was making it harder and harder not to see him as a psycho. The idea he executed his army colleagues because of the wedding massacre but then happily went on to murder innocent people left right and centre didn’t really make psychological sense.