Hostage Season 1 Review: An Overstuffed but Intriguing Political Drama

Hostage is a twisty and overstuffed political thriller that does not quite stick the landing, despite a compelling performance from star Suranne Jones.

To the series’ credit, it wastes no time in getting into the action and the central plot. We get a brief introduction to who the Prime Minister is, and her family, and almost immediately, we go to the present day, where her husband is kidnapped along with his fellow doctors working for Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). 

What Hostage does well is to keep the crisis mostly contained to the UK and France, rather than too many other countries having a say, barring the dismissively titled “The Americans” making several calls to the leaders in the show.

But where it could have been a more interesting meditation on what a leader should do when having to weigh their family’s safety against their country’s, the series instead tries to concoct a plot that would fit better on The Diplomat or even Scandal with some of its more shocking twists.

Dalton’s moral dilemma is probably the most interesting part of the series, but her unwilling partner in all of this, Vivienne Toussaint, never gets the chance to be as interesting.

There is a lot of talk about the kind of “good” politician Toussaint used to be, now that she is apparently cutthroat and craven in pursuit of votes, but we never really get to see who that was, or why she changed herself so drastically.

Jones and Delpy have a few good scenes opposite each other, but their relationship gets overshadowed by just about every preposterous thing that happens next after Alex’s kidnapping: the step-son is being spied on by his girlfriend, who also might be in on the plot to kidnap Dalton’s husband, along with a mole on either Dalton’s or Toussaint’s staff, and this shadow organization may also be responsible for Dalton’s father’s death.

There simply is too much going on, and five episodes is nowhere near enough to cover it.

It would have been a far better-paced series if it had stayed focused on the tension between Toussaint and Dalton, and the ways in which both their families are breaking apart because of the pressure on them.

The best moments are where Dalton is stripped down to the basic question of struggling with the responsibility of being a leader, but also a wife and mother and daughter – how can you be responsible for a whole country if you can’t even protect your own family?

There’s a tension that Suranne Jones is very good at holding – physically and mentally – in her moments spent alone reeling from the litany of bad news she receives in such rapid succession.

With all those twists and turns, you would expect the mastermind of this plot to instigate a coup of Dalton’s government to be someone completely unexpected. But when you see who it is, the realization does not hit as hard you would expect it to, considering just how many people died to make this coup happen.

The reveal and the evil mastermind speech from General Livingston, who just thinks Dalton is making the UK weak by cutting the military budget, is not exactly a compelling motivation for a villainous character. He is really just another power-hungry war hawk.

The antagonist that is far more compelling is Shagan, whose aim to destroy Dalton is far more personal. Although his story comes to an abrupt end, having Dalton’s daughter be the one to kill him implies that he might have fulfilled his mission of making Dalton suffer as much as his family did.

Despite there being too much going on for too few episodes, Hostage is a bingeable political thriller that tries to tackle the question of the responsibility of the protagonist to her family and country, with great performances from Suranne Jones, Julie Delpy, and a strong supporting cast.

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Hostage is available to stream on Netflix.

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