'The Capture' Season 3 Episode 1 Recap: Is Isaac Turner Dead?

I know I am a bit late to the party, but in my defense, I spent two weeks watching the first two seasons of The Capture so I could be fully prepared before I jumped into this complex rabbit hole. I really hope you have watched the previous seasons, but if you haven’t, then let me give you a brief recap of the events that have transpired so far. In this show, we are dealing with a secret intelligence program called Correction, through which the authorities create deepfake audio-visual clips of targeted individuals to create evidence which didn’t exist in the first place. Let me simplify this further. Suppose, the British Intelligence Agency has intel on a suspect, who is planning to blow up a building. Here, you have to understand that the intel is not evidence, and the crime hasn’t been committed, so the agency can only keep an eye on the suspect, not arrest them. Now, entertain the possibility that the agency failed to stop the crime or catch the suspect red-handed. The authorities know who committed the crime, but they don’t have any evidence against them. So what they do is create the evidence. They use actors, video editing software, and AI deepfake tools to create a video that frames the suspect for the crime. They can make a video of the suspect driving the van that exploded into the parking lot. So when they present this video clip in court, the judge has enough evidence to put the suspect behind bars. Things were going fine for them, until Rachel Carey, a righteous cop, showed up. When Rachel found out about “Correction,” she tried to raise her voice against her seniors, the people running the unethical program, but unfortunately, she was immediately shut down. She was given two choices: to either become a part of the operation or lose her life. Well, Rachel decided to join the Counter Terrorism Command (or SO15) so she could gather evidence against her senior, DSU Gemma Garland (a senior British intelligence officer), and her American ally, Frank Napier (CIA Section Chief). And at the end of season 2, with the help of BBC journalist, Khadija Khan, she finally exposed the operation by running a deepfake interview of former Minister of State for Security, Isaac Turner. The second season ended without revealing the fate of these important characters, but now that we already have a third season, I think I’ll be able to fill in the gaps for you while breaking down the events of season 3, episode 1.

Spoiler Alert

The third season takes place a year after the events of Season 2, so you know that a lot might have happened in between. At the end of Season 2, Gemma Garland had threatened to have Rachel arrested for compromising national security by exposing the program, but as it turned out, nothing of that sort really happened. It could be assumed that the department didn’t want to escalate the matter any further, and therefore asked Danny Hart, Head of SO15, and his junior, Gemma Garland, to resign from their post. It’s likely the department pinned the entire blame on them and scapegoated them, while in reality, all the higher-ups, including Home Secretary Rowan Gill, had always been aware of how Correction was being misused. Isaac had recorded Rowan on camera where he confessed about the operation, so it could be assumed that the PM asked Rowan to step down from his position, and later the same post was given to Isaac. But what about Frank Napier? We know that he’s the worst of all, right? The thing is, Rachel knew that Frank was a dangerous man, but she didn’t want to pull the lion’s tail until she had gathered enough evidence against him. In season 2, she had recorded Gemma and Danny on a spy camera after she got access to the seventh floor, but Frank remained off the radar, and it’s likely that in season 3, Rachel will try to bring him down. Furthermore, in season 2, Rachel had handed over a lot of video recordings to Khadija Khan, but as it turned out, the BBC didn’t broadcast most of them. It’s possible that the intelligence agency stopped them from showing those clips to the people of the country, as it would compromise national security (yes, that’s their favorite phrase). However, the authorities assured the public that they would create a committee, headed by Lord Justice Frederickson, to look further into the wrongful convictions. In season 3, Danny was called to the witness stand, but apparently, he refused to talk.

