3 out of 5

Developed By: Andy Harries

Covers season 1 (‘Chris Ryan’s Strike Back’), season 2 (‘Project Dawn’), season 3 (‘Vengeance’)

Since I don’t believe N-flix has an entry for the first season (‘Chris Ryan’s Strike Back’, aired in the UK prior to Cinemax co-producing and had a different lead) or for season 3 (‘Vengeance,’ season 2 in the US), we’ll go ahead and cover all three here.  Strike Back – as pitched for UK network Sky 1 – was intended to fill a lacking niche in TV of high stakes action and intrigue, blending some procedural elements with timely politics and a budget that would allow for big screen flash.  Season 1 felt a little rushed in introducing special MI6 agent Porter, played by Richard Armitage, disgraced after making some decisions during an operation that seemingly led to some fellow agent’s deaths.  We get the mission where he fails, then flash forward to his disgraced years where he works as a parking lot attendant and has long scraggly hair, then suddenly, of course, he’s The One Man who can accomplish a job so let’s get him back into fighting shape… which happens miraculously quickly.  The season uses an editing trope that was thankfully abandoned midway through season 2 – flashing back to events that JUST HAPPENED – and suffers a bit from over-obviousness of a conspiracy within the ‘Section 20’ special branch team, but Armitage has a calm quiet that sells the character and the lower key nature of the battles – lots of hand to hand – are committed efficiently and capably by the actor, and seem fitting for special ops.  The plots are a bit cheese and thin and cautiously lacking in blood, but its enough to keep us watching.  Season 2 is trash.  Cinemax ups all the antes – a required sex scene in every episode, which is always garishly glorified and drawn out – and ups the hero ante – Armitage is killed off during a mission in ep 1, and thus other agent Philip Winchester must now find the other One Man – Sullivan Stapleton, another disgraced soldier – to finish the mission – so we get two leads – and they up the action and blood, the stars constantly getting winged during missions before things explode into wackadoo sequences of bombs and bullets and babes.  The scripts seem to initially go for buddy cop format – the straight Winchester and the silly Stapleton – and carries the same unnecessary distraction of a conspiracy running beneath the main plot.  But there’s something there, still, some germ of tactical action that works, and as the season goes on, despite the trashiness, you find yourself getting attached to the characters and their mission.  The core cast wants to sell these roles, and it can shows.  Underneath the mickey mouse action you can sense the effort and grit in wanting to get this right and the general ops setup seems to carry just a dash more heft than the usual TV fare.  Still, had season 3 not completely blown me away and fixed almost every issue, the show probably could’ve been put to bed.  Cinemax still requires frequent boobage, but it’s not drooled over so much, and seems to just come and go as part of Stapleton’s hound-dog character.  The action still goes bananas every ep, but it feels more harried and tense.  We’re not getting shot and healing episode to episode; there’s a real feeling of fear and danger and often some mistake or skin-of-their-teeth move saves the day instead of our leads being supermen.  Indeed, according to the wiki, the show was taken to task for its lack of realism, and everyone went back to training.  I don’t know real ops from fake, but I believe it.  I believe in these guys, and suddenly the whole team goes into the field and seems competent with a gun.  The operations aren’t just distractions from some b.s. twist, and the writers slowly, competently develop each character’s personality and role without slowing down the proceedings at all.  It’s leaps and bounds over season 1, and a billion times that over season 2.  It’s not going to appeal too far out of its action niche, since it’s still a boy’s show, for sure (despite all the female roles being pretty strong – excusing the boob candy nonsense – and the women on the team, especially Rhona Mitra, stepping in as leader in season 3, being especially hardcore), and we’re not plumbing psychological depths of warfare or anything, but the show already held a unique spot and has grown to not only fill it, but define itself beyond those borders.  3 stars for season 1, 2 for season 2, 4 for season 3… averaging out to 3 for right now.  Here’s hoping season 4 maintains 3’s higher standards.