In England today, there are approximately 5 million public surveillance cameras. Civilian security is the justification; the loss of personal privacy is but one casualty.

"The Last Enemy," a five-part, seven-hour "Masterpiece Contemporary" miniseries, takes that obsessive lust for intruding into the lives of citizens and takes it to its "Heart of Darkness" conclusion.

It's a paranoid conspiracy drama with political elements, but mainly, it's a popcorn drama with moments of white-knuckle anxiety and potboiler plotting.

Set in the not-too-distant future, "Last Enemy" stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Stephen, a brilliant but germophobic mathematician. After four years in China, he returns to England to bury his estranged brother.

In England, he meets his brother's distraught widow, Yasim (Anamaria Marinca), who he falls for. He also encounters - far less pleasurably - David Russell (Robert Carlyle), an agent who has gone so rogue it's difficult to tell whose side he's on until the show's last frame.

Russell is interested in Stephen because he's been offered a lot of money to tout a new political initiative called T.I.A.: Total Information Awareness (the Pentagon has a program with the same name). T.I.A. would force citizens to carry an ID card that would contain every bit of information about them (address, bank records on down), which would be scanned just about everywhere they might go. A sophisticated computer database would, therefore, know where everyone was at virtually every moment.

That sounds sinister enough, but throw in a pharmaceutical company's test vaccine that is killing Third World refugees, the mysterious deaths of the world's leading microbiologists and Stephen's ex-girlfriend (Eva Birthistle) heading a shadowy group overseeing everything else, and one's mind can fairly spin.

As dire as it all sounds, "Last Enemy," written by Peter Barry ("Prime Suspect: The Final Witness") is even more obsessed with telling an exciting story, which includes throwing in a romantic triangle or even quadrangle.

Still, "Last Enemy" is a thriller with something on its mind, warning how such control over a nation's citizenry in the wrong hands can affect innocents. It's not until episode four that the miniseries fully unveils its thesis, in which a bit player declares, "It should be a right - the right to be anonymous."

David Kronke, (818) 713-3638

david.kronke@dailynews.com

www.insidesocal.com/tv/

review>

THE LAST ENEMY

>What: Conspiracy thriller about further expansion of what some consider to be England's already-Draconian security-surveillance system.

>Where: KCET.

>When: 9 p.m. Sundays; through Nov. 2.

>In a nutshell: A serviceably crackerjack (if convoluted) yarn, with cogent points about the encroaching loss of privacy.