Diksha Sundriyal
The second season of Peacock’s cyber-thriller ‘The Undeclared War’ has been confirmed and will start filming in the UK in early 2024. The series is created by seven-time BAFTA winner Peter Kosminsky, who wrote four and directed all six episodes of the first season, which aired in the UK on Channel 4.
Set in 2024, the first season follows Saara Parvin, a young coder who gets the opportunity to work at the UK’s cyber intelligence agency, GCHQ, as part of her student experience. Things get chaotic on her first day on the job when a cyber attack forces the agency to reconsider its defenses and find a way to stop further attacks, especially with the upcoming elections on the horizon. Over the course of six episodes, a convoluted picture emerges, confirming Russia’s involvement in the attacks directed at the country’s electoral system.
Hannah Khalique-Brown, who recently appeared in Greta Gerwig’s ’Barbie’ as Growing Up Skipper, plays the role of Saara, a brilliant coder who is still learning the ropes of how things work in the real world. The supporting cast includes actors like Simon Pegg (‘Mission Impossible,’ ‘Shaun of the Dead’), Mark Rylance (‘Wolf Hall,’ ‘Don’t Look Up’), Alex Jennings (‘The Crown,’ ‘This is Going to Hurt’), Adrian Lester (‘Mary Queen of Scots,’ ‘London Spy’) and Maisie Richardson-Sellers (‘Nine Perfect Strangers,’ ‘The Jagged Mind’).
‘The Undeclared War’ is produced by Playground in collaboration with NBCUniversal International Studios, a division of Universal Studio Group. It was produced by Robert Jones. Kosminsky and Colin Callender served as executive producers for Season 1 alongside Noëlette Buckley. The trio has previously collaborated on ‘Wolf Hall.’
While the show’s creators have kept the plot details for Season 2 under wraps, we expect it to be another thrilling look into cybersecurity-related issues with timely relevance to our world. For the first season, Kosminsky and his team thoroughly researched for years and, reportedly, “gained unprecedented access to the cyber security industry on both sides of the Atlantic, allowing a realistic picture of the threat faced by the Western world to be depicted in the drama.”
Kosminsky hinted at an idea that could become central to the second season. He said: “At one point, there’s a reference to, ‘How have the people who designed the malware that is attacking Britain been able to hardwire a MAC address of a particular computer inside GCHQ into their code?’ A MAC address is, I think I described it in the script as like a fingerprint. This is a sort of super-secret facility; how could they know the MAC address to write it into their code? That was not an unintentional loose end. That would possibly be a starting point for a season 2.”
Kosminsky is known for his attention to detail, and his deliberately leaving this loose end shows that he already had something in mind regarding the second season. However, he said this before the show was greenlit, and since then, several changes could have been made. We expect more details about the cast and plot to follow in the coming months.
Read More: Is The Undeclared War Based on a True Story or a Book?
