Created by Matt Charman, Hostage is the story of Abigail Dalton, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who faced the biggest predicament of her life when she was forced to choose between protecting her family or safeguarding her nation’s integrity. Dalton’s husband had been abducted by certain unknown criminals, and they demanded her resignation if she wanted to see him alive. Obviously, Dalton’s daughter wanted her to save her father and do as she was told. But Dalton chose not to negotiate with the kidnappers, and by doing so, she put the life of her husband at risk. So let’s find out what happened in Hostage season 1 and if Dalton was able to find the perpetrators.
Spoiler Alert
Why was Alex kidnapped?
In a conference in Delhi, the British Prime Minister, Abigail Dalton, had said that Vivienne Toussaint, the French president, was a “handmaiden to the hard right.” Obviously, that statement didn’t go down well with Toussaint, and as a result, it ended up straining the political relations between the two nations. Toussaint had stopped exporting medicinal drugs to Great Britain, as a result of which many patients lost their lives. The opposition fully exploited the situation, placing Dalton under scrutiny and openly dismissing her policies as redundant and ineffective. President Toussaint was coming on an official visit to the UK, and Dalton wanted to mend the relationship between the two nations. Toussaint met Dalton and told her that she needed a solution for the refugee problem that France was facing. She wanted French soldiers on British soil to deter the migrants from entering her country. She told Dalton that the crisis her nation was grappling with, stemmed from British citizens, since a majority of the refugees were British nationals, and so Dalton was obliged to agree with her. Dalton was still negotiating with Toussaint when she got to know that her husband, who was a doctor and a part of Médecins Sans Frontières, had been kidnapped from French Guinea, where he had gone to provide medical help to the refugees. The kidnappers issued a statement stating that Alex and his team of doctors would be killed if Dalton didn’t resign in the next 24 hours. Dalton knew that she needed President Toussaint’s help to find out who was behind the kidnapping. She knew that without the support of the French military, she wouldn’t be able to track the kidnappers and save the doctors. She went and had a chat with Toussaint, who now knew that she had leverage over Dalton. The British PM had no choice but to make certain concessions and give her what she wanted. Toussaint went and made a public announcement that the SOS Mediterranee (a European maritime humanitarian organization that is basically incorporated by an association of Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and France) ship would be docked in UK waters and treat the people on board. However, the news of the kidnapping wasn’t made public as Abigail believed her adversaries in the cabinet would use it against and force her to resign.
One doesn’t need to be an expert in geopolitics to understand what it means for a nation to let a ship belonging to a foreign nation be docked so close to its territory. Dalton wasn’t really happy with it, but at least she was getting Toussaint’s support, and she felt that once she had saved her husband, she would tackle the opposition. But just moments before the French military was going to attack the kidnapper’s base, Toussaint received a video on her phone. It looked as if the president had seen a ghost. She felt fuzzy, but then, regaining her composure, she ordered the military to call off the mission.
How did Toussaint and Dalton form an alliance?
For the longest time, Dalton didn’t know why President Toussaint backed out at the very last moment. The truth was that Toussaint had an intimate relationship with her stepson, Matheo Lewis, for a brief period of time, back in the day. The kidnappers had gotten their hands on an intimate video that Matheo had taken when they were spending some quality time together. Toussaint didn’t know who had leaked that video, but she knew that she had to do what the kidnappers asked of her. Dalton eventually got some alone time with Toussaint, and that’s where the latter told her that she was being blackmailed. Meanwhile, Dalton was losing the support of her own cabinet, and she wanted to do something before they moved forward with a no-confidence motion against her. Dalton made a public statement, telling the British citizens why she’d agreed for the European ship to be docked in British waters. She told the people that her husband had been kidnapped and that the perpetrators were demanding her to step down from her post. She said that her nation was above everything else for her and that she wouldn’t give in or negotiate with the kidnappers. She also took the opportunity to reveal that President Toussaint was being blackmailed, because of which she had called off the covert operation that was meant to rescue Dr. Alex and others. Toussaint did not expect Dalton to make such a bold move. Meanwhile, Toussaint’s husband, Elias Vernier, who owned a media company in France, got to know about Toussaint’s relationship with his son. He was livid, but he wanted to make sure that he controlled the narrative and didn’t let the opposition take advantage of it. He had a huge influence on the kind of policy Toussaint’s cabinet made, which was one of the main reasons the people who believed in Toussaint lost trust in her.
