| The Last Enemy | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Drama Thriller Science fiction Adventure Mystery |
| Written by | Peter Berry |
| Directed by | Iain B. MacDonald |
| Starring | Benedict Cumberbatch Anamaria Marinca Max Beesley Robert Carlyle Eva Birthistle Geraldine James Tom Fisher James Lance San Shella David Harewood Christopher Fulford Paul Higgins Nick Sidi |
| Composer(s) | Magnus Fiennes |
| Country of origin | UK |
| Language(s) | English |
| No. of series | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 5 |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | Patrick Irwin Justin Thomson-Glover Adrian Bate |
| Producer(s) | Gub Neal, Rebecca Eaton (for WGBH) |
| Location(s) | London, UK; Bucharest, Romania |
| Camera setup | John Hembrough |
| Running time | 85 minutes (Episode 1); 60 minutes (Episodes 2–5) |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | BBC One |
| Picture format | PAL |
| Original run | 17 February 2008 – 16 March 2008 |
| External links | |
| Website | |
| Production website | |
The Last Enemy is a BBC TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and featuring Robert Carlyle and Max Beesley which first aired on 17 February 2008.
Contents |
Set in a near-future United Kingdom beset by terrorism and illegal immigration, it features the introduction of "TIA" (Total Information Awareness), a centralised database that can be used to track and monitor anybody effectively by putting all available government information in one place. The story deals with a political cover-up centred around a rogue batch of vaccine that seems to be causing a deadly virus, as well as the moral, social and privacy concerns of such a system in a post-7/7 world. The story is told through the eyes of a mathematical genius, Stephen Ezard, who is portrayed as a recluse and showing some signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder. The final episode then has a plot twist in which this apparent virus is shown to be in fact an ethnicity-specific side effect of an experiment in producing an internal, injected and unfakeable bio-tag, a side-effect, which affects Arabs, but not Caucasians, and so (to avoid international scandal) has had to be shut down.
| Episode number | Season | Original airing | Total viewers | Audience share (average) | Season viewer average |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Season 1 | 17 February 2008 | 4.2m[1] | 18% | 2.7m |
| 2 | Season 1 | 24 February 2008 | 2.5m[2] | 10% | |
| 3 | Season 1 | 2 March 2008 | 2.3m[3] | 9.4% | |
| 4 | Season 1 | 9 March 2008 | 2.5m[4] | 10% | |
| 5 | Season 1 | 16 March 2008 | 2m[5] | 8% |