The Undeclared War, Channel 4's drama about digital warfare, has returned for a second season four years after its debut. The show, which originally aired in 2022, now continues the timeline from where it left off, moving from a near-future setting into the past.
New direction and lead character
The second season arrives without director Peter Kosminsky, who helmed the first series. Instead, Paul McGuigan takes over, bringing a more kinetic style. The opening scene is shot in one continuous take, following Simon Pegg's character Danny Patrick, the newly animated head of GCHQ operations, as he strides through corridors and bursts into conference rooms, dealing with bad news delivered by underlings.
Danny now serves as the unquestioned lead, a shift from the first season which focused on computer science undergraduate Saara (Hannah Khalique-Brown). Saara remains in the story, still implausibly bypassing British and Russian surveillance by direct-messaging her friend Vadim (German Segal) in a gaming server's chatroom, but she is no longer the main driver of the plot.
Personal and professional intersections
The show explores Danny's home life, introducing his wife Barbara (Siân Brooke), who heads the China team at GCHQ. His best mate Charlie (Danny Sapani) is GCHQ's head of security, tasked with finding a traitor on Danny's team. This creates a stressful intersection of personal and professional spheres.
While the second season has more energy than the first, which featured tech whizzes staring listlessly at each other in GCHQ's silent environs, it still struggles to make cyber-attacks visually compelling. The show's politics remain unchanged, with writer Colin Teevan repeating the dynamic between idealistic Danny, his pragmatic boss David (Alex Jennings), and gung-ho cabinet minister Richard Marston (Ed Stoppard), who wants to retaliate against Russia while Danny warns such moves would be “highly escalatory.”
The Undeclared War is available on Channel 4 now.
