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Faced with the full blast of Baptiste’s kindly bedside manner, Edward didn’t take long to explain that his niece, Natalie, had turned to prostitution to fund her heroin habit. (‘My daughter believed she was taking drugs,’ murmured Baptiste empathetically, ‘but they were taking her.’) Gradually, it emerged that she’d fled to Germany to escape a bad man called Dragomir Zelincu — who might or might not have been the bearded Romanian responsible for the opening murder or the sex-trafficker we kept glimpsing in a roomful of terrified women.
Except that, like The Missing, Baptiste is written by Harry and Jack Williams, who specialise not so much in plot twists as in regularly dismantling almost everything we thought we knew. And so they did again here. By the end, it turned out that Natalie hasn’t fled to Germany and isn’t English; that Dragomir Zelincu is no longer either bad or a man, having changed both gender and moral outlook to become a female goodie; and that Edward isn’t Natalie’s uncle. Moreover, his fridge back in Britain appears to contain the severed head of the Deal shell-collector…
There’s no denying that much of this narrative trickery felt contrived. Happily, though, it also felt very well contrived. At this stage, it’s impossible to know what on earth will happen in episode two — but my guess is that most people who watched on Sunday will be desperate to find out.
Meanwhile, over on Channel 4, the pre-credits murder was of a British civil servant in 1945 — and the main character is Feef Symonds (Emma Appleton), a young woman from a prominent Tory family, who was training to be an SOE agent when, much to her annoyance, the war was inconsiderate enough to end. So what would she do with her sense of adventure now that she was dispatched to the Ministry of Housing to swot up on fungal decay?
In the event, she didn’t have to wait long. With the cold war already taking shape, one American spy officer believes the Brits don’t realise the extent of the communist threat — otherwise why would they have just elected a socialist government? As a result he wants Feef to spy on any commies who might have infiltrated the civil service. (And merely because he’s paranoid doesn’t mean he’s wrong.)
At this stage, in fact, it’s this political background that’s the most gripping aspect of the programme. Bash Doran’s thoughtful script reminds us that the end of a war can be as cataclysmic as the outbreak of one. It also shows us how overwhelmingly shocking Labour’s 1945 victory was to people like Feef and her family. And, while Doran doesn’t overdo the contemporary parallels, we’re clearly invited to ponder the implications when the British electorate makes a decision that leaves the old order aghast. (For a start, the word ‘traitors’ becomes a highly ambiguous one.)
So far, this does, I suppose, make Traitors less of a heart-pounding thriller than a chin-stroking one — but, so far too, it’s none the worse for that.
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