This explosive thriller moves so fast, there's no time to ponder the plot holes: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Trigger Point

Trigger Point (ITV)

Rating:

Short of an alien spaceship landing on the roof of Buckingham Palace, the Thames catching fire and the London Eye going berserk like a giant Catherine wheel, it’s hard to think how the opening two episodes of Trigger Point could have been any more feverishly dramatic.

From the first five minutes, when explosives officer or ‘Expo’ Lana Washington (Vicky McClure) and her squad ram-raided their way through steel gates as though they were made of cardboard, the action has been non-stop.

More than that, it has escalated constantly, each thrill catapulting Lana into even headier peril. 

After defusing a bomb in the back of a lorry racing through the City of London, she hurtled down the river in a speedboat and disentangled a security guard from not one but two explosive devices.

Then she sprinted a mile in full kit, to rescue a young copper who was locked in the boot of a car with a spring-loaded bomb crammed into his mouth like a lethal gobstopper. 

To render it harmless, all she had to do was take the battery out — but that meant cutting a hole in his face with a scalpel.

Brave lad, his eyes didn’t even water. Mine did, though.

Whether writer Chris Brandon can maintain this pell-mell pace across six episodes remains to be seen, but the sheer velocity of the plotting makes it impossible to look away.

More importantly, it gives us no time to ponder the improbabilities. Why has that highly trained (and now late lamented) bomb disposal expert just yanked open a door in a terrorist lair instead of checking for the obvious booby-trap?

Is it likely that, after two colossal explosions rock the capital, the roads will be gridlocked with drivers calmly sitting there as though they’re waiting for the lights to change?

How come that super-sensitive tilt switch on a hostage’s bomb-belt is about to explode just because she’s shivering, if it wasn’t triggered during the hour when she was trussed up and wriggling on the floor?

And most puzzling of all, why have the maniacs who are trying to blow up the Bank of England packed half a ton of RDX military grade explosives in shrink wrap and polystyrene nuggets, which make such notoriously poor shrapnel?

Running through it all is a theme about the psychological cost to Expos of living in constant danger of violent death. 

Lana’s colleague and former love rival DS Helen Morgan (Natalie Simpson) is clearly a nervous wreck, though that doesn’t fully explain why she’s lying to her new boss, Commander Quentin (Julie Graham).

And Lana is in therapy herself, seen in flash-forward scenes which slightly spoil the tension, since they imply she is bound to survive every unexploded bomb.

Though I wouldn’t be surprised if her therapist turns out to be a terrorist in a suicide vest, too.