‘The Last Post’ on Amazon: Sex, Lies, And Vintage Terrorism

Amazon‘s The Last Post opens with blue skies and promise. We see a young newlywed couple landing in 1965 Aden. The husband, a uniformed officer named Joe Martin (Jeremy Neumark Jones), is here to take up an important post in the region, while his improperly wool-clad wife Honor (Jessie Buckley) is acting as though they’re continuing their honeymoon indefinitely in this exotic locale. But things will not be so dreamy for long. The Last Post is about the twilight days of British colonialism in the Middle East and the rise of Islamic guerrilla groups, who use suicide bombers, sharp-shooters, and mind games to further their cause. But Moffat isn’t just interested in war games. He gives as much time and space to the wives and children forced to tag along on this adventure. This is a show about the families, friends, and rivals who are stuck together in Aden. So the show plays like an ultra-elegant hybrid of Manhattan, The Crown, and Marvel’s The Punisher.

The Last Post is the brainchild of popular British showrunner and writer Peter Moffat. Moffat, not to be confused with Sherlock and Doctor Who‘s Steven Moffat, is perhaps best-known in Britain for his legal dramas. HBO’s The Night Of was based on a Moffat series called Criminal Justice. Moffat drew from his own life experience for the series. His father served in 1960s Aden as a member of the Royal Military Police and he spent his childhood there. For context, Aden was an old jewel in the British colonial empire. They began occupying the Yemeni port city in the early 1830s, as a way to stop-gap the piracy problem afflicting trade routes to the east. By the 1950s, Aden had another role to play. It was the site of a major BP oil refinery. As the Yemeni teetered towards revolution, Britain sent additional forces to combat rebel groups on the ground.

Which brings us back around to The Last Post. I’ll admit the first episode is a bit dull at points: beautiful, but dull. But this is a show interested in the calms before the raging storms, the breath in before the scream out. The Last Post likes to lull you into a place of comfort so that the moments of flashing horror are all the more vivid. Parts of The Last Post will send a chill down your spine as sharp as an ice cube placed your skin in the fever of a hot August day. There’s one shot at the end of Episode 2, where an officer arrives at the hospital, where his wife is ailing after giving birth. He’s just returned from a failed mission, and so he’s covered in blood splatters and holding the swaddled head of a fallen soldier in his arms. (Yes, there is decapitation in this show. Like I said, the dreaminess doesn’t last long.) In the same line, he tells someone he’s there to go to his wife, and the mortuary.

Marvel’s The Punisher dealt with modern American soldiers attempting to make peace with the sins they committed while deployed in Afghanistan. But in that show, these men had to balance who they were as soldiers with who they were at home. The idea being that there was a wall between the guy with a gun and the man who was the father, husband, friend, and son. The Last Post doesn’t allow its military characters this divide. The men all live with their families in the barracks. The tetchy friendships between the wives can undermine the power balance in a unit and younger officers get assigned unofficial babysitting duty. There’s still a veil between who these men are at home and who they are at work, but it’s a gossamer one. Everyone knows each other’s secrets, which isn’t good in a place where secrets can literally get someone killed.

And speaking of the families…like Manhattan, The Last Post is as interested in the wants, needs, dreams, and heartaches of the women holding down the fort at home as they are with the soldiers. I even noticed that this show, which is about a bunch of British soldiers scrambling to fight a Middle Eastern force leaning increasingly on terrorist-like tactics, passes the Bechdel Test. The female leads are three-dimensional women who get to chat about Christmas trees, cocktails, the best way to kill a scorpion.

The Last Post is an exquisite ensemble drama featuring actors like Essie Davis, The Crown‘s Ben Miles, Stephen Campbell Moore, Amanda Drew, and up-and-comers like Jessie Buckley and Tom Glynn-Carney, but the glittering star, acting her butt off in the middle of it, is Jessica Raine. If you’re even a passing fan of British period dramas, you’ll recognize Raine from Call the Midwife. Here, she plays a character as far from sweet midwife Jenny Lee as possible. Alison Laithwaite is a depressed, debauched military wife who is smarting after an extra-marital affair ends in quite possibly the worst way possible. She spends her days swilling gin and brooding about her lot in life, and discovers a plaything in Buckley’s Honor Martin.

The Last Post is a trickier watch than something like The Crown. It’s a show that challenges its viewers as much as it challenges its characters. And while the show doesn’t deal with explicit terrorism, you can’t help but draw parallels between the tactics on display and how we wage war in the 21st Century. Because of that it’s a show that hooks you as you sink into it. The more you watch, the more you’ll want to see.

The Last Post is now streaming on Prime Video.

Stream The Last Post on Prime Video