Temple, series 2 episode 1, review: Mark Strong's anti-hero holds this madness together
Thank you.” “For what?” “For not letting me die and dumping me in the sea.” “My pleasure.” No one could suggest that Temple (Sky Max) lacks a sense of its own ridiculousness, and indeed the chief pleasure of this series lies in how it tackles human tragedy while maintaining a straight face and arched eyebrow, right from the opening exchange of this second series.
Mark Strong’s heart surgeon Daniel Milton had spent season one running an illegal operating theatre in the tunnels beneath Temple tube station, using the takings from those rich and desperate enough to fund a cure for his comatose wife Beth’s (Catherine McCormack) terminal illness. We rejoined him in A Good Place, reintroducing Beth to the outside world (“that’s quite a story – almost unbelievable,” opined the police officer confronted with their cover story for Beth’s resurrection), shuttering the underground clinic for good and listening to Every 1’s a Winner and Everybody Wants to Rule the World while carrying out his business.
But, with fate duly tempted, the wheels span off: the bodies of the criminals dumped into the sewers at the end of series one surfaced; prepper and accomplice Lee (Daniel Mays) became agitated; the woman whose kidney he harvested to save Beth’s life started blackmailing him; his daughter courted the wrath of the law as a guerrilla activist; his old flame Anna (Carice van Houten) nursed resentments that Beth – a fellow medical researcher – was taking the credit for the cure she had discovered.
Having been suspended from work, Milton’s last option was an underworld fixer played, in as unsettlingly louche
a manner as always, by Rhys Ifans. Much once again rested on Mark Strong to hold this madness together, and he just about managed it in the sort of role in which he specialises: the anti-hero doing bad things for good reasons.
Reviews of series one bandied around song titles by The Jam, from Going Underground to Down in the Tube Station at Midnight. As Milton begins his descent into hell, Funeral Pyre feels most apt now.
