by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched a KPBS showing of a British detective
series called DCI Banks, the creation of
an author named Peter Robinson who was born in the factory region of Leeds in
the U.K. but left at 24, after completing his undergraduate degree at the
University of Leeds (who knew there was a University of Leeds?), and moved to Canada, where he’s lived ever
since (he was born in 1950, which makes him three years older than me). He’s
written 24 DCI Banks novels — DCI Banks is a detective formerly based in London
who moves and resumes his career in the area of the Dales in Yorkshire — but
the plot of this episode, “What Will Survive,” is (for the first time in the
series’ history, according to imdb.com) a new story by writer Nicholas
Hicks-Beach rather than an adaptation of one of Robinson’s novels. DCI Banks
(Stephen Tompkinson) is a rather dour character who works with at least four
other police officers, and the environment is a rather seedy one whose main
business seems to be energy production — a giant nuclear power plant hangs over
the background and we see big transmission lines and a few windmills as well.
The case depicted in “What Will Survive” kicks off when Katrin Vesik (Julia
Krynke), an undocumented immigrant from Estonia, is found murdered and crudely
buried, and it spins off into a pretty dark tale (this is not one of those quiet, genteel drawing-room murder
mysteries British writers were once known for) involving the immigrant’s
sister, Annika Vesik (Daiya Dominyka), who police discover is working as a
prostitute and then disappears altogether; Robbie Osgood (Aron Julius), a
half-Black autistic boy who lives with his father Michael (Steve Toussaint), an
ex-con; a long-haired middle-aged white guy who chewed out the victim for being
an immigrant and taking jobs away from Brits like him (where have we heard that kind of rhetoric lately? It’s won elections for
“Brexit” in the U.K. and Trump in the U.S.!); a group of local vandals who
tried to burn the Osgoods’ home; and the man who turns out to be the main
villain of the piece, Jason McCready (Darren Morfitt).
Jason is a man on the
make who took charge of a number of local businesses after his dad died and his
mom Maureen (Kate Rutter) turned them over to him because she knew she couldn’t
run them herself. What she didn’t realize was that Jason was going to extend
the McCready business empire from legitimate enterprises to prostitution and forced
labor — he was shipping in immigrants and forcing them to work on the McCready
meat farm and in his processing plants — and in the film’s most chilling scene
Banks and his team discover a shed full of slave workers on McCready’s farm —
including Annika, who was taken there and impressed into farm labor when Jason
decided she wasn’t making him enough money as a hooker. There’s also Jason’s
nephew Gary (Charlie Heaton, a cutie I’ve noticed in these productions before),
who’s arrested when the Osgoods’ home burns down; he admits he was part of the
first group that lit some fireworks under the Osgoods’ door to make it look like they were going to burn it down but says he
wasn’t responsible for the fire that consumed the whole building and killed
Robbie. Later it developed that when Robbie was suspected of Katrin’s murder
Michael decided to burn his own house down and commit murder-suicide to spare
Robbie the horrors of incarceration — only the firefighters got to the house in
time to rescue Michael and in the end he’s arrested after the police horrify
him with the revelation that Robbie didn’t commit Katrin’s murder after all.
The real culprit was Jason McCready, who struck her during an argument at work
and buried her — as he’d done with other slave workers who died of natural
causes but whose existence he could not allow to be revealed because that would
have blown the whistle on his whole operation — and the saddest people in the
whole story are Michael Osgood and Maureen McCready, both of whom end up facing
legal liability under bizarre and morally ambiguous circumstances.
There’s also an odd subplot
in which Banks’s mother dies of a heart attack — Banks gets a call from the
hospital that she’s been stricken but not that she’s dead, and when he shows up
to see her the nurse (a Black woman) is startled that Banks’s father didn’t
call him with the news that his mom had died — and it seems as if Banks and his
dad have been having a cold war for many years and Banks’s dad not only doesn’t
want Banks to help him cope with his grief but just wants Banks to get lost
already. Judging from
this sample, DCI Banks is one of
the more dour British mystery shows but also one of the more compelling ones,
even though sometimes it seems too
dark for its own good — and I wonder if the previous episodes that actually
drew on Robinson’s work are materially different from this one which only used
his characters. I was also amused that while the original British airing of
this show in March 2015 was as two 45-minute parts on ITV (Independent
Television), Britain’s commercial broadcaster that competes with the BBC, it
was the BBC that distributed this show to the U.S., and presumably they were
the ones who spliced the two episodes together to create a single show that ran
a shade over 90 minutes (fine by me given my usual allergy to TV serials).
