• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 26, 2024

The new FX/Hulu series “The Veil” establishes itself at the very outset as an excellent, edge-of-your-seat thriller not unlike a number of previous such shows set in the world of international intelligence and the fight against terrorism.

The six-part series -- starting next Tuesday on Hulu -- stands shoulder to shoulder with the best of the best, such as “Homeland, for example.

But “The Veil” has something extra. As its story unfolds, the show drops various literary references whose purpose is to shed light on the inner lives of its two, sparring principal characters.

They are an MI6 agent -- a female James Bond whose identity shifts from mission to mission -- and a woman of Middle Eastern descent who may or may not be an ISIS commander.

The swashbuckling MI6 agent (Elisabeth Moss, pictured above) is tasked with yanking the suspected ISIS leader (Yumna Marwan) out of a refugee camp in Syria near the Turkish border, and delivering her over rough country to French intelligence in Paris.

Thus, the two women are alone with each other for hours stretching into days, riding in an SUV where they have no choice but to converse.

The catch is that neither one is sure who the other one is, and both struggle to distinguish truth from falsehood in the stories they tell each other.

French, English and American intelligence communities have a number of alternative names for the shadowy, mysterious woman who says she is an Algerian who grew up in a Paris suburb.

Talk about an identity crisis: One of her nicknames is “shape shifter,” which means she could be anybody.

As for the MI6 agent, unless I missed it, her real name was not revealed in the first two episodes of “The Veil” that I previewed on Thursday.

But when she is first assigned to this mission, she blithely announces to her handler that for this task, she will be called Imogen, the first of a series of references to Shakespeare.

Imogen is the daughter of King Cymbeline in Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline,” but it turns out that the MI6 agent’s favorite Shakespeare play is “Twelfth Night,” from which she plucks a quote: “For such as we are made of, such as we are.”

The suspected ISIS commander also reveals a knowledge of Shakespeare, crediting her education in a French school, a backstory that might be a complete lie.

In a library in Istanbul, the woman finds an illuminated book from the tail end of the Middle Ages inscribed in Arabic that she calls The Book of Surprises, also known as The Book of Wonders, that she identifies as her favorite book.

She tells her traveling companion that the book is at least in part about djinns, beings from Arabic and Muslim mythology that are capable of, among other things, shape-shifting.

The two characters are very well-matched, and so are the two women playing them. Moss is mesmerizing, as usual. And Marwan, a Lebanese actress virtually unknown in the West, rocks her performance.

“The Veil” premieres with the first two episodes (of six) Tuesday, April 30, on Hulu.