There’s a scene toward the end of the BBC docudrama Prisoner 951 when Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British Iranian mother held hostage in Iran for six years, pushes back against the cruel mind games of her captors. Summoned from house arrest to the offices of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Zaghari-Ratcliffe, played by Narges Rashidi, is ordered to sign a piece of paper accepting all the allegations made against her, including a blank space where her interrogators will “complete the details later.”

In contrast to earlier interactions with Iran’s feared Revolutionary Guard, Zaghari-Ratcliffe stares down her captors. At the beginning of the four-part series, she is anguished and afraid, but now her eyes flash with steely resolve.

“What you did to me was wrong … and now, after six years, you expect me to sign a blank piece of paper. I will not. You will have your money, why do you need to steal my honesty?”

When the interrogators insist that she won’t be allowed to board her plane home to the U.K. if she doesn’t sign, Zaghari-Ratcliffe calls their bluff. The IRGC had been boasting about extorting $530 million out of the U.K., the principal and interest of a historical military debt owed to the previous regime of the shah. If she doesn’t sign their false confession, “Iran will never see that $530 million and that will be on you.”

Zaghari-Ratcliffe walks out without signing but is ultimately compelled to give her signature the following day, after being urged to do so by both the U.K. ambassador to Iran and the official sent by the U.K. Foreign Office to negotiate her release. The IRGC continues its mind games until the last moment, telling Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s parents—who live in Iran—to come to the airport and then not allowing them inside to say goodbye, and holding the plane on the tarmac until she signs the aforementioned document (which is clearly obtained under duress).

Here the British government’s impotence, a recurring motif throughout the series, is on painful display. Not only do the U.K. diplomats do nothing when Zaghari-Ratcliffe is pressured to give up what little dignity she has left, they actually encourage her to give into her captors’ unjust demands. Rather than throw their weight around and insist on the negotiated terms of the deal ($530 million is a lot of money after all), British government representatives urge the path of least resistance.

---

It was both surreal and confronting to see Nazanin’s arrest, detention, trial and eventual release dramatized on screen, because I too am a former hostage of the Iranian regime.

Like Nazanin, I was arrested by the IRGC’s intelligence branch, and I was convicted on vague security-related charges for which no evidence was presented as well. We both spent time in the 2A interrogation facility in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. Our prison time overlapped—indeed, I met Zaghari-Ratcliffe briefly on a couple of occasions inside the prison infirmary. Her story is well known among Iran’s sizeable population of political prisoners, and it became something of a cautionary tale, especially for anyone like myself who had a connection to Britain.

For me, inevitably, reviewing this series elicited a complex flurry of emotions. I struggled to separate my own experiences as a prisoner, first in 2A and then in Qarchak women’s prison, from those I saw on screen. I had to remind myself that this was a TV show and, as such, not to nitpick every single detail. (IRGC female prison guards would never wear thick kohl around their eyes; makeup is banned! Zaghari-Ratcliffe would never be allowed to appear in front of her interrogators or in court with her hair spilling out of a loose hijab…)

Objectively, as a piece of television, Prisoner 951 is well-acted and thoughtfully shot—intimate when it needs to be, and appropriately expansive when exploring the broader themes of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s story. And while many of the prison sets relied too heavily on CGI and did not closely reflect reality, in other aspects of the series, the filmmakers had clearly done their homework. The decision to show the actors speaking Farsi for all of the Iran-based scenes added an indispensable layer of authenticity. The Farsi dialogue itself, which at times diverged from the English subtitles, closely mirrored actual prison vernacular—both that of the inmates themselves and the particular expressions and phrases of the highly religious IRGC interrogators, prison guards, wardens, and judiciary officials.

I found myself tensing up at those officials’ all-too-familiar responses to Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s distress. For example, after telling her that her appeal had been denied, and later, that new charges would be brought, her captors counseled “Tavakol be khoda” (“Trust in God”) and “dua kon” (pray). There is almost something sinister at hearing such language in such an obviously godless place, from people engaged in such acts of cruelty and injustice.

The secondary narrative of Prisoner 951 is the tale of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s British husband, Richard Ratcliffe (played by Joseph Fiennes), who waged a years-long public campaign for her release that elevated the couple to two of the most recognizable faces in Britain. As we are reminded throughout numerous meetings between Ratcliffe, his legal team, and U.K. government officials, the media circus that attached itself to Ratcliffe’s campaign may or may not have been counter-productive to the goal of bringing his wife home.

