Review of Secret City

This is a very exciting Ossie conspiracy series set in the Australian capital of Canberra. There are two outstanding performances in the series which hold it all together and make the series work. Jacki Weaver is spellbinding as the evil, Machiavellian Attorney General named Catriona Bailey. And the lead role is played by Anna Torv, who has an effortless ability to compel one's attention, and who held together the American series FRINGE (2008, see my review), all 87 episodes of which I watched with bated breath. So she easily handles the mere six episodes of this one. She is such a stalwart lead for a series, that if she is cast, you can know it will work. The plot is exceedingly complex and ingenious. Everyone is betraying everyone, and it is impossible to know who all the good guys are and who the bad guys are, except of course for Anna Torv, who plays a crusading political journalist who is always trying to expose corruption. (And in Australia there is certainly plenty of that, as the Ossies are always complaining about it.) Here the corruption is more to do with insidious political scheming than with financial matters. Weaver wants to establish a police state in Australia with herself in control. For this purpose, she has drawn up an Act to create the Safer Australia Agency, of which she will be the head. She stages false flag operations, has opponents murdered, and manipulates international events to create a climate of fear, so that the Ossies will surrender their civil rights in order to 'be kept safe'. She succeeds in doing this. Draconian laws then come into being which permit people like Anna Torv to be detained indefinitely and imprisoned for the 'offence' of informing the public of the truth about the conspiracies by the Australian Deep State. Sound familiar? Secret courts are established and no one can publicly reveal that he or she has been detained without spending ten years in prison for revealing it. The background to all of this is a simulated threat from China. Weaver is scheming with the Americans to have a military conflict with the Chinese at sea, and stages a false 13 minute 'cyber attack' on Australian air space, leaving everything in the air helpless, both military and civil, then insists it was a Chinese attack on her country. She had secretly given orders through a corrupted general to have various backup units stand down the day before, therefore rendering the nation helpless. Having sufficiently terrified Australia, she gets her bill passed and becomes the shadow dictator of a country whereby the Prime Minister is always the last to know anything critical, while she holds all the cards. Numerous people get killed along with the way, including Torv's ex-husband who has become a woman working for the spy agency. She is played very effectively by Damon Herriman. There is so much intrigue in this gripping series that one hopes that 'Season One' on the front of the DVD means there really will be a Season Two, though so far none is scheduled for production.