Christmas 2027: Viv Rook is Prime Minister. She addresses an adoring crowd, telling them how Britain proudly stands alone against a far-right America, a Europe in flames, and a resurgent China. She is in her element, shouting platitudes to mindless, cheering fans.

Russell T Davies brilliantly captures the meaningless blather of a tyrant as Viv promises “an emboldened society with the strength to enable itself!” It doesn’t mean anything and isn’t meant to. It just needs to sound vaguely patriotic and idealistic. And of course, Viv alone can fix this. Sound familiar?

Viv (Emma Thompson) bobs her head like a fool while wearing her inane Santa hat. (HBO)

As an opponent criticizes Viv on a radio program, he is dragged from the recording studio by goons from her privatized police force. Meanwhile, Viv concludes her address by wishing the nation “a very merry Christmas,” putting on a Santa hat, and bobbing her head about like an idiot. As Davies notes in his script, this is “her greatest talent, distracting everyone by playing the clown.”

Meanwhile, the Lyons family assembles for a dreary Christmas dinner. Daniel’s absence is keenly felt. He was the life of every party, but since his body washed up on that cold beach weeks earlier, divisions have clearly formed within the family.

The Lyons clan gathers for a mournful Christmas dinner. (HBO)

When Stephen offers a toast to his late brother, Edith follows with a toast to Daniel’s fiancé Viktor. Stephen’s look in response could chill the polar ice floes that no longer exist.

Stephen visits Viktor in a refugee detention center. Viktor greets him with an open, welcoming smile, and we get a concise series of flashback memories, images of the family arriving at Daniel’s house immediately after they learned he was dead and confronting Viktor.

It’s a brilliant and devastating choice by Davies. The flashes have a hundred times the emotional impact of seeing the full scene earlier, because only now are Stephen and Viktor able to process those events.

Stephen (Rory Kinnear) visits Viktor (Maxim Baldry) at the detention center. (HBO)

Stephen recalls he was most broken by opening Daniel’s fridge and seeing the food left there, “I thought of Danny. In the shop. Choosing all those things. Paying at the till. Coming home. Putting them in the fridge. Little bit of cheese.”

Suddenly, Stephen turns on Viktor, and it’s the searing reality of this mental image that makes the change plausible. Davies has written a villain who’s still profoundly human here, a truly remarkable accomplishment.

Stephen’s visit at first appeared to be a kind gesture, but it reveals itself to be the nightmarishly vindictive action of a small, angry man. He tells Viktor that he blames him completely for Daniel’s death.

Viktor (Maxim Baldry) is left shattered by Stephen. (HBO)

Stephen’s are the understandable actions of an angry, grieving brother, but it doesn’t make it any less repulsive or arrogantly selfish. He leaves Viktor a heartbroken mess. Yet again, Davies is brilliantly setting up exactly what kind of man Stephen is and what pain he’s capable of inflicting.

The regular musical montage takes us into 2028. We learn that Britain is now plagued by rolling blackouts caused by cyber attacks. Nobody knows who is causing them, but the Russians get the blame from the public.

Meanwhile, the UK has suffered through a record 80 straight days of rain – thanks very much, climate change! Flooding leaves massive portions of the population displaced, as do two dirty bombs, detonated in Bristol and Leeds.

ITV newsreader Mary Nightingale announces Viv’s “Bedroom Law.” (HBO)

In response, Viv Rook introduces the “Bedroom Law,” requiring those with spare bedrooms to make them available to UK citizens made homeless. It’s a smart and subtle dig at the famously cruel “Bedroom Tax” introduced by the Conservatives in 2013 in the UK, which taxed those in public housing for any unoccupied bedrooms.  Davies cleverly has Viv invert it, so middle class people now feel the sting of it.

Edith and her girlfriend Fran volunteer, helping house displaced persons with highly resistant homeowners. When one complains, Edith points out that Viv is their local member of Parliament and sponsored this legislation. As Prime Minister, Viv is taking advantage of circumstances to erode individual rights.

Fran calls out Edith’s support of Viv, saying, “Oh, she wanted Mrs. Rook in power, she said, let’s smash the system!” All right, all right,” Edith replies, “I’m an idiot.” Unlike most, she can recognize when she’s made a horribly wrong choice, admit her mistake, and correct course. It’s a nuanced portrait of the various mindsets necessary to support the rise of a tyrant.

Edith (Jessica Hynes) and Fran (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) guide evacuees to temporary housing. (HBO)

Edith asks the displaced woman if she encountered any “disappeared” while she at the transit camp. It’s clear, as the man being hauled off the radio warned earlier, that in Viv Rook’s England, dissent isn’t tolerated.

