Filmed in 2016, Secret City is a dystopian vision of a future for Australia that has already come to pass in America. That’s what I can’t get over, watching the fifth and penultimate episode of the show’s first season (“Ghosts in the Machine”). I mean, it’s uncanny. Right-wing influence peddlers collude with authoritarian foreign governments to consolidate power. They use fear of non-white foreign hordes to drum up xenophobic fever. They take advantage of the previously existing, already unaccountable security and surveillance apparatus — left intact by a left-wing government in order to look tough — to consolidate power even further. Like I said in my previous review, all you need to do is change a few nationalities around, and this thing isn’t a drama, it’s a documentary.

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In the end, I think the point Secret City is trying to make as it closes in on its final hour is that politics as warped as those being practiced here is pulp. If politics is the art of the possible, as the saying goes, and it’s possible to detain a journalist without a warrant and disappear her into a Kafkaesque nightmare only the lawyers of the country’s top newspaper can get her out of — and only just in time, since legislation has been passed to prevent this — well then, there’s really no limit to what politics can be, right? Compromised cabinet members, clandestine meetings, rampant corruption, flagrant human rights abuses, crackdowns on dissidents: Anything goes. Are a few bodice-ripping hookups and pitched gun battles really that outlandish in a political landscape that seems torn from a fever dream?

I reviewed episode five of Secret City for Decider. There’s some sex stuff in this one, too!

Tags: decider, reviews, secret city, TV, TV reviews

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