The pandemic has resulted in an overload of news about fatalities, vaccines, and a failing global economy. For individuals though, the problems are more contained, and concern their everyday experiences. The Salisbury Poisonings focuses on this aspect of human suffering, and is about every person’s battle for survival, during a different tragic event.
This mini-series spanning four episodes is based on the real accounts of the 2018 Novichok Poisoning that happened in Salisbury and Amesbury in England. It’s about Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer and a double agent for the UK, and his daughter Yulia Skripal getting poisoned by Novichok, a nerve agent and thought to be one of the deadliest poisons.
The series tells us that a small amount can kill thousands. The Salisbury Poisonings also focuses on the story of Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey (Rafe Spall), Charlie Rowley (Johnny Harris), and his partner Dawn Sturgess (MyAnna Buring), who were also poisoned by the nerve agent. But the chief focus remains trained on Tracy Daszkiewicz (Anne-Marie Duff), the director of public health for Wiltshire and Nick’s wife, Sarah Bailey (Annabel Scholey), who deliver riveting performances.
The lockdown across the world caused a surge in demand for disaster films and series, and in this backdrop, The Salisbury Poisonings can be seen as a disaster too, albeit man-made. It’s a series reflective of our times—Salisbury economy takes a hit, schools get shut, testing begins... It’s all quite familiar. It’s about the average man’s good fight against the unknown, exemplified by Tracy Daszkiewicz, who begins estranging her family.
As she tells her partner, “It is more important than us. It is more important than anything right now.” Like our governments today, the officers in this series are also forced to confront the ‘panic vs truth’ conundrum. Is the poison more dangerous, or is it the panic? Tracy tries to deal with this by going where the truth leads her.
A pandemic or any such widespread contamination encourages social distancing that goes against the very grain of who we are as a species. Disasters, at their essence, are a problem for and of humanity, and The Salisbury Poisonings never loses sight of this.