Grandmother Muriel finds a new stem cell treatment that can regenerate her fading eyesight. She’s told there’s a three-year waiting list at the National Health Service, but they can “NHS Fast Track” her for £10,000. It’s a horrifying little bit of exposition that, like so much else on the show, is thrown away casually, because it is absolutely normal to the characters.

Back in episode 2, Rosie commented that her neighbor’s insurance covered a fetal operation to cure spina bifida but that the NHS couldn’t afford such expensive treatments. The divide between medical haves and have-nots is widening as the series moves forward.

Muriel (Anne Reid) and Celeste (T’Nia Miller) visit the doctor. (HBO)

£10,000 is everything Muriel has in the world. It’s the money she hoped to leave to her grandchildren, but she decides to spend it all to save her eyesight. As she says, in one of the most gorgeously poetic lines of dialogue in the entire series, “It is a terrible, terrible world, and I want to see every second of it.”

Rosie soon finds herself unable to operate her sandwich van. Her license is no longer valid because her neighborhood has been designated a “Red Zone,” due to the amount of criminal activity.

Jonjo (George Bukhari) and Rosie (Ruth Madeley) watch Viv’s forces fence off their neighborhood. (HBO)

Troops from Viv’s privatized police force install a barbed wire fence around Rosie’s entire neighborhood. Areas like hers are being severed from “decent” folk, and anyone unlucky enough to live within them is being cast adrift.

Viv’s far-right policies are finally starting to have an effect on Rosie. As she puts it, “They’re not fencing us off to stop criminals. They’re making us the criminals, they’re locking us in!” She is beginning to learn that the rise of Viv, which she wholeheartedly welcomed, may not go so well for her.

Edith (Jessica Hynes) has her hair braided by her nephew Lincoln (Aiden Li). (HBO)

As she tells Edith about it, there’s a beautifully observed moment where Edith and Lincoln braid each other’s hair, uncommented upon. Edith jokingly suggests that if they don’t obey the rules of the new Red Zone, they might get “disappeared.” The Disappeared are clearly her obsession, and Rosie is sick of hearing about it, just as she was sick of hearing about Viktor’s plight.

Yet again, Davies skillfully shows the limits of Rosie’s vision. She is utterly unconcerned with the world beyond her apartment. Davies doesn’t write saints – just deeply flawed, relatable human beings.

Edith (Jessica Hynes) visits Viktor. (HBO)

Edith visits Viktor in detention. He says he has heard the Disappeared go to “erstwhile,” or that they are “erstwhiles,” but he doesn’t know what the term means. Edith explains it means “former” or “previously.” Her fear is growing, but Davies skillfully illustrates how, within a police state, the extent of atrocities and human rights violations would not immediately be clear; it would be confusing. The authorities would adopt vague and innocuous terms to make their horrors feel mundane.

Meanwhile, Bethany undergoes another operation to have more implants in her eyes, brain, and fingers to become “synced up,” fully integrated into all the global computer networks. It’s done by the best physicians, at government expense, but in exchange, Bethany’s tech is now all government property, she is essentially government property.

She still hasn’t become the “transhuman” she dreamed of in episode 1, but it’s an enormous step that thrills her. It unsettles her parents, but Celeste acknowledges, “We surrounded her with screens from the moment she was born. We did this.”

Stephen (Rory Kinnear) and Celeste (T’Nia Miller) with Bethany (Lydia West) after her surgery. (HBO)

Yet again, Lydia West’s casting pays enormous dividends. Her pure delight as she explains how she can access all the information in the world by thinking about it allows this potentially menacing technology to show its positive, hopeful side as well. Davies is not suggesting anything as reductive as that technology is our inevitable downfall. Instead, technology is profoundly neutral – everything is up to the intent of the user. We are responsible.

Ashamed that he couldn’t afford to help pay for Bethany’s procedure, and sick of being an impoverished failure, Stephen finally gives in and calls an old school friend named Woody (Kieran O’Brien). Once a small-time crook, Woody has flourished under Viv Rook.

He describes her rule as chaos, with panicked, unprepared “idiots” who never expected to win, have no clear plan, and constantly undermine one another. However, for Woody, this is the mother lode; he has struck it rich as a property manager dealing with her regime.

Woody (Kieran O’Brien) and Stephen (Rory Kinnear) meet for a pint. (HBO)

Here, Davies brilliantly illustrates one of the most vital cogs in the rule of a tyrant: the amoral businessman who sees only dollar signs in selling ovens to Auschwitz or cages in which to lock up children on the border. They can claim they’re not doing anything wrong themselves, but the immoral actions could never happen without them. Yet again, Davies shows how many layers of complicity are necessary for monstrous evil to flourish.