Matheo also resented the fact that she had become a puppet of right-wingers like his own father when she was capable of doing so much better for the people of France. He disagreed with her stance on the refugee crisis, which was why he had distanced himself from her for a long time. In fact, Matheo’s hatred for his father ran so deep that he had even stopped using his last name. But then things changed after Toussaint realized that she, too, hated the person she had become. Firstly, Toussaint told her husband that she was divorcing him, and then went to meet Dalton to tell her that she was ready to ally with her. Toussaint told Dalton that she would rescue her husband, but she would have to help her find the mole who had leaked that video of her and Matheo.
Who killed President Vivienne Toussaint, and why?
Though Alex lost two of his colleagues, the French forces were able to rescue him and two other captives, one of whom was a doctor, and the other a British agent. Dalton asked Ayesha, one of the people working on her team, to do a background check on everybody from her and Toussaint’s team. Ayesha found that Kofi, the chief secretary to Abigail Dalton, had an offshore account, and he had made a transaction of $72,000 just some time back. But Kofi was not the mole who had leaked information to the kidnappers. It was Toussaint’s chief secretary, Adrienne Pelletier, who was working for the kidnappers. She had no direct relation to the kidnappers, but she’d agreed to help them because she was not happy that Toussaint had changed her political stance and gradually shifted to the far right, probably because of her husband. This was not the candidate that she had voted for, and she was ready to go to any lengths to remove her from her position. When Toussaint decided to launch the rescue operation, Adrienne went to another room to let the kidnappers know about it. Kofi caught her in the act and made sure that she was taken into custody. Kofi was also suspended from his position, but it was later revealed that he was not a traitor; he had only used that money to buy some medical supplies to save his ailing wife’s life.
The kidnappers eventually leaked that video in which Toussaint and Matheo were together. Soon after that, Matheo found out that his girlfriend, Saskia Morgan, had left his house and gone missing. Saskia, too, was working for the kidnappers, and she was the one who went and killed Dalton’s father, who at that time was admitted to a hospital. Sylvie, Dalton’s daughter, who was very close to her grandfather, was shattered when she got to know about his demise. Strangely enough, Saskia had left her laptop behind, and Matheo believed that she must have forgotten it in her rush. Matheo accessed the files on it, and he found out that Saskia was a spy who had been tracking their movements for a very long time. Matheo immediately took the laptop to Toussaint, who, at that time, was at Downing Street meeting Dalton.
The laptop has a bomb hidden inside, and the leader of the kidnappers had carefully planted it at Matheo’s house, as he knew that he would carry it to Downing Street after getting to know the truth about Saskia. That anonymous man who stood just outside the house posing as a journalist detonated it, and the blast claimed Toussaint’s life, though Dalton fortunately survived. The kidnappers believed that their mission was successful, and they had no clue that instead of Dalton, the French president had been killed in the attack.
Why did General Livingston want PM Dalton to resign?
Adrienne, before being taken to France, told the British officers that she had coordinated with a man named Shagan, who happened to be a British national. When Dalton asked her people to conduct a background search on Saskia, she came to know that she’d served as a corporal in the 3rd battalion of the Highland Guards, and she lost her job when Dalton cut the funding to the army. Back in the day, when Abigail Dalton was a junior minister in the foreign office, the Guatemalan army had invaded Belize. Dalton was asked to make a choice: either order the forces to wait until all the locals were rescued, or prioritise saving British citizens and leave the locals behind. At that moment, Dalton took the call to save her officers, and because of her decision, a lot of locals ended up losing their lives.
