There Has Never Been a Sillier Thriller About Math

How much do you remember about prime numbers from math class? That they’re only divisible by one and themselves? Every other number can be broken down into them? They follow a pattern that mathematicians still don’t know how to predict? They’re … crucial to cybersecurity? That last fact is probably more obscure, but it is also apparently true and the basis for the enjoyably ludicrous AppleTV+ series Prime Target. Leo Woodall, The White Lotus season two’s very own not-nephew, plays a Cambridge grad student named Edward who has stumbled into a way to predict prime numbers, which in turn threatens the entire security state and sends — oh no! — NSA suit Martha Plimpton chasing after him. She’s so mad and she’s wearing so many power scarves.

To enjoy a show like Prime Target, you have to develop a sommelier-esque palette for the technobabble nonsense that accompanies this sort of airport conspiracy thriller. The genre comes in both STEM and humanities varieties; the former has stuff like The Number 23 or Pi, while the latter gets into the territory of The Da Vinci Code, National Treasure, and our dearly departed The Lost Symbol. These properties combine the hallmarks of any school curriculum, enough factoids to make you feel comfortable and maybe flattered that you get the reference, then apply a thick coating of hyperbole and conspiracy. In Prime Target’s case, the notion that prime numbers are critical to computer passwords gets extrapolated into a situation where governments and shady corporate concerns have hired people to secretly watch all the world’s thinkers who might get too close to uncovering dangerous math facts, then try to take them out when they do. Prime Target is mostly in the STEM zone, but there are scattered references to world history; that monitoring program is named Syracuse, after the innovations of Archimedes, and the history of prime numbers is tangled up with an archaeological dig in Iraq, which primarily seems to be an excuse to give Borgen’s own Sidse Babett Knudsen as many reasons to say the word Baghdad as possible.

The twists and turns of Prime Target defy explanation yet are delightful to unspool. I recommend watching a few episodes and then trying to explain the plot to your friend and/or editor. To give you the roughest possible understanding: Edward’s mentor suddenly tells him to stop researching prime numbers, then dies in an obviously faked way. Quintessa Swindell, meanwhile, plays a young woman watching the professors of the world from afar on her laptop in the south of France. Her job doesn’t quite make sense, but she has convinced herself she’s doing high-level global security work, and, really, congrats to whomever convinced Apple to pay for that location shoot. When she’s not flirting with a French guy, she sees what’s happening over in Cambridge, realizes things are shady, and tries to help Edward. Despite the risk, he still wants to research those damn prime numbers! Briefly, everyone ends up in Baghdad for an expensive, convoluted, and dramatically unnecessary chase scene. Again, congrats to whomever convinced Apple to pay for that.

As you might hope from this already goofy premise, Prime Target’s creator, Steve Thompson, has given the show delightfully bonkers dialogue. In a monologue near the end of the first episode, Edward waxes poetic about the beauty of prime numbers and announces that “Newton was full of shit.” He goes on about how nature builds things in prime numbers: “How many petals in a flower, I’m talking statistically, 3, 5, or 13 — all prime, why?” It’s the “statistically” that takes the cake. Edward is trying to propose that all of our thinking is built around ignoring some grand unifying mathematical force, but he still has to hedge about the power of that force! There’s a disjunction between the character you’re supposed to be watching and the performance, which is both hilarious and, perhaps inadvertently, charming. Prime Target’s costume team seems to have been equally confused about the extent to which Edward is a nerd or a cool guy, as he spends most of the show running around in a tweedy jacket and not one but two necklaces. Woodall’s sleepily chic vibe served him well in One Day but is completely unconvincing when applying that energy to a character supposedly thrilled by math. You do not, at any moment, imagine he is a person who has spent time thinking about the statistics of flower petals. It is more convincing when he is briefly shown rowing, then much less convincing when he engages in a gay romance, though props to Prime Target for mixing up the role of “cardboard love interest in the thrall of genius” by making that character a man.

Edward isn’t the only person on the show who spouts this nonsense, though, which makes the world of Prime Target so oddly endearing. Everyone is breathless. Everyone is obsessed with those dang prime numbers. Everyone is supposed to be one of the smartest people on the planet, and yet they also say things like “You’ve been watching us … for years? So basically you’ve been spying on us.” Yes, that is what the verb spy means, tell me more! Prime Target is both deeply unserious yet never cloyingly self-aware; as it speeds forward and our characters race across Europe in incredibly short periods of time, I couldn’t help becoming enthralled by its hard-charging nonsense. The show builds steam as it introduces several factions of bad-seeming guys who are all trying to get their hands on Edward’s idea about a prime finder, and never once blinks about the fact that the MacGuffin in this show is … numbers. That commitment to the bit is essential to your enjoyment of this kind of pulpy thriller, as is the fact that Apple was willing to fork out money to send Woodall and Swindell, if not around the globe, to at least several stops easily reachable by a Eurail Pass. We go from Knudsen proclaiming the importance of her dig in Baghdad to Plimpton doing her best impression of Joan Allen in a Bourne movie, standing behind a desk and announcing she needs to follow these two to Orléans. (Yes, Plimpton’s purposefully American pronunciation of Orléans rivals Knudsen’s reverential treatment of Baghdad.)

What could have been a disposable 2000s caper has been reborn as a 2020s TV miniseries, for better and for worse. I wasn’t sure if Prime Target had enough of a premise to sustain so many hours of viewing, yet I gleefully clicked through all eight screeners, eager to see who might betray whom (it’s obvious) and whether anyone would just start listing prime numbers in a tense moment. (Could be a funny bit?) The mystery may not be convincing and the actors might look confused by the very words coming out of their mouths, but the momentum of Prime Target compels you. And once the characters managed to hack into a sinister company’s computer, which you’d think would have good cybersecurity, one turns to the other and says, “There’s a folder here called Primes.” I could not wait for them to open it! I needed to know about those primes!