Woody can tell Stephen is desperate for a job. He’s a conspiracy theorist who thinks the American nuclear bombing of Hong Sha in episode 1 never happened. Daniel could dismiss his idiot husband’s theories earlier, but Stephen is a desperate supplicant. As Woody puts it, “What I need in the office is someone who says yes.”

Stephen needs an income and validation so much that he embraces fiction, says Hong Sha was probably faked and gets the job. It’s an absolutely masterful nod to the iconic finale of 1984, in which the villain’s victory over the dissident Winston is not to kill him but to make him say, of his own free will, that 2 + 2 = 5. Is a lie still a lie if everyone agrees it’s the truth?

“I can say yes.” (HBO)

Edith, the militant activist, is in her element again as she breaks into the offices of the company that runs the mysterious “Erstwhile” program. With the help of Bethany and her networked abilities, Edith finds documents describing secret detention camps.

In this bravura heist sequence, a lesbian and her young biracial niece are the warriors on whose teamwork the truth depends. It’s a powerful corrective to the thousand times we’ve seen a straight white man save the day in this exact same genre scenario.

Edith (Jessica Hynes) admits she blames herself. (HBO)

As Edith admits, she blames herself for Daniel’s death. Bethany beautifully conveys absolution, saying Daniel was doing what he had to. The spiritual core of the series firmly finds its place in these two amazing women. If anyone can save Britain from Viv Rook, it will be people of principle like Edith and Bethany.

Meanwhile, Stephen and his loathsome boss Woody drive to an elegant country manor where we find a strange reception being held. Woody tells Stephen it’s an auction, which only makes it seem more mysterious.

As Stephen sets up Woody’s papers in an empty conference room, in strides Viv Rook herself. It’s a scene of absolutely masterful understatement in both writing and performance. This is only the second scene in the entire six hours in which we have seen Viv in the flesh, and she’s decidedly not terrifying here. She seems focused but harried by the demands of power.

Stephen (Rory Kinnear) unexpectedly encounters Viv Rook (Emma Thompson). (HBO)

Stephen gets drawn into a brief and banal conversation with her. She barely looks up at him, through when he comments on the constant blackouts, due to “the Russians,” there’s an absolutely brilliant moment where Viv replies, still without looking at him, “Oh, don’t be so stupid.” She’s shocked that someone within her orbit believes the pablum being fed to the masses about the Russians being behind the power cuts.

The series never comments again on exactly what she means. Is she implying that her government is staging the power cuts itself, as a Reichstag fire to assert control? It seems so, but it’s a strength of Davies’s writing that he leaves the question tantalizingly unanswered.

Viv finally looks directly at Stephen to say she would leave all this behind, if only she could. Stephen is bewildered. She’s the most powerful woman in Britain. What could stop her? She laughs and says, cryptically, “They’d kill me. They would have me killed.”

“They would have me killed.” (HBO)

In an instant, the terrified look on Thompson’s face hints at an entirely different miniseries running parallel to this, in which Viv is a pawn in a nightmarish game played by people of utterly unimaginable wealth and power. She is nothing to them, just a means to an end – a device. The look in Thompson’s eyes in that moment suggests universes, showing just how powerless a cog even Viv may very well be. It’s mesmerizing, then gone as she walks out.

Stephen still can’t figure out precisely what kind of meeting this is, as a cheerfully inoffensive female bureaucrat explains the housing problem Britain faces is bigger than refugees. There are the homeless among their own population – those displaced by the current flooding and the dirty bombs (whose provenance the series cleverly never even bothers to hint at), but there are also a million more Britons who will become homeless due to coastal erosion from climate change in the coming five years. Something drastic must be done if they are to have sufficient living space.

She breezily explains that the top secret “Erstwhile” sites are set up at erstwhile army bases and erstwhile hospitals, etc. She asks what all the assembled businessmen would do if given control of these camps.

Viv (Emma Thompson) enters the meeting. (HBO)

At that moment, Viv calmly takes control of the briefing, saying they must be careful using the word camps, since it has a “negative connotation.” Viv brilliantly understands what the Nazis did. Language itself must be weaponized in order to commit mass murder. Gassing people in concrete bunkers with insecticide becomes “special treatment.” The more innocuous the terminology, the more evil can be hidden behind it. Davies has done his research into the inner workings of the monstrous.

Viv explains the term camp is really not so horrible, nor is it horrible when the modifier concentration is applied to it. As she cheerily puts it, “If you filled a camp with oranges, it would be a concentration camp, by dint of the oranges being concentrated, simple as that.”

Viv (Emma Thompson) addresses the businessmen. (HBO)

Viv explains that the British themselves invented the concentration camp during the Boer War in South Africa to hold “the men, women, and children made homeless by the conflict. Refugees.” Anyone with half a brain can see the coming political and social upheavals, many due to climate change, mean the camps will continue to fill up. As Viv puts it, “I can see the vast migration of people stretching ahead for centuries.”

