'COBRA's Premiere Plunges The Tories Into Darkness

The first words of COBRA's opening episode are “Mayday, mayday” from the cockpit of a passenger plane in desperate trouble. Systems are failing, the fuel tank is empty, and air traffic controllers work frantically with the crew to find a landing place. As we’ll see, it’s just the beginning. We first meet Prime Minister Robert Sutherland (Robert Carlyle) at his daughter Ellie’s college graduation, a brief respite from his many concerns as leader of the country and the Conservative party. As his Chief of Staff Anna Marshall (Victoria Hamilton) puts it, he is a decent, principled man and not a representative of “the nasty party.”

Robert has an imminent crisis on his hands, necessitating a return to London soon after the ceremony and convening a Cabinet Office Briefing in Room A (otherwise known as COBRA) for the next day. The universe is acting up, and it’s not playing cricket. An extreme space weather warning could either “fuse a few kettles or send us back to the stone age.” It’s refreshing to see a government that takes science seriously. Reference is made to the Carrington event, a major electromagnetic storm that knocked out telegraph communications in 1859.

Solar flares on the right side of the sun are expected to initially damage flight safety and satellites and will be followed by a geometric storm, the size and danger of which are not yet known. There’s evidence by the afternoon that the threat level has been raised to severe, and planes cannot land in Paris. Robert decides not to ground all flights, a decision he'll regret. Anna reports that so far all is well, there is no panic at the gas pumps or civil unrest. Although the threat level has been raised to severe, the Cabinet awaits satellite data that will indicate the storm's direction, a crucial factor in the damage that will result.