A story that recounts a series of thrilling events about large bomb attacks carried out by Palestinian youth in Israeli homes in West Germany. The Israeli interrogators wanted to stop these bombings. They identified an eccentric figure of English origin and recruited them as an Israeli agent for them to control the Palestinian networks. Indeed, that agent and her officers have done a privileged job.
This thriller gets its thrills in early and late. There is an explosion, and a significant plot development right at the end. There is a calm, then a hellride.
As a technical package, The Little Drummer Girl is polished and voluptuous. But as an exercise in gripping serial narrative, it lacks the spark and swagger of recent superlative small-screen espionage capers.
Le Carré's stories progress best at a slow burn, and the pace thus far feels just right, set by creeping human desire and curiosity, not by rattled-off plot points.
It's hard to imagine someone watching these first two episodes and not finding them to be deeply pleasurable, artful and gripping. TV drama in 2018 has left some of its very, very best for last.
You can practically smell the cigarette smoke, the post-Watergate disaffection and the desperate hope, that, with a new decade dawning, life simply has to get better.
