The Capture review – this juicy return for the deepfake conspiracy thriller is full of truly outrageous twists

Holliday Grainger’s superlative drama, and its focus on shady digital practices, has never looked more timely. Its latest series is a seriously impressive feat

Last month, the Guardian reported on an arrest made by police in Southampton. Automated facial recognition software had identified the likely perpetrator of a burglary 100 miles away in Milton Keynes; the cops had a photo of the robber, and now they had found a match. The trouble was, not only was the arrested guy not the real culprit but, apart from them both being of south Asian heritage, the two men didn’t even look alike. Only one had a beard, and they were noticeably different in age. The algorithm couldn’t be trusted.

Fans of the superlative BBC conspiracy thriller The Capture might have read the story and let out a dry chuckle. Although it deals with bigger problems than one unfortunate guy unfairly spending time in a cell, the drama exists in a world bedevilled by opaque online systems and unreliable digital imagery. Every day something in our modern reality chimes with it, whether it’s dodgy data firms getting government contracts or your mum’s Instagram being overrun by AI videos of dogs with five legs. It’s a good time for The Capture to come back.

Previously on The Capture … season one: CCTV on a London street clearly showed a man committing a crime that we knew he had not in fact committed. The Metropolitan police high-flyer Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger), an abrasive loner who thinks quickly and questions everything, discovered the existence of a practice called “correction” that used deepfake technology to bypass due process and incriminate those deemed to be enemies of the state. Carey saw how dirty SO15, the Met’s elite counter-terror unit, was but, in an apparent admission that its dark power could not be defeated, ended up agreeing to work there. Season two: even scarier deepfakes were deployed to falsify entire live TV interviews with a government minister, Isaac Turner (Paapa Essiedu), as part of a grand scheme to manipulate the electorate. Carey, who had been on a long undercover grift the whole time, teamed up with the withering Newsnight presenter Khadija Khan (Indira Varma) to inform the public about “correction” and reveal SO15’s complicity.

It’s now a year later. Isaac is home secretary and angling to be PM. Khadija is still striding forcefully around the Newsnight studio, railing against the idiocy of staid BBC executives and acting as the conduit for the script’s sly gags about the media: “I’m going to take those podcast people up on their offer!” And, with her old bosses in disgrace, Rachel has become Acting Commander Carey and is running SO15.

In a post-correction era where citizens are aware that videos can be faked and even live pictures are not necessarily what they seem, Carey’s calling is not to use correction, but to lead the fight against it. Scene one: a new device known as a “Carey cam” foils a Russian black-ops agent who arrives at Heathrow armed with a smartphone gizmo that, in real time, makes airport-security cameras see a face that is not his. But one of those cameras is a Carey cam with two lenses, one of which isn’t wired to the internet. It can’t be accessed remotely. The intruder is detected and repelled.

A good conspiracy thriller is always several steps ahead, leaving us running to catch up. The Capture does that in the traditional way with its plotting, giving us twists too swift to be predictable and a wide ensemble of juicy characters whose agendas are expertly marshalled by the writer Ben Chanan: if this person here isn’t up to something, that one over there is. (Chanan, incidentally, has written every episode of The Capture himself and also directed the first season, despite his CV prior to this show being fairly limited. It’s a seriously impressive feat for a lone human, if indeed he is merely a man and not an intimidatingly sophisticated bot.)

But The Capture also has to keep moving forward in terms of real-world context, doubling down on its tech-horror visions. It started with a simple warning about deepfakes, then boosted that with ideas about how machines collecting data can, at large enough scale, understand the world better than people. What next? In the season three opener, there are moments where Carey and co are, once again, looking at video feeds that are lying to them; an admittedly scintillating sequence where a villain on the loose is not just armed but omnivident, because he has hacked into the building’s CCTV, is one we’ve seen before.

Not to worry. The episode ends with some truly outrageous surprises that ramp up both our terror of not being able to believe our own lying eyes, and the more traditional conspiracy-thriller feeling that the stubborn hero, Carey, is outgunned. The Capture’s dystopia is still one you can believe in.

• The Capture aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer now