If you like hard-hitting military action (of the fictional kind, of course), you’re all over the wildly popular Strike Back series. Well, lock ‘n’ load, comrades, because season 8 of Strike Back is now streaming on Binge and Foxtel Now.
Created by SAS commando turned bestselling author Chris Ryan, based on his novel of the same name, and debuting in 2010, the extremely muscular Strike Back follows the high calibre exploits of Section 20, a super-secret subsection of the British Secret Intelligence Service, who gallivant around the globe dealing with the kind of high-risk, high-body count missions that would make James Bond consider early retirement.
Strike Back: Vendetta, to give this eighth and apparently final season its full and illustrious title, follows directly on from the events of Strike Back: Revolution, with Section 20 up against Italian-Albanian crime family the Demachis, headed by the icy Arianna (Ivana Miličević) and brutal Edon (Goran Bogdan) who are on the hunt for an engineered virus (a bioweapon, in other words) for the usual nefarious purposes. Also in the mix are a pair of Jihadist terrorists, brothers Zayef and Mahir Hijari (Alec Secareanu and Bamshad Abedi-Amin).
On the side of the angels, we have the members of Section 20 who have managed to survive the previous seven seasons: Daniel MacPherson as Sergeant Samuel Wyatt, Warren Brown as Sergeant Thomas “Mac” McAllister, Alin Sumarwata as Lance Corporal Gracie Novin, Jamie Bamber as Colonel Alexander Coltrane, and Varada Sethu as Lance Corporal Manisha Chetri. This being the big finale, don’t expect all of them to survive to the final episode.
Fans of the tactical action subgenre, which puts realism and military accuracy above your more cinematic approaches to filming people killing each other, have heralded Strike Back as one of the leaders in that particular field, for those who have yet to discover its charms, you certainly get a lot of bang for your buck.
