NR | 4 episodes | thriller | Dec. 15, 2022
The Provisional IRA had a weak grasp of economics, basically adopting the Marxism of their international sponsors, but they understood geography, especially the Limburg region of the Netherlands as the center for their foreign operations, because it bordered Belgium and Germany.
As it was in real-life, coordinating with the law enforcement agencies of all three countries represents a bureaucratic challenge for Limburg-based Jeanine Maes, the lead investigator in this Dutch-language thriller.
Not surprisingly, she tends to get better results when she goes rogue in writer-directors William Bosch and Pieter Kuijpers’s four-episode series, “The Spectacular.”
Maes has been warning her superiors of the dangers of the Provisional IRA for years, but they finally start to take her seriously after several highly visible assassinations of British military personnel in the tri-point Limburg area.
She quickly identifies a key suspect, Fiona Hughes, the IRA’s “Angel of Death.” Hughes is a true believer, but maybe a bit too erratic for the comfort of Corey O’Keefe, an IRA political spokesman, who hopes to take power through the ballot box. He dispatches old school operative Declan Moore to take charge of Hughes’s cell to rein her in somewhat. However, he and O’Keefe have different visions for the terror group’s future. O’Keefe wants to maintain their assassination campaign, but strictly limit collateral damage, and to keep the heat on the British, while not undermining international sympathy for the IRA.
Irish Fanatics
Throughout the series, Bosch and Kuijpers make the IRA look like reckless fanatics with no regard for human life. It hardly registers for Hughes when she inadvertently murders an infant while gunning down its British officer father. Whereas for O’Keefe, it is merely a public relations nightmare. Of course, that puts more pressure on Maes to catch Moore’s brutal gang.
The intrepid Maes turns out to be an acutely human protagonist. She has relentless drive, but she also carries the emotional baggage of a devastating personal tragedy. Hadwych Minis (whom some viewers might recognize from Netflix’s “Tokyo Trial”) compellingly portrays her as a smart, professional woman in her late-40s. We can see why Martin de Waard, her chief deputy, is so loyal to her, despite her counter-productive tendencies.
It is the kind of tough, commanding role that is hard to find in Hollywood, for women of her age.
Conversely, Aoibhinn McGinnity is quite chilling as the remorseless Hughes. Bosch and Kuijpers adroitly position her as Maes’s polar opposite, who cares about nothing except her single-minded pursuit of terror, whereas Maes cares about everything, to the detriment of her own well-being.
Declan Conlan is also weirdly fascinating to watch as Moore, who emerges as something like an “honest terrorist,” in contrast to the sleazy duplicity of O’Keefe.
Violence and Carnage
Judging from “The Spectacular,” every member of the Provisional IRA was either a psychotic murderer or an informer—or not infrequently, both. Ultimately, Bosch and Kuijpers build towards a rather unsatisfyingly ironic epilogue, but they vividly capture the fear and carnage the group spread.The series also casts the European Left of the 1980s in a largely unflatteringly light, particularly the naïveté of the student-activist Lynch seduces, who learns the hard way that “revolutionaries” often turn out to be scary terrorists.
In many ways, “The Spectacular” serves as a corrective to self-serving revisionist histories of the Provisional IRA. The series leaves little doubt regarding their violent means and power-seeking goals. It is a decidedly dark thriller, but Maes’s perspective greatly helps to humanize it.
