

The MacGuffin at the heart of these opening episodes is a case that contains all of Citadel’s many secrets, secrets “that can murder millions of people or hold entire nations hostage,” including the launch codes “to every nuclear weapon in the world.” One day, the family is kidnapped and spirited away to a remote Wyoming mountaintop, where Bernard will tell him who he is and, as possibly the only other Citadel agent left alive, what he needs him to do. In those elided eight years, Mason has established a blueberry-pancake normal life in Oregon with a wife (Ashleigh Cummings) and young daughter (Caoilinn Springall) - though old memories lately have been flashing into consciousness.
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Mason will wake up in a hospital with no memory of who he is or how he got there - a subsequent Jason Bourne reference demonstrates that series creator David Weil (“Hunters,” “Invasion”) knows as well as you that this is not history’s first amnesiac secret agent. What is survived here, to begin with - by Mason and Nadia, who will lose sight of each other until we jump forward eight years - is a fiery train derailment, from a great height, into a lake. Coyote School of Filmmaking, where nothing is impossible and nearly anything might be survived. A brutal tussle in the close quarters of a rail-car bathroom recalls, I would guess intentionally, a similar pas de deux between Sean Connery and Robert Shaw in “From Russia With Love” - but it’s a long way from that Bond film, whose climactic scene involved Connery being chased around some low hills by a helicopter, to your modern action film, whose computer-assisted stunts defy physics and physiology. As will later be explained by surviving self-proclaimed “tech genius” Bernard Orlick (Stanley Tucci), who has helpful montages ready, Citadel is an independent, stateless fellowship of spies whose only loyalty is to humankind and which has “helped shape every major event for good in the last 100 years.” The equally international and unaffiliated Manticore - not to be confused with the 1970s prog-rock record label, though that is a series I’d definitely watch - is, by contrast, the creation of the world’s richest (which is to say most criminal) families, meant only to increase their wealth and power by shaping major events for bad.Īnd so ensues much punching and grunting and kicking and gouging and shooting, and shooting, and shooting. It transpires that Mason and Nadia have been lured to this fancy, speedy train in order to be assassinated by Manticore, an enemy spy organization, heretofore unknown to them, which has acquired a list of Citadel operatives and is in the process of eliminating every last one.


(They appear at first to be strangers, which clearly means they are not.) The talk, naturally, is prelude to what makes action films so salable around the world: the first of many fight scenes that punctuate the three episodes out for review. As a kind of preview of this internationalism, our two main characters - Richard Madden as Mason Kane and Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Nadia Sinh, agents of the eponymous Citadel - banter in English, Mandarin, German and Spanish as they meet on a super-luxurious train hurtling through the Italian Alps, where no trains should hurtle in the first place.
