The Little Drummer Girl recap: episode three – a coolly calculated chess game | Television & radio

SPOILER ALERT: This recap contains spoilers for episode two of The Little Drummer Girl. You can read the episode two recap here

When does the “theatre of the real” get too real? Episode three of the Little Drummer Girl started with a God’s eye view of a red Mercedes lined with explosives snaking through Greek country roads, and ended with that same vehicle erupting into a fireball on a German autobahn. Staged by Kurtz (Michael Shannon) and his team, it was a coolly calculated and highly extrajudicial execution: killing Salim/Michel and his pretty courier Anna, perpetrators of the Bad Godesberg bombing that opened the series. An act of vengeance, then, but one purposefully designed to keep the conflict going.

By arranging to blow up these wanted terrorists in Germany, Kurtz was giving his local police badet Paul Alexis – lover of cheesecake and useful intel – an easy way to wrap up the Bad Godesberg case. There was also an ulterior motive: to flush out the real target, master bomber Khalil. Investigating the final movements of his baby brother, Salim, should lead Khalil along a carefully embroidered paper trail of love letters and hotel receipts; a trail that ends with Charlie (Florence Pugh). She may dabble in Scrabble but Kurtz is playing chess, thinking three moves ahead.

Was there ever any doubt that Charlie would accept her mission to ferry explosives across multiple borders? The episode began with her already en route and fiddling with the car radio but then, in one of the weird rewind flourishes that have become a hallmark of this drama, we were back at her al fresco briefing with Becker (Alexander Skarsgård). Like an acting exercise, he issued most of his instructions to her in character as her lover Michel, even if his aside about the cargo – “Semtex is popular because it is stable, but I wouldn’t light a cigarette in there” – seemed to be pure deadpan Becker. Then, with a Jason Bourne-esque stack of different Euro currencies, she was off.

In his Munich safe house, Kurtz suddenly decided to pull back the curtain for Salim/Michel, marching his captive out of his wired-for-sound “cell” and revealing that the prison ordeal had all been staged (including some pre-Photoshop faked Polaroids crafted by Mr Schwilli). That Salim would open up about how he informed his comrades of their next bombing target after some tentative bonding with Kurtz over their formative hardships felt a little implausible, although admittedly he had recently been drugged to the eyeballs. Had Kurtz already decided his prisoner’s ultimate fate at this point? It seems likely.

After a tetchy Scrabble game with her handler, Rachel, to confirm she was to park the Mercedes in Gutigplatz, Charlie craftily stuffed the boot with Yugoslavian firewater before crossing the border into Austria. The initially suspicious guards waved her through while, in the fine tradition of border guards in 1970s Europe, retaining the bootleg liquid evidence for further investigation. After leaving the car in position, Charlie stashed the keys in the exhaust and made a beeline for Becker, who was disguised as a suspiciously hunky priest in a nearby cafe.

Leaving Kurtz’s eager lieutenant Shimon to oversee the stakeout – which identified preening biker and “petty little leftwing journalist” Rossino as the next link in the bombing chain – Charlie had a solo post-mission celebration in a garish hotel room, slaying the minibar and lounging in a magnificent orange/brown tiled bathroom suite. Becker dropped by to insist she had done a good thing but after the expulsion of all that nervous energy, Charlie fell asleep. Never off-mission, Becker dutifully created the illusion of a lover’s tryst, leaving room service in disarray.

Then, in Munich, the real debrief. Charlie was brought face-to-face with the man she was supposed to be in love with, who, propped up between the shoulders of his captors, seemed terribly young and vulnerable. (Meanwhile, in one of the drama’s creepiest cutaways, his accomplice Anna was screaming in the soundproofed cell just feet away.) During the uncomfortable scene of Charlie memorising distinguishing marks on Salim’s naked body, the magnitude of what she was being asked to do seemed to overwhelm her. Outside, she confronted Becker with his real name – which she winkled out of Rachel during their Scrabble game – and we saw his composure slip: “Never call me Gadi again.”

If there was initially a glamour to the idea of playing spy games, Charlie was now reduced to scribbling out carefully concocted love letters with different pens to convince Salim’s comrades that their relationship was so all-encompbading that she can be trusted. Reading these love notes aloud with Becker – still, to her, Joseph – made her, not for the first time, reach out for him and, rather mechanically, he responded. Does he really care for her or was he dutifully playing the handler’s role, giving an badet whatever support they need to get the job done? What could have been a cathartic love scene then warped into something more horrifying, a hallucinogenic nightmare where Charlie saw Salim instead of Joseph in her embrace while Kurtz and his team looked on.

Where does that leave Charlie? Back in London, in a flat where the phone is tapped and pbadionate love letters have been planted in her guitar case, uneasily waiting for someone to make contact. As Kurtz noted in Munich: “From now on, we won’t be writing the play … the play will come to you.” No wonder she’s knocking back pints at her local snooker club.

Park’s performance review

That prolonged stakeout in the town square, with slow tracking zooms through slightly wobbly telescopic lenses, suggests director Park Chan-wook is a fan of paranoid 1970s thrillers such as The Conversation and was keen to evoke a similar feeling of cramped tension. It was also intriguing to see that Shimon’s post-stakeout interception of Anna as she drove away the red Mercedes – a scene referenced but not actually described in the original novel – was mostly viewed in a long and very wide shot that emphasised how chaotic it was for four operatives to subdue one determinedly agitated woman. Park loves a prolonged single take (even if he couldn’t resist cutting to a close-up when Anna took a chomp on Shimon’s ear).

Spy notes and observations

• Becker has spent most of The Little Drummer Girl channelling young romeo Michel – wearing his clothes and medallion, mimicking his handwriting, absorbing his lectures – to help immerse Charlie in the fiction they are creating. By the end of this episode, he had reverted to a much less flamboyant look: an all-business black polo neck. Perhaps a box of Milk Tray will feature in episode four?

• Did you spot the John Le Carré cameo? He was the waiter in the town square looking rather bemusedly at big Alexander Skarsgård in a dog collar.

• I’m no Scrabble expert but seems very unlikely that you could GUTIGPLATZ in one go since you only have seven tiles. (Other more legitimate words on Charlie and Rachel’s board included AXIS, RISK and SORRY.)

• “My friends used to call me Short-Fuse Marty … ” Kurtz initially seemed like a scruffy, avuncular ringmaster but now we are starting to see how ruthless he can be.

• Too slow, too stagey, too complicated, too implausible … for every viewer luxuriating in the prickly pleasures of the Little Drummer Girl, there seems to be another one ready to put it down. Now we’ve marched to the halfway point will you be sticking with it?