After Danny and Gemma resigned from their posts, Rachel was made the acting commander of SO15, who had been trying to find ways to fight corruption and ensure public safety. In season 1, Frank’s team had developed an AI technology through which their program could create a 3D model, a deepfake of any person, and make them say things that serve their interests. In season 2, Frank’s team hacked the BBC live feed while Isaac was giving an interview to Khadija on a video call, and they used their deepfake model of Isaac to jeopardize the British government’s deal with a Chinese company that had a facial recognition program for them. In short, the world now has the technology to implement Correction in real-time. Suppose a certain person who is on the most wanted list doesn’t want the authorities to track him down, he can make use of this new Correction technology to hack the camera feed and make the cameras see what he wants them to see. In season 2, a private American company, Truro Analytics, used the same technology to erase the footage of the assassin its CEO, Gregory Knox, had sent to eliminate the witnesses and cover his tracks. So in order to combat such Correction, Rachel and her team launched an operation called Veritas to develop highly advanced surveillance cameras that can detect Correction in real-time. The episode began with Rachel and DSU Tom Kendricks using their new toy to catch a Russian ex-military, Anton Koslov, breaching UK Border Control. Anton had a device to hack the cameras at the airport and swap his face with a deepfake avatar, but Rachel’s new CCTV camera system flagged the dispensaries between two live feeds to the control room, from where SO15 helped the ground forces to catch the intruder. If you are wondering how this smart camera works, let me try to explain this a bit. Basically, this new camera has two lenses. One feeds a signal to SO15’s encrypted network, which can be hacked. However, the second lens is offline. It is connected to the camera’s internal hard drive, which records footage locally, so it cannot be hacked using an online program. If you really want to hack this second lens, then you may have to take a screwdriver to the camera, which is a lot of work. In a nutshell, if the video signals from the two lenses do not match, then the camera quickly raises the alarm. However, needless to say, the Correction technology is advancing day by day, which means the authorities have to keep developing newer and tougher measures to catch up with these kinds of cyberattacks. 

So you see, after Carey exposed the corrupt practices of the former chain of command of SO15, she was being hailed as a hero in the public eye, and the department decided to take advantage of her popularity to repair the damage. Commissioner Cameron Yates made Carey the new acting commander to distract the public from the main problem and now that their goal had been fulfilled, they simply told Carey that she had to vacate her post, as they had found a new commander, someone with more experience at multi-agency level. They said the candidate was someone who was more used to collaborating with other entities. The reason I am emphasizing these words is because in this sentence, you can identify the exact reason why Isaac was shot dead. As we are all aware, both Carey and Isaac are driven by a strong moral compass and simply cannot ignore injustice on their watch. But can we say the same for the rest of the department? You already know the answer. So as long as Carey and Isaac are part of the government, the British Intelligence Agency cannot resume their unlawful practices, and therefore need someone who’s more in sync with their agenda. Commissioner Cameron wanted Rachel to continue being the brand ambassador of CareyCam, or Smart Cam, but he no longer wanted her to lead the department.

During the Operation Veritas press launch, Rachel invited Home Secretary Isaac to share a few words about the new camera with the public, and as soon as Isaac stepped on stage, all the live camera feeds went down, and an armed assassin shot Isaac in the head. Rachel tried to stop the shooter, but he pointed a gun at her; however, for some reason, he didn’t kill her, fired into the air, and disappeared from the building. The ending of the episode revealed that the man who shot Isaac was Noah Pearson, the new Commander of SO15. Yeah, I was as shocked as Rachel was, and if you are wondering why Noah killed Isaac, as I mentioned earlier, someone wanted Rachel and her allies gone so they could reinstate Correction.

Okay, two things here. Noah was using an app on his phone to take down all the cameras outside the building. Tom Kendricks believed that the shooter only hacked the cameras that were connected to a network, but he was wrong. I’ll come to this in a bit. Okay, so at the beginning of the episode, we saw Anton Koslov using similar software at the airport, and if the Russians had developed that kind of technology, then it’s likely that their sworn enemies, the Americans, had it too. Now, the reason I am bringing this up is because I think Noah’s either working for Frank or Gemma, or maybe both. Over the past two seasons, Frank and Gemma have been in cahoots, helping each other cover up their dirty work, but with Gemma gone, Frank (that is, the CIA and the US government) had lost his grip over SO15. Rachel’s not one to look the other way, and Frank knows that, which is why he wants her out of the way. However, the way Gemma called Rachel when she was trying to catch Isaac’s shooter, I think she’s a part of this conspiracy against Rachel. We will definitely find more about it in the next episode. 

The second thing I want to point out is that through his highly advanced software, Noah was able to map a new face onto his own, and that too in real time. This was the reason the man Rachel saw at the crime scene wasn’t the same man who was recorded by the people at the press conference on their mobile phones. And I think this is important information, because mobile phones capture video locally, the same as Rachel’s smart cams, so if someone has already developed technology to hack an “offline” camera, then Rachel’s Carey-Cam is already obsolete technology. It would no longer be able to detect Correction in action if there are apps out there that can override the recording with the push of a button. As I mentioned earlier, these cybercriminals are making milestone progress every single day, making it really difficult for the authorities to catch up. So, the question here is how’s Rachel going to expose the new commander and all those working with him?