tells a story that audiences have heard numerous times before—and in infinitely better fashion. A spy saga that requires one absurd leap of faith after another, hinges on inconsistent and unbelievable characterizations, peddles ridiculous plot twists, and loves clichés more than the French adore baguettes, this six-part FX limited series fromis something of a unicorn, in that it boasts not a single original, convincing, or compelling element.
In a refugee camp on the Turkey/Syria border, Adilah is fingered by others as a famed female ISIS commander who goes by many nicknames, including the “Djinn of Raqqa.” This attracts the attention of the globe’s intelligence agencies, and results in Imogen —an MI6 operative working with France’s DGSE agency and, in particular, her former boyfriend Malik —being sent to the outpost to learn if Adilah is “the most wanted woman in the world.
Thanks to an attempt on Adilah’s life and some even more oh-so-convenient developments, Imogen gets Adilah out of the camp alive, and as they take to the road, they bond over their fondness for poetry and Shakespeare. Adilah additionally explains that she’s a single mother who once dreamed of becoming an engineer before circumstance led her into European modeling.
This is the groundwork for what comes to be the most preposterous fictional character in recent memory, unless one sincerely believes that Middle Easterners turn to suicide-bombing jihadi terrorism not out of ideology but because they’ve been blackmailed, and all they really want to be, in the end, are good mommies.
Those include her ISIS pals as well as the West, which is here embodied by a series of caricatures that also negate the proceedings’ seriousness. Chief among them is Max , a CIA bigwig who arrives in Paris and immediately lives up to Malik and his boss’s opinion of Americans as arrogant, violent blowhards.