The best thing about a big-streamer spy series these days is that one doesn’t need to watch the whole show to watch the whole show. So, regardless of the release strategy, I no longer feel guilty about forming an opinion based on the pilot or a couple of episodes. I used to be a purist, waiting patiently to do full-season reviews. But this genre is so tired and derivative that a taster – sometimes little more than a trailer or a recap – is enough to know what the narrative is and where it’s heading. Suspense is not quite the selling point anymore; slick violence rules; and the Bond-meets-Bourne-meets-Hunt storylines are inbreeding siblings of each other. Everything is an iteration of Spy dies, Spy survives, Spy returns to restore reputation and save the world. Citadel might be six episodes long, on a weekly run till the end of May, but the two screener episodes offered to critics do the job. One knows exactly how it’ll unfold. Perhaps one is supposed to.
The trick is for a show like this to make us enjoy its predictability. As a viewer, we need to feel not just vindicated but satisfied when corny elements find fruition on screen. I suspect Citadel – starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden – is that sort of series. It seems to be blissfully aware of its silliness, and the stage it sets is built to thrive on all kinds of terse action tropes. It opens on a luxurious train in the Italian Alps, with independent spy agency Citadel’s (“not the minor CIA leagues”) top two agents on a mission. Nadia Sinh (Chopra Jonas) catwalks through compartments and charms her potential victim, while Mason Kane (Madden) engages in brutal combat with a crook in the toilet. Their banter suggests that they are sassy ex-lovers. Their colleague and tech genius, Bernard (Stanley Tucci), guides them on an earpiece through the carnage.
Except this beginning is also the end of Citadel (the agency, not the TV series) as they know it. They are tricked by Manticore (I love the names), a shadowy crime syndicate that has dismantled Citadel and killed all its agents across the globe. Mason survives the accident with his memory wiped out, and eight years later, Bernard plucks him out of his domestic-wilderness existence to resurrect the agency, steal back their X-case (a computer with agent identities and nuclear codes) and stop Manticore – led by British ambassador and evil broker Dahlia (Lesley Manville) – from causing widespread chaos. Naturally, Nadia isn’t dead either, and the show darts between timelines to dent the stylistic punch of her return. I was hoping to see Nadia reappear out of nowhere when Mason is struggling, but perhaps that’s because I occupy a movie culture of larger-than-life “intro” and “entry” sequences. Instead, the series insists on showing us how she survived after building up her absence. I suppose the next four episodes (and subsequent seasons) will be about Citadel rising back up against all odds, thanks to Nadia and Mason, with the ‘lightness’ provided by friction between Mason’s new life and his old flame.
Having said that, I’ve quite enjoyed the pointed goofiness of the first two episodes. I like the unoriginal ridiculousness of Citadel existing as the Mother Teresa of spy agencies – they course-correct history and rescue people from the misdeeds of their own national agencies. I also like the cheeky characterizations. For instance, Chopra Jonas is introduced as a linguistically fluid butt-kicker amongst other things, seamlessly alternating between languages and accents at will – a nice riff on the trolling aimed at her for ‘putting on’ an American accent in Hollywood. In fact, a crucial moment depends precisely on this accent to drive home Nadia’s comeback shot. It’s only when she rolls her R’s again and smirks at the villain that we know the spy is well and truly back. (It’s a step up in Western-star quotient for the Indian actress after Quantico and Baywatch). The campiness, too, has a sense of purpose. The opening scene in the train plays with passing scenery and warm-light combinations to distract us from the naivete of the two agents who get blindsided as if they were middle-aged uncles on a Whatsapp group.
Then there’s the memory chip mechanism for Citadel spies. Both Mason and Nadia don’t remember a thing about their past, but it’s not our old favourite retrograde amnesia that’s keeping them blank. The X-case contains vials of customized serum that, once injected into their necks, will give them back their spy-life memory. (That noise you hear is Severance and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind turning in their arthouse graves). Which is essentially a way of suggesting that spies are machines with no personality or ‘agency’ of their own. I have no problem with that revelation. If anything, it’s a cheap and cheerful way of injecting some tension into scenes where the frazzled normies are one prick away from morphing into the superheroes they used to be. Their memory is their superpower, because their bodies are ready. That doesn’t sound right, but you know what I mean.
Tucci infuses the dumb exposition dumps with wryness and wit, and the very presence of Manville is a wink at the A-lister-trash reputation of the modern spy genre. In other words, everyone’s tagging along with impressive conviction in the first two episodes. How else was I cringing and chuckling at the idiotic ease with which Mason – a civilian whose muscle memory bails him out of certain doom – breaks into a “top-secret” Manticore vault to retrieve that story-expanding case? Both Citadel and Manticore look uniquely incompetent, and there’s some B-movie joy to be found in a premise that relies on their battle to define a dying planet. Maybe it’s no surprise that Marvel overlords, the Russo brothers – whose The Gray Man (2022) was a condensed version of this bad-but-fun formula – are executive producers of Citadel. They’re more or less playing the role of Tucci’s tech-genius character in the streaming landscape. I’m not a fan, but we live in an age where mediocrity becomes entertaining if it stops pretending to be better. Citadel is another addictive brick in that wall. I would never say that I can’t wait to see how it ends. I can wait. A lot. Until I’m looking for something pretty to watch during a meal. Or something to start a Twitter dumpster-fire debate on.