However, she points out they need only study history. “The British found a way to empty those camps in South Africa.” They simply let nature run its course, as disease ran rampant through the camps, and the populations were decimated. Some might call this “genocide,” but she asks those present: Have they ever heard of the British camps in South Africa? Of the Boers who died there in their thousands? Nobody in the room has.

Viv (Emma Thompsno) discusses the camps. (HBO)

Davies is brilliantly dramatizing Hitler’s infamous quote “Who remembers the Armenians?” Viv calmly, smilingly asks the assembled businessmen of the murder of the Boers, “Have you read about it? Were you taught it? Do we remember it? We forget it. Because it worked.”

It’s now apparent exactly what this scene is, what this conference is. It is Davies’s nightmarish restaging of the Wannsee Conference. As Davies describes the moment in his script, “In the light of the fire, with good coffee, she just gave them permission to murder.”

It’s more horrifying than the most grotesque slasher movie, because this exact scene has played out countless times in human history, and millions have died as a result of decisions made by people who will go home afterward to smile and tuck their children into bed.

Davies is getting at the core of what makes a tyranny function – willing cogs in the intricate machinery of death. People who can make a little bit more money to buy a slightly nicer car if a few hundred thousand people, or a few thousand people, or even just one person dies.

“We forget it. Because it worked.” (HBO)

Emma Thompson has been spectacular throughout the series, but this scene truly could not work without an actress of her titanic gifts. She has a massive page-and-a-half monologue, unheard of in cinema, explaining the bestial mentality at the heart of the Four Star Party’s nightmarish vision of Britain.

It is “us versus them,” in which an insidious “other” is infiltrating a pure, unadulterated nation, which must be protected by any means necessary. Those who would pollute it must be expelled or exterminated. If this sounds horrifyingly familiar from the evening news, that is entirely intentional.

Stephen (Rory Kinnear) realizes what Viv has in store for Britain. (HBO)

Throughout this scene, Rory Kinnear gives a masterclass in horrified underplaying. Stephen must hide his shock as he learns what kind of system he’s complicit in. As they drive home, the repulsive Woody and the others exult at having been awarded management of two Erstwhile sites, from which they can make unimaginable profits.

We ponder Stephen’s inscrutable expression, imagining he’s going to do something heroic. Surely, he’s going to tell his loved ones or the media about Viv’s insidious plans. Davies is too brilliant for something as conventional as that, however.

Stephen transfers Viktor into a concentration camp with the click of a mouse. (HBO)

Instead, Stephen returns to his office, inspects the files about the Erstwhile camp his company now manages… and we brilliantly cut back to that moment when he looked at the pitiful groceries in Daniel’s fridge and mourned for his brother. We watch as he gives in to his pain and anger, and calmly, coolly, selects Viktor’s name from a list and with a click of his mouse, transfers the love of his brother’s life, the man his brother died for, the man he believes killed his brother, into that camp.

Afterward, Stephen joins the family for Daniel’s memorial service. They have even invited his ex-husband Ralph. Davies is not interested in tying things into neat bows. Ralph’s betrayal is never revealed. He attends Daniel’s memorial service as his loving partner, not the vindictive ex who indirectly brought about his death. In fact, Ralph is both. Davies understands the complexity and duality of us all.

Bethany (Lydia West) knows. (HBO)

Alone among the mourners, however, Bethany watches her father, utterly unmoved by his expressions of grief. And now, everything that has been planted about Stephen pays off. The moment he told Bethany his mistress was white and she turned away from him in disgust. The selfish way he drove over that delivery bike in episode 4. The equally selfish way he screwed a coworker behind his wife’s back. All of those were building toward one revelation.

And now we see a flashback, from Bethany’s point of view, as she watches Stephen transfer Viktor to the Erstwhile camp. Of course she knew, of course she saw. And she not only watched her father do this. In an absolute masterstroke of Davies’s narrative abilities, we see a moment that was withheld from us when we saw it earlier.

Stephen (Rory Kinnear) smiles after sending Viktor to the concentration camp. (HBO)

After Stephen transferred Viktor, we see what only Bethany saw a moment later, the gleeful smile that crept across Stephen’s face. It’s the most hideous, human moment of pure unadulterated evil yet in the series. It’s the smile of every German who reported his Jewish neighbor in order to get his now-empty apartment. It’s the smile of anyone who rejoices in another’s suffering.

It’s the most profoundly human action imaginable. No animal would expend the effort to make another suffer, just to enjoy watching it. That smile on Stephen’s face is more human than anything we have seen yet in the series – and more nightmarish. It is the devil lurking within every one of us, unleashed across a whole country, with nothing remaining to stop it except the will of a few good people.