Peacock’s The Day of the Jackal, a new adaptation of the novel by Frederick Forsyth, is pretty great television. There’s just one part that makes no fucking sense and causes me to laugh hysterically every time I think about it.
The Day of the Jackal is an enjoyable cat and mouse game about a terrorist and a counter-terrorist operative trying to stop them. Eddie Redmayne stars as the Jackal, using his uncanny valley qualities appropriately to portray an exacting assassin who always gets his target, slipping in and out of new identities and leaving the scene without a trace. Lashana Lynch is an absolute revelation as the MI6 agent hot on his trail, struggling to balance her dedication to her job with the havoc it wreaks on her personal life. The only real problem with the show is the Jackal’s target: a tech entrepreneur with a killer app that does… something.
The motivations for the hit on this target make perfect sense. Ulle Dag Charles, or UDC, played by Khalid Abdalla, is like a reverse Peter Thiel in that he’s a weirdly menacing gay tech billionaire who, instead of ruining the world for his own benefit, wants to take down his fellow billionaires. The billionaire class has taken note, and they’ve hired the Jackal to kill UDC before he can do any damage.
It’s just that UDC’s methods don’t make sense—and not only that, the show seems determined not to clarify them. UDC aims to change the world by releasing a killer app, River, which will… like, and, such as? Sometimes characters on the show say it will “provide economic transparency,” though they do not say how. Often UDC implies that it will allow people to look at anyone’s bank account, which simply raises more questions than it answers (like: why? We are already painfully aware that rich people are rich? Also I have some privacy concerns). In one scene, UDC describes the purpose of River as revealing the flow of money, which, again, is something that is already possible to track, though it can take a little leg work.
Whenever UDC gets close to describing what River will actually do, the show interrupts him. In one very funny moment, just as UDC is about to launch River, literally the moment when he is about to explain what River even is, a second, non-Jackal assassin appears and fires at him, scattering the crowd and ending UDC’s launch event. It’s made all the more comical because if I am interpreting the show I half watch while stoned with my husband correctly, River doesn’t actually do anything or reveal any information that the billionaire class would be worried about. We know rich people are rich—they truly aren’t trying to hide that! We know that they use that money to do terrible things and that bad things seem to happen to those who call them out.
I know that The Day of the Jackal is more about spy nonsense than whatever UDC is doing, which is why I can let it all slide. Redmayne and especially Lynch have two compelling performances that rise above whatever silliness is going on with River. Still, I hope the writing team can create a stronger target for the Jackal in their second season. There’s plenty out there that scares the ruling class. Why not try a charismatic Italian-American who’s been denied a healthcare claim?
