As a woman, watching the first episode of The Capture, I thought, having big brother watch over you is not so bad, especially when the police were called immediately when the assault happened. Of course, that only works if you can trust the people in authority. The Capture takes you down a path that makes you think about CCTV and the methods law enforcement will go to take terrorists off the streets.
If you haven’t watched the entire series yet, stop reading and head over to Peacock. Then, come back, and we can analyze everything that happens.
Beware, spoilers below!
CCTV footage is something that we trust. The camera picked it up live, and that’s what happened, but what if that’s not what happened? How can we ever trust video again? And is “correction” as they call it on the show, happening in real life?
Shaun (Callum Turner) gets caught up in a plot to expose the government, and there was very little he could do to save himself.
His barrister, Hannah (Laura Haddock), represented a person who was convicted because of “correction.” The police couldn’t find enough physical evidence to arrest him, so they altered the video footage to what they believed happened anyways.
This is outrageous, right? I get wanting to keep terrorists off the streets, but if there is no physical evidence, could you have it wrong?
In a very high-level terrorist case, I can believe there would be no hard evidence to find, but someone working by themselves or looking to attract the attention of a terrorist group, surely you can find something. They would leave a trail.
Hannah and a group of activists decide to expose “correction.” Her and her partner, Charlie (Barry Ward), decide to represent Shaun in his appeal case. He had been accused of shooting an unarmed Afgan soldier, and with an expert in video, prooves the footage was flawed. The audio didn’t line up with the footage, which was right, but we later find out that he did know the man wasn’t reaching for his weapon.
Hannah and Charlie get the charges cleared just to set him up for another crime. They did their own “correction.”
How “correction” works, you film what you want to see played out and superimpose the person’s face on a different body. They can do this because they are collecting all the images of you online on your social media accounts. The “correction” team, later on, explains they are going further than that and creating virtual avatars of all the persons of interest.
Once you have your footage, comes the tricky part. You have to plan it out to the T. Everyone in the real footage has to be on their marks, you also have to delay the feed, then a bus or truck has to pass so you can change the footage to the one you want to be seen.
The original plan was once Shaun went to trial, Hannah would come out of hiding and expose the footage to be fake. They didn’t account for the video to be redacted or for it to being leaked online. Once it was leaked, the “correction” team couldn’t cover it up anymore and had to make it real, so they killed Hannah. Everything snowballed from there.
There were multiple people involved in the government’s scheme. Rachel’s (Holliday Grainger) former boss, who was in counter-terrorism (CT), a woman from Mi-5, and the Americans were also included.
Rachel’s former boss, who she was having an affair with when she was working in CT, eventually told her everything and wanted to recruit her. She was defiant.
Then, in the end, the Mi-5 operative Gemma (Lia Williams) explains how irrefutable the voice recordings were for Hannah’s previous client, and all they did was show what they know to have happened.
She also said that if this were exposed, every convicted felon from CCTV footage would want a retrial, and potentially a lot of criminals would be back out on the street.
Gemma was pleading with Rachel because Rachel had the power to expose it all with video from the bus that Hannah got on after the faked assault, proving Shaun couldn’t have killed her.
Shaun ended up confessing because they threatened to alter a video of him playing with his daughter to make it look violent. He had no choice but ultimately decided his last crime was catching up with him.
While Gemma’s point was mostly valid for the potential of criminals that could be released, as Shaun’s situation points out, maybe you shouldn’t do the crime in the first place, so it doesn’t come back to bite you in the ass.
There’s an interesting twist at the end that involves Donald Trump. They don’t mention him by name, but it’s clearly him they are referring to. A mysterious woman comes from the US to defuse the crises. We never really get her official title, but she seems to be in charge of the entire operation, and the president sent her. It turns out she’s not there to defuse the situation, she’s there to take the whistleblower, the guy who helped the activists create the “correction” back to the US. Trump wants the operation exposed as a conspiracy theory, so some of the things he’s done that have been caught on tape can be explained away by the extremist left faking the footage.
If you weren’t against “correction” before, that has to certainly make you see the ramifications of a tool like that when it falls into the wrong hands.
I’ve been watching The Alienist, and in the first episode of season two, a woman gets wrongfully executed for killing her baby. Isn’t that the reason most states in the US have banned executions, so they don’t unjustly kill someone?
Couldn’t “correction” be doing the same thing? Detectives are humans, and humans get things wrong sometimes. Not only that, but real footage could also get explained away that is was fake when something horrible did happen, just like in the Trump situation.
While the CCTV system was designed to protect people, if the people in power are abusing their power, it doesn’t help anyone.
Rachel, in the end, decides to join the “correction” team. Partly because she would probably be killed if she didn’t, but maybe the inspector also believes she can help them use this tool for good instead of evil.
There is a season two, but when it airs on Peacock is unknown, since it has yet to air in the UK.
What do you think of The Capture and the ramifications of “correction?” Tweet me @MandyTTCarr or comment below.
