Prime Target Season 1 Episode 3 Review: The Sequence

To say Prime Target Season 1 Episode 3, “The Sequence,” is not great is putting it mildly. There’s a lot going on, and very few aspects of the episode work. It’s disappointing.

Part of the issue is that “The Sequence” has too much going on, so nothing gets the chance to develop as it should. We spend time with Safiya at Cambridge, Andrea’s coworker in Baghdad, Andrea as she decides to go to Baghdad, and then we follow around Ed and Taylah (thankfully their storylines do merge).

It’s clear that the Baghdad piece will tie in eventually, and the scenes there hint that this conspiracy Ed and Taylah have found themselves in covers a lot of ground.

However, that doesn’t mean that we need to follow Andrea’s colleague around as he befriends the crew and potentially learns that one of them has been killed after tipping him off about shady dealings happening at the site.

As for the flashbacks to Safiya’s time, they are completely unnecessary.

The Kaplar Institute connection could have been discovered solely through Ed and Taylah’s scenes. The only thing we really needed the flashbacks to reveal is that Robert (Ed’s deceased advisor) warned Safiya away from researching prime numbers, just as he did Ed.

This means that it wasn’t Safiya’s death that made him wary of this research. There’s something else in his past that we don’t know about yet. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be surprising if Prime Target decided we need another flashback to explore this. Odds are it will be as useless as Safiya’s, but time will tell.

Prime Target does at least realize that Safiya’s flashback scenes only require short scenes to get the point across. In truth, the flashbacks wouldn’t be as detrimental if the rest of the episode was in better shape.

On the bright side, Ed and Taylah have finally met and joined forces. Their team up just doesn’t quite work.

You have Ed who has been through a lot recently. He’s aware he’s being watched/pursued by the suspicious Kaplar Institute, his advisor died under mysterious circumstances, and he was just mugged. If I were him, I’d be wary of anyone approaching me.

And yet, he allows Taylah to tag along with him to the library. She showed interest in his work, which should have been a concern for him, but he brushes it off until after they’ve been pursued. Then he decides to press for details.

No immediate reason comes to mind as to why Taylah couldn’t have explained everything to him at that bar. It would have made a lot more sense if Taylah shared the full extent of her involvement and her near-death experience. It would have made Ed trust her a bit more, so her tagging along to the campus would not have been as odd.

While they are hiding out in the church, they could have still discussed Safiya’s note, and Taylah could have explained more as to how she knows that primes are essential to digital security. She just blurts it out as if it’s common knowledge, but she doesn’t give any indication as to how she knows that or why she’s right.

Perhaps we are supposed to believe that this is just common NSA training or common knowledge to people like Ed who are math geniuses. It’s just bothersome that she makes this grand declaration without any proof.

What did you think of this episode of Prime Target? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Prime Target airs on Wednesdays on Apple TV+.

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