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COBRA begins with a plane in crisis, losing power and not sure if it’ll make it to the next airport – just one of many incidents happening around the world due to an unknown cause.
Then it goes back 24 hours, as the characters are introduced with everyday scenarios, such as the Prime Minister Robert Sutherland (T2 Trainspotting‘s Robert Carlyle – his Scots accent oddly varying between very light and very strong)’s daughter graduating from University, while Chief Of Staff Anna Marshall (Victoria Hamilton)’s seemingly getting hassle from an ex… well, their situation isn’t quite what I expected, but I’ll let you discover that in due course.
Thanks to a solar storm – and note that the solar flare in Nicolas Cage’s film, Knowing, caused the end of the world – we learn in this case, that if it comes Earth’s way, and when their satellite picks it up, they’ll have just 30 minutes knowledge as to “whether it’ll fuse a few kettles, or send us back to the Stone Age”.
On the plus side, if it is like Escape from L.A., where Snake Plissken put the Earth back to day one, then at least it’ll stop the liberals from whining about so-called “man-made global warming”.
Of course, if there was to be no problem at all, this six-part series would end surprisingly early.
In this series, we have a cast ready to ham it up, especially David Haig as Home Secretary Archie Glover-Morgan, and because he’s such an odious character and has a double-barrelled surname, I do wonder whether he’s based on Jacob Rees-Mogg?
Overall, COBRA does give us some entertaining B-movie-style nonsense, such as just as when things look like they’re about to improve slightly, they suddenly get massively worse very quickly, and as Snake said at the end of his aforementioned sequel, “Welcome to the human race(!)”
However, on the downside, I couldn’t really get too invested in the personal situations running concurrently for Robert, Anna and Fraser.
I will just say one thing – the aforementioned plane is flying above a motorway, yet Carlyle refers to it as the “A1” which is a main road, not a motorway, but I digress…
Oh, and as for the title, C.O.B.R. is the Cabinet Office Briefing Room… presumably, the A is silent.
COBRA begins on Sky One on Friday January 17th, and the series is available to pre-order on Blu-ray and DVD, ahead of its release on March 23rd.
Overall: 8/10
Director: Hans Herbots, Al Mackay
Writer: Ben Richards
Cast:
Prime Minister Robert Sutherland: Robert Carlyle
Chief Of Staff Anna Marshall: Victoria Hamilton
Fraser Walker: Richard Dormer
Archie Glover-Morgan: David Haig
Ellie Sutherland: Marisa Abela
Rachel Sutherland: Lucy Cohu
Nick Dunbar: Pearce Quigley
Francine Bridge: Marsha Thomason
Edin Tosumbegovic: Alexandre Willaume
Scott Minett: Charlie Carrick
Tess Marshall: Grace Hogg-Robinson
Barney Marshall: Joshua Hogan
Peter Mott: Edward Bennett
Eleanor James: Lisa Palfrey
James Odubajo: Emmanuel Imani
Stephanie Lodge: Ellie Kendrick
Jane Allum: Molly McGlynn
John Cripps: Max Parker
Eloise Porter: Yemisi Oyinloye
Minister For Business: Caroline Hayes
Isabella: Denise Moreno
Dominic Knight: Sam Crane
Sutherland’s bodyguard: Daz Morland
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.