Spoiler alert: this recap assumes you’ve seen the first episode of Undercover. Don’t read on if you haven’t.

The countdown has begun. It’s a stark day in red-hot Louisiana, and British lawyer Maya Cobbina (Sophie Okonedo) is speeding across the scorched earth, alone and exposed. She’s racing to prison to meet her client Rudy Jones (Dennis Haysbert), wrongfully on death row for murder, a man who’s about to meet his maker in the most horrific way – and she’s got a last-ditch appeal with the Supreme Court for a stay of execution.



What a thrilling opening episode: bold, gripping, troubling and so chock-full of call-to-arms speeches I expect no less than one every 10 minutes for the duration of the series, please. Rudy’s was the first – “Stay brave, be strong, hold your dignity. Go big,” he says – just after Maya takes the call that her 20-year bid for justice has failed. She walks away from him for the last time, neck veins bulging, cheeks tight, childlike, broken. “You hear me, Maya?”



Outside, she addresses the protesters, as her daughters Ella and Clem watch on a live feed at home in London and set the clock to Mum time. Cue poignant speech number two: “This anger that I feel will go to work. It will not soften, it will not be softened until they stop killing brothers and sisters and calling it justice.”

Maya leaves the crowd and drives off, listening to a right-wing radio presenter relishing the countdown to Rudy’s death by lethal injection. As the radio reaches zero, she staggers off into the desert – and has an epileptic fit. Her loving husband, Nick Johnson (Adrian Lester), who’s at home trying to shield their autistic son Daniel from the awful news, calls and tells her to hold on. Suddenly, a prison van swerves up and tells her the execution was botched, that Rudy is in fact still alive. She rushes back, witnesses the horrendous scene (I will never forget that grim shaking drill) and gets him an emergency stay.



The easy domesticity makes the story all the more crushing ... Ella (Shannon Hayes), Dan (Daniel Ezra) and Clem (Tamara Lawrence) in St Just. Photograph: Lee Searle/BBC

Former lawyer Peter Moffat’s script is engrossing from the get-go. I got so swept up in the Rudy case that I almost forgot what the true premise of this show was until the halfway point, when Nick was suddenly being tailed. He’s taking off his wedding band and heading in to a hospice to see his dying father – then telling him that no, he doesn’t have a girlfriend because no, he still hasn’t found the right woman. The air of easy domesticity in the Johnson-Cobbina household (“How many times did you eat pasta while I was away?” “19”) makes it all the more crushing and disturbing when it’s revealed as a sham. Moffat has of course been inspired by the real-life exposé and Pitchford Inquiry into undercover officers who infiltrate political groups and have personal relationships with key figures.



‘He’s watching you. We all are’

Nick (Adrian Lester) at an anti-racism rally in the 90s. Photograph: Sally Mais/BBC

So we see both Maya and Nick at an anti-racism rally in Hackney in 1996, flanked by skinheads and heavy-handed police. Maya’s plaid shirt is very Angela Chase (how apt: Maya’s so-called life) and she’s rushing into the police station to assist Michael Antwi (Sope Dirisu), a civil rights activist who’s been beaten up, arrested and later dies in custody. As the wall of her office proves – even Homeland’s Carrie Mathison wasn’t this overt with her obsessions – she’s been trying to get to the bottom of the crime against Antwi since ‘96. Or, as her boss, mentor and father figure Jimmy (Phil Davis) tells her: “People say you’re mad you know … 20 years and you’re still on it.” “People can say what the hell they like.”

Okonedo plays Maya brilliantly, flitting from fragile to fierce with a flinch of the arm or a twitch of the forehead. Still, I had to suspend a fair amount of disbelief that this woman had a decades-long legal career of “taking on the state when it behaves badly”, three grown children and a cottage in Cornwall. She seems so disconcertingly infantile. Is it that lack of gravitas that gets people on side? Does she disarm judges and the establishment by so naively fighting the good fight? Presumably that’s why she’s been headhunted as the first black director of public prosecutions. And, as Jimmy says to sway her, there’s a new witness in the Antwi case (really … after all this time? A pretty mammoth coincidence) – and the DPP gets to decide which cases the state tackles. Those responsible could finally be held to account.

‘Welcome back, Detective Sergeant’

Not if the mystery man (played by Derek Riddell) who returned Nick’s rogue runaway dog gets his way. Nick is forced to meet him in a cafe and he lets Nick know that “there’s a perfect storm coming” if his wife takes the DPP job. Things get even more threatening when the man, his former employer, follows the family to their coastal cottage in St Just. Nick tries to beat him up, but ends up in a headlock. “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.” Far from it.



Threatening ... Nick Johnson (Lester) is followed to Cornwall by his former employer (Derek Riddell). Photograph: Lee Searle/BBC

In Lester’s hands, Nick is tender and penitent and heartbreaking – no small miracle for an undercover swine. Somehow, he manages to wrench our moral compass aside and make us pity him. Let’s just examine some evidence from that conversation on the coastal path. There’s a buffet of creepy lines: “The beauty of this is that 20 years of normal life makes for very deep cover”; “We just need you to share what she’s thinking”; “You think any of you could survive this?” Gosh this man’s got a lot on his plate. A father who’s just died, three teenagers at home, a triathlon to train for, a penchant for icy baths and being hosed down in the garden, to say nothing of the police threats and the life of servitude and lies. So we know Nick did abandon his duties when he fell in love with Maya – that he’s not been at work the whole time. But his willingness to be welcomed back as a Detective Sergeant (albeit to spare his family from this hell) stops dead my pity and reignites my rage.



So many of life’s horrors and indignities are explored here: capital punishment, police brutality, establishment injustice, even incontinence. There’s such a lot going on that at times it did feel as though we were watching four different shows this week – a tense legal saga, a blissful family drama, a crime thriller and a civil rights battle. Still, I can’t wait to learn more about each of them.

‘Go big’ speech of the week



It can only be Rudy: “You can’t win trying to save people like me. You have to go big. Walk away from me now. Stay brave, be strong, hold your dignity. Go big.”

Notes and observations



• How has poor Maya never found one iota of evidence in her 20-year relationship that her perfect husband is a lying bastard? Here’s one piece for you, for starters: why is the man who “makes it all possible” so angrily adamant that you should not take a glass-ceiling-shattering job? She should’ve smelled a rat right then. At least her friend reminded her of the magnitude of being the first black woman DPP.

• A barrister could never afford a huge house that close to Hampstead Heath, could they? Tut tut, location manager. Unless I’m mistaken: lawyers, speak up! Do you live in a house like this?

• I’m not a medical professional, but do people really recover that quickly from an epileptic fit? Surely she wouldn’t have been able to run and answer her phone.



• The scene when Nick cared for his dad, changing his nappy as he sang Hush Little Baby and checked if he’d been a good enough father, was heartstoppingly sad. And it was unbearable when, just after Nick found out he’d died, the family did their own singalong/beatbox rendition of the very same song on the road to St Just.



• Who on earth is the garden snoop, the woman who tailed Nick to the hospice to see his dad? Is she a former colleague of Nick’s? Is she coming round just to spook him, or might she be trying to protect him? Have the police been watching him for the last 20 years?



• I’m so anxious about Daniel. What will happen when he inevitably finds out his dad is a fraud? If he’s willing to slam his sister against a wardrobe over the waxing of a leg, how far could he go?