This Nightsleeper episode 5 recap contains spoilers... Abby has been removed from her position as Acting Technical Director of NCST and has some very tricky questions to answer about information on her computer. Meanwhile the stowaway is unmasked and we're wondering if we can trust the Minister for Transport...
Screaming echoes around the train following the lone gunshot, but it’s Arran Moy (Alex Ferns) — aka Drunken Annoying Man — who’s been hit and not the mysterious stranger. It turns out the stowaway is Caleb Mahmoud (Rawaed Asde), the boyfriend of Billy (Scott Reid) whom he snuck on the train so they could enjoy a day out in London together and see Jersey Boys.
Caleb tells the other passengers he arrived in Britain with his brother four years ago, but doesn’t have the right to work or remain in the country. Yet with someone on the train potentially working with Iranian terrorists, the BBG, they’re a bit cynical. Meanwhile, Arran is seriously injured from the gunshot, which was fired by what turns out to be HIS rifle.
In London, Saj Siddhu (Parth Thakerer) has taken charge of the situation, while Abby is downstairs being grilled by Mark 'Hud' Hudson (Jonjo O'Neill), who believes she wrote the code used in the hijacking and poses a threat to national security. “Is that incredible to you? Even though you’ve done it before?” he asks pointedly.
“I was 15, you can’t hold that against me now!” says Abby (Alexandra Roach). “Hacking into GCHQ is an offence at any age..” replies Hud. Yet rather than facing punishment, it seems the stunt put Abby on the fast track to a career in cybercrime, which Hud clearly finds rather irksome.
However, when the Director General, Nicola Miller (Pamela Nomvete), enters the room, Hud confronts Abby about the fact that she launched a phishing attack against her. It’s a tight spot, but Abby comes out swinging by saying that it’s the DG who’s a threat to national security - rather than her - as she’s been withholding information.
Can we trust Liz Draycott?
Abby is then shocked to find that it was a piece of encryption used to stage that evening's hijacking was written by her, as part of the attack programme from Operation Mashhad, the aim of which was to hack an Iranian train that was believed to be transporting nuclear material.
“I think Iran is being used by someone who knows about Mashhad to make it seem like them,” says Abby, who then begins asking questions about Miller’s messages to Draycott.
Meanwhile on The Heart of Britain, Rachel Li (Katie Leung) is very close to getting the same information out of the Minister herself. “I was always against it and did everything I could to stop it,” says Liz Draycott (Sharon Small).
It seems UK Rail was about to be broken up and sold to non-UK companies, one of which was the French company, Voyeur Rapide. Miller says she was reluctant to sanction it as she had no idea where the crucial British infrastructure would end up, but she claims that despite what she says, the ambitious Minister of Transport was all for it. The information was highly classified and Miller says Abby should know better than to see Deep state conspiracies everywhere she looks.
Meanwhile, in Abby’s absence Saj asks Joe - or ‘Joseph’ as he calls him - to plug the phone back into the hacking device on the train. He seems to have come up with an acronym and jargon-heavy plan that will hopefully allow them to slow down the train. “Abby said nothing should be done without being tested,” says Pev (David Threlfall), although Saj claims that if they do nothing the train could come off the line in Birmingham within minutes.
However the plan backfires and instead of slowing down, the train speeds up, while a message “Did you really think it would be that easy?” scrolls across the departure board at Euston. Ooops.
Who's been tampering with Abby's computer?
At Abby’s flat, agents have discovered a laptop, which is running an encrypted virtual PC in the background. We’re not sure what that is, but from Abby’s reaction, we’re guessing it’s not good news. “You look an awful lot like someone with something to hide,” says Hud.
However outside the interview - sorry "conversation" room - things are getting tense as the train is hurtling towards London at breakneck speed. Pev begs Miller to bring Abby back, however, the discovery at her flat makes that very difficult - especially as she’s refusing to share the password to her PC. “I can’t give you a password I haven’t set!” says Abby, but Hud doesn’t believe her.
Yet on the train, Arran is on the brink of death, while Fraser (James Cosmo) has come up with a plan. He wants to decouple the train, which sounds pretty dangerous. “We would be fools to try this, but we’d be bigger fools if we just didn’t do anything,” he says and passengers vote to go ahead with the plan, despite Drayott’s protests.
Billy and Joe begin ripping the train apart in a bid to separate the carriages, while back at NCSC the team lose the helicopter feed monitoring The Heart of Britain and realize another train is slowly starting to move to block the line. Apparently it's a deliberate bid to stop the hijacked service from reaching London and the feed has been cut so there’s no record of what’s about to go down.
Back on The Heart of Britain, it seems Fraser crossed back to the other side of the train to get his watch while they were smashing the connection. It seems he’s had a heart attack and collapsed in the process. We thought his days were numbered as soon as we saw him making peace with his daughter-in-law tbh.
Meanwhile, after a host of malware was discovered on Abby’s laptop, it looks like she’s history at the NCSC, but she won’t be going without a fight. Using Saj’s pass (did he leave it deliberately for her?) she escapes the Conversation Room and says she believes the terrorists are using the NCST’s systems against them. “If they used the code I wrote for Mashhad, then maybe they used the same vulnerabilities that we did too! We don’t need to find the real interface for the device, we just need to update the train’s systems and we’re in!” We have no idea what they’re talking about, but it sounds like a great idea.
Yet who does the stuff on Abby’s computer really belongs to? It’s her lodger Tobi (Gabriel Howell)! It was obvious when we think about it, although we’re surprised he confessed so easily.
Abby tells the passengers they simply need to connect the phone to the device and then her team can take it from there, but with the train splitting apart it won’t be that easy. To make matters worse, some of the passengers are trapped on the front half of the service as it hurtles towards a collision with the train placed across the line!
