Lex Shrapnel: The Law, the Blast Radius, and the Opening Credits

We were sitting there watching the 2nd series of Red Eye, minding our own business, following the plot, when the credits roll up a name that detonates whatever narrative tension the writers have so carefully assembled.

Lex Shrapnel.

At that point the drama is over. Not because it is bad, but because my brain has left the aircraft and is circling the concept of nominative determinism at 35,000 feet. You cannot casually introduce a man called Lex Shrapnel and expect the audience to focus on anything else. It is not a name, it is a plot device.

“Lex” implies law, authority, Rome, tablets of stone, the cool weight of precedent. “Shrapnel” implies sudden noise, chaos, fragments embedded in places they should never have reached. Together they suggest a legal system administered by high explosive. Habeas corpus, but with a blast radius.

You half expect his characters not to enter scenes but breach them. Doors fly open. Policies collapse. Minor characters dive for cover. Even if he is playing someone entirely benign, say an earnest civil servant or a quietly competent officer, the name alone suggests that something nearby is about to go catastrophically wrong. But he was only a bit player.

What makes it even better is that it is entirely real. Not a stage name cooked up by an agent with a sense of irony. Not a post-drama-school rebrand. Just a straight-faced inheritance, handed down without mercy. Some people are born sounding like accountants. Others like dentists. Lex Shrapnel sounds like a clause in the Geneva Conventions.

And then there is the historical twist. The surname Shrapnel did not begin life as an explosive. It already existed. The family was established in Wiltshire centuries before anyone thought to pack iron balls into artillery shells. When Henry Shrapnel lent his name to a new and particularly efficient way of turning cannon fire into airborne chaos, the language simply seized the opportunity.

That is why it works so disturbingly well. The surname effectively split in two. One branch remained a perfectly respectable family name. The other escaped into the language as flying metal. Most surnames do not get that privilege.

So Lex Shrapnel is not named after an explosive device. He is named after a family whose name was later turned into one. Which is arguably worse. It means the menace was there all along, patiently waiting for the Industrial Revolution to catch up.

And yet he wears it with admirable restraint. No wink. No nudge. No attempt to defuse it. Just calm professionalism, as if everyone else is peculiar for noticing. Which, frankly, is the most British response possible.

So yes, Red Eye is very watchable. Taut, well paced, solid television. But for me it will always be remembered as the moment when the credits reminded us that sometimes the most explosive thing in a drama is not the plot, but the name quietly sitting underneath it.