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6. The Final Showdown

  Halfway through the final episode, Susan is given a final warning to stop pursuing the case.  The deputy commissioner threatens her with consequences if he finds her at his office again and tells her that this will disappoint her husband, Timothy.  She reluctantly tells the deputy commissioner that she will stop, but once again, all the women continue to brainstorm about how they will retrieve concrete evidence against Malcolm Crowley.  If the deputy commissioner won't believe them about the postcards, they need to find his files, or other evidence, to prove he is the killer and the poor man that was arrested, Gerald Wiggins, is innocent.   Meanwhile, Susan and the other women devote their attention to the content on the postcards.  Cavendish, the old SOE director, told them that Crowley worked as an illustrator during World War II, creating provocative pictures of women to discourage foreign army men from continuing to serve the Axis powers (which primarily consisted of Germany
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5. A Close Encounter

The third and final episode of the season opens where we left off.  Susan is in the mental hospital with Malcolm Crowley.  She does not know his true identity and he lies about who he is.  He also knows that Susan is looking for him because of the train station incident and the fact that she is directly asking for Malcolm Crowley's files.  He takes her to the file room and sits down at his desk.  He fumbles for a cigarette as he explains that he signed the Official Secrets Act of 1939, just like Susan did at Bletchley Park.  Therefore, he cannot hand over the files.  As Susan listens, she looks over at his pack of cigarettes and recognizes it is the same brand of cigarettes found at the murder sites.  She thanks him for the opportunity to talk anyway and quickly leaves the mental hospital.  Scared knowing that she was with the killer, she runs to the police to tell them about Crowley's file room.  The police respond by going to the mental hospital, but they find his office comp

4. Risks and Their Consequences

  Halfway through the second episode, Susan, Lucy, Millie, and Jean attempt to track down neighbors or relatives that know their suspects.  Susan and Millie discover a potential suspect, Gerard Wiggins, matches who they think the killer is: someone who has authority on the train way, and someone how knows routes by heart.  However, they learn Wiggins has a brain injury that has severely impacted his intelligence.  When the women finally meet up later, they learn that Wiggins was taken into custody as the police found evidence in his train station locker.  Susan claims he could not do this.  Knowing what they know now, Wiggins is simply a scapegoat for the killer and is not smart enough to kill in the pattern/way the killer does.  As the group think about their next move, they remember the victims.  All the victims were pretty young women.  The group decides to take a risk--they want to use Lucy as bait for the killer on his most common train route.   Lucy is very reluctant at first.  S

3. Morality and Technology

  The second episode of The Bletchley Circle opens on a somber note.  The victim Susan and her friends found at the end of the last episode is receiving a public funeral.  Susan attends this and as she listens to the eulogy, she reflects on what she has gotten herself into.  At the same time, her friends were wanting to back away from the investigation but now changed their mind after finding the victim.  They are all motivated to continue their search for the killer.  Now that they correctly predicted the location of the fifth victim, they believe they are on the right track to finding out the killer's identity. Back at their meeting spot, the women start to narrow down their list of suspects to seven men.  In the last episode, they figured that the victims would not leave with any normal man--the man would have to have some sort of authority in order to lure them away from the trains.  Thus, they expect the killer to work on the railways.  However, they do not have enough data to

2. Technology and Ideology

  The first half of the pilot episode focused on setting up the main plot of the series which is catching a serial killer in London.  The protagonist Susan, who worked at Bletchley Park as a code-breaker during World War II, cannot ignore the killings because she notices a pattern that links all of the victims together.  She brings this information to the deputy commissioner who sends out police to check an area Susan suspects a fifth victim may be located.  The police return empty handed which results in Susan's research and ideas being pushed aside by the authorities.  Her husband, Timothy, who is a civil servant in the Department of Transport, does not know about Susan's past as a code-breaker.  He is embarrassed by her failed attempt at locating the killer with the deputy commissioner and actively insists on her forgetting the case and staying home to fulfill the role of housewife and mother to his children.  His disappointment spurs her to burn her notes about the cases an

1. Plotline and Representations

  The Bletchley Circle, a historical drama from 2012, is a three-episode long show that centers around a group of four women who met in 1943 during World War II as code breakers for the British army.  Jean, Millie, Susan, and Lucy (pictured above from left to right) decipher and crack a German code that reveals German troops are approaching.  With the code deciphered, they save the British military and other allies from the planned surprise attack from the Germans.  Nine years later in 1952, they are all separated and back to their "ordinary lives." https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/birth-of-the-computer/4/82 Although this show is fictional, it is based on actual events.  There really was a group of code-breakers at Bletchley Park in England.  According to the Computer History Museum website, one of the most prominent pieces of technology used was dubbed the "Colossus," an electronic code-breaking computer.  Additionally, most of the code-breakers that were