On the one hand, Zaghari-Ratcliffe has the unfortunate distinction of being the only foreign hostage to have served her sentence in full, and then some, before a deal was agreed for her freedom. This could have been because her husband’s campaign was too successful, in that it raised her “price” so high that nothing short of a highly contentious payment of hundreds of millions in cash could prise her free of the Iranian regime. On the other hand, the series does a good job of foregrounding the extent to which Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case became a political headache for the governing Conservative Party, and in particular for then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, whose ill-informed remarks to a parliamentary committee directly impacted Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case. The ramifications of this for Johnson meant that the U.K. could not afford to leave her plight unresolved, especially after Johnson was elevated to prime minister.

The ethical implications of the $530 million military debt which the U.K. accrued and then ultimately paid in exchange for Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, a second British-Iranian hostage, unfortunately remained unexplored in the show. While it was natural for both the Ratcliffe and Ashoori families to campaign in favor of paying the debt, many of the legitimate concerns that had fueled the British government’s decades-long reluctance to pay up were never articulated. The conundrum of owing half a billion dollars to a state sponsor of terrorism with a long history of violent repression against its own people is only of tangential relevance to Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s story. Still, some mention of this would have added color to the series’ depiction of why the U.K. government was so reticent to agree to Iran’s demands.

The Iranian regime is shown to be both highly paranoid and incompetent—Zaghari-Ratcliffe was likely arrested, for example, because the IRGC mistook her employer, the Thompson Reuters Foundation, a charity, for the Reuters news agency. This kind of ill-informed stupidity is tragically all too common within the Iranian judicial system, and its consequences can be measured in ruined lives.

The series is however most scathing in its treatment of the British government. Boris Johnson and former Prime Minister Liz Truss appear to blunder their way through various meetings with Ratcliffe, unable to show evidence of any tangible progress and often making the situation worse. Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Middle East Tobias Ellwood is depicted as callous and patronizing. He suggests, for instance, that rather than campaigning in the media, Ratcliffe should get therapy, and that both he and his wife should consider keeping a diary as a means of coping with their trauma. Revealingly, at one point Ratcliffe quips that “I feel I’m fighting two governments, the Iranians’ and my own.”

Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s character comes across as quite emotionally restrained. As an audience we never really get to see inside her mind. Though this can be chalked up to the emotional detachment that is a common coping mechanism among prisoners, and the series does an excellent job of showcasing the cruel and capricious mind games of the IRGC interrogators, it is less effective at exploring the effect of these psychological tactics.

Interrogators use all sorts of methods to threaten and bully information or false confessions out of their charges, including humiliation, threats of torture or execution, arrest and harassment of family members, and, for female prisoners, threats of sexual assault. Prisoner 951 by and large shows the IRGC to be far more rational and civilized than members of this extremist Islamist group, listed as a terrorist organization by many Western nations, deserve.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s main IRGC interrogator is young, attractive, and well-groomed. He seems almost likeable in contrast to the thug-like characters who typically occupy such positions. In my experience, your average IRGC intelligence officer is more likely to be a balding middle-aged man with a thick beard and a paunch, someone who never misses an opportunity to leer at a passing female inmate, usually while hypocritically thumbing a set of tasbih prayer beads.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s solitary confinement cell is dank and grimy but most of the other prison spaces—including the interrogation facilities, judiciary offices, and the women’s ward where Zaghari-Ratcliffe is ultimately transferred—are curiously well-appointed, spotlessly clean, and free from clutter.

The many thousands of prisoners who pass through the walls of Evin know that such places are quite literally falling apart from neglect—scuffed and aging furniture, wild vegetation, smog from Tehran’s infamous air pollution coating every surface in a layer of fine dust. Judges’ offices and even courtrooms themselves are piled high with cardboard files, lever arch folders, and document storage boxes, a physical manifestation of the many thousands of cases left to languish in a seemingly endless backlog as the Iranian regime crams more and more people into its prisons.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s pale pink uniform and floral chador are bright, spotless, and well-fitting; in reality, prisoners in the IRGC’s 2A interrogation facility are forced to wear whatever size uniforms the guards have on hand at the time, usually miles too big and worn by so many others that they are often no better than rags.

---

Quibbling over details aside, Prisoner 951 is gripping. It paints a devastating picture of Iran’s practice of hostage diplomacy, wherein innocent citizens are traded like currency, with neither the arresting state, Iran, nor the target country, the United Kingdom, coming across well in the exchange. State hostage-taking is a poorly understood yet growing practice, making this series compulsory viewing for anyone interested in the messy diplomacy of Iran’s relations with Western powers. It is also a kind of love story, of a mother’s love for her child, and a husband’s love for his wife—one which no amount of cruelty, deprivation, or IRGC mind games is able to overcome.