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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 and lose hope in preventing another murder from happening.  However, she notices an old picture of her and her Bletchley Park friends which makes her think twice about giving up hope.

In the last post, I mentioned the Colossus and the Enigma machines that were used in real life at the real Bletchley Park.  Susan and her friends are spotted in the opening scene using the Enigma machines which were decoding machines used by Germany in World War II.  The Germans believed the machine to be extremely difficult to decipher, but the Allied powers were able to figure out how they could be used.  Essentially, the Enigma consists of 26 letters that can be scrambled by a wheel.


Due to the complexity of the process, many times a clerk would pair up with another to tackle a code.    Alan Stripp wrote an insightful article called How the enigma works | NOVA | PBS about this process works.  Additionally, aside from the opening scene of The Bletchley Circle, there is no other scene featuring this technology.  In later episodes, other technology is used to trace the patterns of the killer, but it is important to know Susan and her friends' experiences with Enigma machines.  Their code-breaking work at Bletchley Park allowed them to become friends.

Despite her failure to convince the deputy commissioner of a possible victim's location, Susan is determined to prove him wrong.  The deputy commissioner embodies the dominant ideology of the time that women should return to housework or smaller jobs.  Ideologies are cultural concepts and premises that provide framework for representation.  This ideology is strengthened by the surrounding cultural ideas that patriarchal power should remain and women should return to their former positions.  During the war, women were needed for certain jobs, but after it was over, much of society pushed them back into their homes, back to domestic jobs.  He was unwilling to listen to her after his men came back without another body or any evidence of another oncoming killing.  He has power in his job and he runs the police department, thus he doesn't feel like he needs outside help, especially from a woman.  Additionally, this ideology supports the dominant representation that women belonged in their homes even after they were shown to be capable of holding very important jobs during the war.  Although that was the dominant representation during the time period, Susan's determination and superb intelligence display the dominant discourse that the show's creators wanted to convey--women are capable of working intelligent jobs and have the ability to impact society with their skills.

The old picture of her and her Bletchley Park friends inspires her to reunite with them in hopes that their skills will help her track down the killer.  She sets out and finds all of her companions.  Susan attempts to convince them to help her because she cannot find the killer alone.  Each of them have special skills--while Susan is extremely skilled with finding patterns, Millie can speak over a dozen languages, Lucy has a photographic memory which helps with remembering details, and Jean used to be the head of one of the units at Bletchley Park, so she has strong leadership skills and many connections with important people that may be able to help.  

At first, the women are hesitant to help Susan because they are unsure they can do much to solve the case.  To cover up the truth of what they are doing, Susan covers their meetings as a book club in order to prevent any suspicion from arising from Timothy.  Unfortunately, their initial research cannot come quick enough before a fifth victim is missing.  The women piece together that the locations where the other four victims were found all connected to several train routes.  They suspect that the killer may be a frequent rider and may know the usual routes the victims took.  Once they find a location within Susan's proposed pattern, they travel to see if the fifth victim is there and if their predictions were correct.

In a both unfortunate and fortunate turn of events, the women do find the fifth victim in an abandoned building where Susan predicted she would be.  The woman is bound, gagged, and slumped on the ground, pulled up by ropes around her wrists.  She is doused in an old perfume, masking any scent of decomposition.  She also looks like she was sexually assaulted after she died.  The women flee the room in horror.  As they stand outside thinking about what to do, Lucy, the woman with photographic memory, is very upset.  She knows she will never be able to forget that scene, but she had to look at it to memorize any potential clues of the killer's identity.  By the end of the episode, they call the police and try to think of their next move, and whether they should continue searching for the killer.


Cited Sources

Hall, Stuart. "The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media." Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader, edited by Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez, Fourth Edition, SAGE Publications, Inc, 2014, pp. 90-92.

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