The Slow, Creeping Horror of <em>The Salisbury Poisonings</em>

Read: The problem of the pandemic movie

Part of this is structural: Rather than focusing the series on the biggest players in the drama, the writers, Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn, orient it instead around the ordinary people whose lives were upended by a chemical-weapons attack on British soil. Tracy Daszkiewicz (played by Anne-Marie Duff) is a local public-health official more accustomed to investigating food-poisoning outbreaks than the usage of extraordinarily lethal, military-grade organophosphates. Nick Bailey (Rafe Spall) is a Salisbury police officer accidentally exposed to Novichok while investigating Skripal’s home. Dawn Sturgess (MyAnna Buring) is a mother of three whose boyfriend, Charlie, accidentally poisons her when he gives her a perfume bottle filled with nerve agent that the would-be assassins had casually discarded in a trash can. By sidelining the international intrigue and giving attention to the civil servants and bystanders who absorbed the aftershocks of the attack, The Salisbury Poisonings puts the anxiety of the incident front and center.

The first episode begins with actors playing Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, as they shake and foam at the mouth in front of a store in the center of Salisbury. Toward its end, viewers see a ghastly triptych: an appalled Tracy googling nerve agents in the middle of the night, a feverish Nick vomiting at home, and a carefree Dawn dancing at a house party, sweaty and ecstatic after drinking too much cheap vodka. The scene, to me, felt as apt an accounting of the early months of the pandemic as any I’d seen on television, with each character representing a different kind of COVID-19 mindset. Tracy represents the doomscrollers, consuming every detail she can to the point of a panic attack. Nick is an essential worker whose life is at risk because of the simple fact that his job is actually useful. Dawn is business as usual, blithely unaware that a deadly toxin is spreading through her hometown.

By the second episode, dread has suffused the show to such an extent that when Tracy’s colleague coughs in a meeting, she flinches and swivels around 180 degrees to investigate the source. Watching Nick casually embrace his wife and children after first being exposed is an exercise in anxiety. Once he’s been hospitalized, a scene in which his wife flings herself on him as he screams at her to stay away is devastating—a reminder of how alienating his sickness is and how even the comfort of touch has been weaponized. As the episodes play out, Tracy becomes more and more haunted, lines etched into her face; she sleeps in her office in gray pajamas. When she learns that Dawn has been poisoned, several months after the initial attack, she breaks down crying. “What did we miss?” she asks her boss. “What the fuck did we miss?”