Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Douglas Henshall, Alison O’Donnell, Steve Robertson, Mark Bonnar, Julie Graham, Lewis Howden, Anne Kidd, Rakie Avola, Derek Riddell, Catherine Walker, Ayanda Bhebe, Lorn Macdonald, Owen Whitelaw, Tracy Wiles, Isabelle Joss, Conor McCarry, Robin Laing, Ryan Fletcher, Meghan Taylor, John Kazek, Francis Mayli McCann, Angus Miller, Emma Mullen, Olivia Barrowclough, Titana Muthui, Erin Armstrong, Kirsty Stuart, Natali McCleary, Kate Dickie, Jenni Keenan Green, Itxaso Moreno, Therese Bradley, Robert Cavanah.
There are so many terrible evils in this world, so many ways in which we choose to commit awful acts of violence and brutality against each other, and the tide of savagery is encroaching further into the island in which we all stand and look outwards, hoping like the advisors to King Canute, that the waves of criminality will soon abate and recede. The problem arises that should the waters fall back, exactly what will we be left to see, what bones and skeletons will be on view.
It is the skeletons and bodies uncovered which bring life to the fifth series of Shetland, a six-part story which brings perhaps the last despicable act enforced upon the innocent right to the island’s doorsteps. People trafficking is not just a crime to be investigated, it is the modern abhorrence which reflects what the crime actually is, slavery, oppression, captivity, and one that must, like the evil into which the drug trade looms in the shadows, be fully exposed and defeated.
It is in this harrowing sense of despair that the windswept ruggedness of the islands plays the perfect backdrop to the storyline; a feature not lost on the viewer as they tie in the loneliness and often hardship of Shetland to the fear that must go through the minds of those who are forced in to this type of bondage. It is also a story-line that sees Douglas Henshall’s character of Jimmy Perez perhaps take on greater significance to the overall arc of the show and how much he has become the moral backbone and face of the community, one shared with Alison O’ Donnell’s growing strength in the role of DS Alison McIntosh.
The series also highlights the growing depth in character of the talented Mark Bonnar as Duncan Hunter and Steven Robertson’s D.C Sandy Wilson and along with a minor supporting role by Francis Mayli McCann, who continues to impress long after her theatrical part in Our Ladies Of Perpetual Succour, Series Five of this hugely popular programme continues to show life is not about rural crime, that the world is a larger place and quite often the evil has a way of checking in like an invading force, brutal and unwarranted but nonetheless ready to be stamped out.
Ian D. Hall