1.1 Mort Hunter’s not the kind of operative to let an assassination attempt stop her though. After a year’s recoup in a remote Scottish cottage (mostly spent running up hills in different hats and eating tinned pork) she’s back on the job, and looking for answers. From the stylised Bond-style silhouetted opening credits to the preview of next week’s action, Sam Hunter is positioned as TV’s answer to Jason Bourne, a multi-lingual, neck-snapping, globe-trotting spook who’s been royally done over by her own people. Was it her boss, who greets her impromptu return from a year MIA with cool collection? Or her ex, whose baby she lost in utero during the attack on her life? Or any number of similarly slippery co-workers about whom we know next to nothing? At this stage, it’s impossible to hazard a guess, so sparingly is information dealt out in this opening episode. What’s immediately impressive about Hunted are the locations and moody, atmospheric direction. A series of hazy orange-tinted scenes in Tangier establish Hunter’s bamf status as she efficiently dispatches a building’s worth of lackeys whilst rescuing the cargo – a kidnapped professor – her team was tasked with retrieving. Back in London, the orange tones give way to steely, shimmering blue, as if the Byzantium’s headquarters scenes were filmed in an aquarium rather than a hi-spec office block. With minimal dialogue and sparse, quiet landscape shots (if there’s a grimy window to be filmed through, the director found it), the first half of the episode keeps us at a distance from Hunter, who’s as much a mystery to the viewer as her assailant is to her. Her next undercover job – posing as a bereaved mother and live-in tutor for the grandson of a wealthy crim (Patrick Malahide) – promises to reveal more of Hunter’s emotional life than her impassive, inscrutable performance has so far unveiled. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
