In the opening
episode of Bodyguard, a BBC drama series screening on Netflix, an
off-duty police terrorism specialist (a man) confronts a female suicide bomber
on a crowded train.
It’s convincingly
tense, but there’s not a lot to distinguish it from other post-9/11 plotlines –
that is, except for one thing.
The commander of a
police anti-terrorism squad that boards the train is a cool and efficient black
woman. Nothing remarkable about that, in itself. But then we see a police
sniper waiting to get a clean shot at the suicide bomber, and the sniper is a
woman too.
