The Jackal’s Day Gets Off to a Great Start – Rate the Premiere!

Peacock has set its sights on suspense with the new hitman drama The day of the Jackaland no time is wasted in achieving the good things.

Early in Thursday’s premiere, we look in the mirror at what appears to be an old man practicing a foreign language, but when the real old man turns out to be dead, we realize this is just a disguise. The disguised man enters a Munich office building and pretends to be a janitor, slips upstairs and pulls a gun as he approaches his target. However, he is discovered and has to kill several people before focusing on his target, a young German man. The man runs for his life down the stairs, and the killer shoots him in the leg before aiming for his head… but the bullet whizzes past his temple. The killer makes a daring escape, throwing smoke bombs and sliding down a wire down the side of the building before disappearing. Later we see his true face: he is the Jackal, a high-class assassin played by Eddie Redmayne.

His target was Elias, the son of Manfred Fest, the top candidate running for German Chancellor. As Manfred rushes to the hospital to visit his son, the Jackal takes up residence in a nearby building, takes a sniper rifle from an ordinary-looking suitcase, and sets up a red pinwheel outside the balcony of his room. (Ah, so he only injured Elias to lure Manfred out.) When Manfred leaves his car at the hospital, the Jackal takes aim and fires, a bullet ripping through Manfred’s skull. Then the Jackal calmly disassembles his gun and leaves a timing device under his bed before driving away in a Mercedes. When the authorities arrive at the room where he took the photo, the timed device explodes and the Jackal switches cars in a parking garage, blowing up the first car as well. He’s good at this!

In London we meet MI6 agent Bianca (played by Lashana Lynch), who is just learning what happened in Germany. When she hears that the bullet is coming from over two miles away, she says that’s not possible and that she needs to know: “Snipers are my perch.” She tells her superiors that a shot from that distance would break the world record for a confirmed kill, and she insists that the weapon must have been custom-made by Norman Stoke, a fugitive gunsmith in Northern Ireland. She volunteers to find him… even though her fellow officers label her as “a nuisance.” Meanwhile, the Jackal covers his tracks by buying an expensive collector’s chess set in Nuremberg, showing it to the border guards, who eventually send him on.

Bianca flies to Belfast to meet Alison, an asset who could put her in touch with Norman Stoke – causing her to miss her daughter’s parents’ evening – and tension immediately arises between them, with Bianca threatening to throw Alison in jail if she doesn’t. ‘not comply. The Jackal is hiding out in Paris, using a secure messaging network to bill for his hit at Manfred Fest, when he gets a message from a mysterious client offering him a new job. He refuses to meet in person, but when they offer a $10 million fee, he relents…but demands $1 million just to meet. He goes to Sweden, sneaks behind the customer into a bird watching cage and doesn’t let her see his face. The target is tech billionaire Ulle Dag Charles (The Crown’S Khalid Abdalla), who is preparing a new application to make the world’s finances completely transparent. (Rich people hate that.) The Jackal tells her it will cost them a hundred million dollars (!), and when she says she needs to consult with her colleagues, he disappears without a word.

Bianca doesn’t hear from Alison anymore, so she decides to approach it from a different angle: Alison’s daughter Emily, a London student who deals well with radical lefties on campus. Bianca and the police find Emily at a protest and take her in, intending to hold her as blackmail to get Alison to give up Norman Stoke’s location. But when they lock Emily in a cell, she goes into cardiac arrest, and Bianca rides with her in the ambulance as the poor girl convulses and eventually passes out. The Jackal flies to Spain, where he is reunited with his wife (!) Nuria, played by Money heists Úrsula Corberó, who seems completely unaware of his field. At home, he gets back on the secure messaging app to again request payment for the Manfred Fest hit, which he still hasn’t received. The answer he gets back? “F–K. YOU.” Uh-oh… you might not want to make this guy angry.

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