An officer named John Michael Shagan lost his fiancée, who was working as a translator and was 6 months pregnant at the time, and from that day, he vowed to take revenge on Dalton. The man only needed the right trigger to do that. The chief commander of the 3rd battalion at that time was General Livingston, who was now the head of the British army. Shagan, Saskia, and all the others who were involved in the conspiracy were working under his orders. He didn’t approve of PM Dalton’s policies, and he absolutely hated it when he got to know that she was slashing military budgets and redirecting the funds to the NHS. Due to the budget cuts, many soldiers like Saskia had lost their means of livelihood, and so they too had a lot of anger against the regime. General Livingston never wanted to kill Dalton; he had only asked Shagan to remove her from his way. Shagan went ahead and planted the bomb, and the general did not appreciate the fact that he had disobeyed his orders. It didn’t take long for Dalton’s team to find out that Shagan and General Livingston were linked. A vote of no confidence had been passed against her, and Dan Ogilvy, who was the defense secretary, had become the interim PM. A state of emergency had been declared, and Livingston was quite pleased with his efforts, as everything was going as per his plan. At the end of Hostage, Dalton went with her team to confront Livingston, though she knew that she didn’t have any solid evidence to back her claims. Her theory was speculative until Livingston walked right into their trap by ranting that he had never ordered Shagan to plant that laptop at Downing Street. Dan realized that he hadn’t mentioned anything about the laptop to Livingston. Dan asked the army to take General Livingston into custody, and he apologized to Dalton for not trusting her in the first place. Dalton was reinstated, but the threat to her life hadn’t ended, as Shagan and Saskia were yet to be captured.
Did Shagan kill PM Dalton?
If you notice, almost everybody who was involved in the conspiracy against PM Abigail Dalton had different motives: Saskia was there because she had lost her job, Shagan to avenge his family’s death, Adrienne because she was ideologically against Toussaint, and General Livingston because he was a male chauvinist who found it extremely hard to comply with the orders of a female leader, especially when they didn’t align with his interests. Shagan took it upon himself to locate the PM and kill her. But once again, he wasn’t able to catch her: he got to know that Alex, Sylvie, and Matheo, after the bomb blast, were moved to a house which belonged to one of Matheo’s friends. Dalton had stayed back with the team, as she wanted to expose General Livingston. Shagan broke into the house with Saskia and took Matheo, Alex, and Sylvie captive. He gave a call to Dalton, who had no option but to do whatever he told her to. Shagan was in one room together with Alex, while Saskia was in another room with Sylvie and Matheo. It was the first time Matheo and Saskia came face-to-face after he had gotten to know that she was with the kidnappers. Matheo actually loved Saskia, and from appearances, she too loved him. She told Matheo that if he knew her truth, the kind of person she actually was, he couldn’t have ever loved her. Matheo told her that it was not so. They had an altercation when Saskia figured out that he had called the police and that backup was arriving at their location. Matheo stopped defending himself, and he left it up to Saskia to do whatever she felt like. Saskia wasn’t able to kill him because no matter what she said, she had really fallen for Matheo. Matheo told Saskia to leave before the police arrived at the scene. Meanwhile, Sylvie took Saskia’s gun, and she went to the other room. There she saw Shagan standing with a knife in front of her parents. Shagan told Sylvie that he had killed her grandfather. He was trying to incite her, as he wanted her to pull the trigger. He probably wanted her to have the guilt of taking a life. He knew how it felt to kill somebody, which was why he wanted Sylvie to do it. Sylvie shot Shagan dead, and then she was taken into custody by the authorities. I believe that Dalton was able to prove in court that her daughter had acted in self-defense, as Sylvie was released within 3 months.
At the end of Hostage, PM Abigail Dalton made a public statement that she was going to call for general elections seeking a fresh mandate. She said that the people deserved their politicians to be truthful, which was why she had decided she would continue in office only if the public placed their trust in her. It was obviously a brave move, as she didn’t know if the people would choose her or not. But she wanted to lead with honesty and set a precedent for the people of the nation in general. I believe that if there is a Hostage season 2, Matheo will try to find Saskia, as they both had a lot of feelings and unresolved sentiments for each other. As for Sylvie, I think she would take some time to recover from her trauma, and I hope that she is able to find the silver lining in all that has transpired.
