by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago I watched an
episode of the British independent (i.e., commercial as opposed to the BBC) cop
show Vera, set in Northumberland
near the Scottish border, that was considerably better than most, mainly
because this time around writer Martha Hillier (using the characters created by
Ann Cleeves) kept both the number of suspects and the number of motives to a
minimum. The episode was called “Shadows in the Sky” and was about dock worker
Owen Thorne, who fell to his death from a tall building in an apparent suicide
— only detective chief inspector Vera Stanhope (Brenda Blethyn), who as I’ve
noted about this show before comes off as if Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple had
decided to join the official police force as a young woman and slowly worked
herself up the ranks, and her sidekick, detective sergeant Aiden Healy (a nice
piece of man-meat named Kenny Doughty), are convinced from the way the body
fell and its position when he landed that it was murder. The two find out that
Thorne had previously been responsible for the death of a co-worker when he
failed to secure a piece of necessary safety equipment, something went wrong
and the boy was crushed under heavy equipment — and his father, Mick McKittrick
(Rob Jarvis), quit his job on the docks and went in for some heavy drinking to
dull the pain. Thorne is a white man married to a Black (would we have to call
her “African-British”?) woman who’s taken in two foster kids, one of
indeterminate race and one definitely Black, and one of his concerns just
before his death is to make sure nothing got in the way of his plans to adopt
them. That didn’t stop him from having an affair with the (white, female)
dispatcher at his worksite, who turns out to be the killer — just why she killed her boyfriend remains a mystery but the
crisis seems to have been precipitated by their daughter, who’s been trying to
re-establish a relationship with her dad. It was a nice show but not an
especially challenging one.
