Six episodes of Season One - will there be a season two?
The set up: Two British cops, one with Dark Past Type A and one with Dark Past Type B, team up together to fight crime. One doesn't know the other one has been assigned by The Powers That Be (Type X: law enforcement) to spy on him in re: his dark past. Wait! There's more. The Earth is going to be burned to a crisp in 5 years!
Cue Bowie song. No, literally, cue the Bowie Song 'Five Years'. It starts playing.
Anyway, MI5 know the planet is doomed in exactly five years. The rest of humanity doesn't know. Our cops accidentally get hold of an MI5 flash drive that shows what's going to happen and proves it. If this news gets out, people will panic and law and order will go to pieces. The Powers That Be Type B, MI5, want the flash drive back and are prepared to kill for it. Which they do. A lot of people die gruesomely, or get beaten up or their throats slashed or lobotomized with an ice pick or whatever in very detailed fashion in this show.
So our intrepid PC Plods get to spy on each other, have affairs, have dark pasts, family they want to protect, and a MacGuffin. Much like any other Watching The Detectives program over the last half-century. Where does the Five Years subplot fit in?
It seeps in as a quiet leak. The news gets out in the first episode, but MI5 go on Twitter and say it's a hoax and everybody believes that except for one nutcase per week who cracks under the strain, each of whom is coincidentally assigned to our detectives to chase down. So that's that. It's a cheap crazy-psychopath plot generator.
Except, every episode, MI5 is still tying up our DCI's kids and threatening to kill our anti-hero plod friends if they don't give back the flash drive. I don't know why! [1]
I watched all six episodes and never found out if
a) it was a good idea or not to tell everybody the world was ending in five years, since as Bowie said, it would drive people nuts
b) why they didn't upload the flash drive to Google Docs or Dropbox and give the original back to TPTB Type B so they'd stop threatening their families while they figured a) out or
c) why they didn't stop being policemen and retire to the Costa Brava for five years of as much fun as possible with their kids until everyone gets fried.
There is a twist ending which is quite funny. Someone's an unreliable narrator and it's not either of our two LEO protags. But I wouldn't say it's worth watching four or so hours for a ten second chortle in the last few minutes.
There is a twist ending which is quite funny. Someone's an unreliable narrator and it's not either of our two LEO protags. But I wouldn't say it's worth watching four or so hours for a ten second chortle in the last few minutes.
[1] It's possible that they need it back in order to stop anyone discovering $twist_ending, but since we don't discover that until the end either - and it's not explicit even then - it's not a good payoff for four hours of wtf?
No comments:
Post a Comment