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Waking the Dead – Pilot episode and season one
There seems to be no end to detective fiction. Walk into any bookshop and you’ll find entire shelves devoted to the subject. Walk into any shop selling DVDs and you’ll find armfuls of boxed sets dedicated to various series over the years. I have no idea when all this kicked off on such a massive scale (though you’d suppose Sherlock Holmes had something to do with it) but I certainly can’t remember a time when this hasn’t been the case. Why has the genre survived so long? I think that a proper answer would probably make an entire PhD thesis; I can only say that in my case I like seeing ethical extremes, and you can hardly get more extreme than murder. Other than that, I like order. The criminal world has always seemed to me to be chaos made flesh; violent and unpredictable, by its very nature it can’t be controlled. A detective solving a murder restores order – makes things safe, eradicates the chaos. And if you think I’m idealising, I’ll paraphrase Oscar Wilde and say that that’s what fiction means.

These days, to get a television series it’s best to have an unusual quirk. The most famous is probably CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which I admit I haven’t watched. (I’m not really one for watching many television programmes) CSI is American, but we Brits can get in on the act as well. One example, which came before CSI, was Waking the Dead. It has so far had seven seasons, and its twist is that the crimes investigated took place are cold cases. Say, for example, that someone disappeared five years ago and their body has just turned up. Or a murder was committed fifteen years ago and new evidence has only just been uncovered. Or even that the police just feel like taking another look.

Working in London, the team has five main members. The head of the unit is Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd, the ‘father’ of the team. He has a bit of a temper (which will increase exponentially throughout the series, to absurd lengths) and one feels that this job is compensation for his own problems, since he has a missing son himself. Nevertheless he’s more than capable at what he does and he gets on well with his team. ‘Mother’ is Dr Grace Folely, a criminal profiler. Well, it was obvious I’d get on with her character from the beginning, given her job, which in some way is to emphasise with the suspects. Her interviews are usually amongst the best parts of the stories. She is also more or less the audience identification figure. She is most easy to relate to, to get on with, and she’s probably the least emotional member of the team. Off to one side slightly is Dr Frankie Wharton, the head forensic expert. She’s my second favourite character; little matters to her other than the job, and I like her enthusiasm, especially since she usually expresses it when surrounded by bags and bags of bloody clothing. (Wharton and Folely also have the advantage of being able to tell Boyd where to get off when he annoys them) Then come the other two police officers, DS Spencer Jordan and DC Mel Silver. I rather like Mel as well, but I’ve a feeling that Spencer gets short shrift. There’s nothing particularly memorable about him, whilst Mel is more often given emotionally charged scenes when dealing with suspects and witnesses. Far too often it seemed like Spencer was there for others to bounce off, that the script didn’t quite know what to do with him.

There can be a temptation with programmes to use their background as a springboard for what, at worst, is soap opera. Suddenly the script doesn’t care about, say, the nuclear bomb that’s going to destroy London – it wants to know about the latest love triangle between the cast regulars. This type of thing was used to great effect in the first few seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which wasn’t only about demons but about how a Slayer’s life is constantly screwed up. It was used to blisteringly bad effect in the last few seasons of Buffy, in which we saw much more of Buffy having sex with Spike than we did compelling plotlines. Waking the Dead chooses not to go this route, mainly concentrating solely on the current case. Generally speaking the cases are brutal, not only physically but emotionally. There are some moments that carry a particularly vicious streak to them, and they aren’t always the obvious ones.

But if you can’t handle that, I can’t imagine how you found this blog in the first place…

Waking the Dead, throughout the years, has dealt in different styles of story. Sometimes we only know what the police know, and have to follow them to see who the killer is. Sometimes we are told outright who did it and watch the police close in. Very occasionally everyone knows who did it; it’s a question of gathering enough evidence. Aside from the pilot, the stories in the first season all play out as mysteries – and it’s very interesting to see how they’re constructed. Perhaps I just know what to look for, but only one writer was really able to nail it, to construct something almost completely successful. But when that happens, when it happens… Waking the Dead rises from very good to wonderful.

The episodes also have a different general style. Barbara Machin, the series creator, writes two stories, the pilot episode and Every Breath You Take. In these stories the team is more antagonistic towards each other. There is more focus on the investigation and less on general drama. That’s not to say that the suspects don’t have deep, dark secrets in their past and that we don’t have disintegrating families, but Machin is more interested in what’s going on in a suspect’s head than in a couple having a rocky marriage. In Every Breath and A Simple Sacrifice we both find lunatics, but the Simple Sacrifice lunatic isn’t very interesting. (Though he does hold webchats whilst semi-naked, which catches the attention) In Every Breath, on the other hand, we are forced to spend two long, gruelling hours investigating the head of not one, but two stalkers.

A Simple Sacrifice forms part of a trio of episodes (not written by Machin) that are all based around family relationships. Burnout is about a teenager who believes her father did not die in a car accident; she thinks it was murder. The Blind Beggar is about some rather upsetting family secrets contained in an Irish Catholic community in London. A Simple Sacrifice is about a killer who may well be released from prison after serving twenty-five years, and her son is not at all happy with the news; he fears that she’ll find him. All this makes for very entertaining drama, but it must be said that Machin’s episodes are superior. The ‘family drama’ isn’t as interesting as investigating lunatics, and the tensions between suspects aren’t as interesting as the tensions that can arise between Boyd and his team.

The stories aren’t particularly graphic, though considering the age of the crimes we do get quite a few decomposing bodies (There’s a priceless moment in the pilot episode with a rotting coffin falling open). What’s more memorable is how bleak the stories can be. The most ‘conventional’ is Burnout, but even then the victim dies trapped in a burning car, an unpleasant way to go. The Blind Beggar is in some ways particularly horrible, given the character of the elderly Father Sebastian Stuart. No Christian charity from him; he’s unpleasant from his first lines and given his part in the story, the audience may well think he deserves his fate.

Every Breath You Take is probably the most vicious (and, not coincidentally, the best in the season). By concentrating on the stalkers, we see not only how disturbed they are, how absolutely lacking they can be in any sort of connection with reality, but also how sad they are. How their obsessive fantasies block out any chance of a normal life (if, indeed, they’re capable of such a thing). There turn out to be not one but two killers, and Boyd is told that a police officer’s corpse has been found – just as his team is celebrating his birthday. It’s the details that count, isn’t it?

Every Breath You Take also has the slight edge on the other episodes structurally. The pilot episode is the odd-man-out in that we are told early on who is responsible for the kidnap and murder of a teenage girl five years ago. The story’s tension is maintained by the fact that the killer has been galvanised into kidnapping another girl, and in the second part of the story the stakes go even higher as the cold case team is directly threatened. For the other stories, they all function as mysteries. We don’t get lengthy explanations at the end (as you’d expect with people like Poirot or Holmes), but we are supposed to uncover the evidence and revelations along with Boyd. This is a difficult task, as it depends on neither overestimating nor underestimating the audience’s intelligence. If you’re going to fall into one trap, assume the audience is too intelligent; I’d rather be confused until the killer’s revealed than have to wait half a hour for a revelation I know is coming. I’m going to discuss various plot details here, but I’ll try not to reveal any vital spoilers.

The worst culprit is undoubtedly Burnout. Near the end of the first episode the team uncovers some evidence that appears to wrap up the case. But this is a two episode story, so right away the audience knows that something is wrong. And given the nature of that evidence, combined with a few more details about the victim’s body, the killer’s identity became flagrantly obvious. We’re not even halfway through the story and I can already tell you who did it. What made it worse was that Boyd didn’t have a clue. I kept shouting at him ‘Handwriting analysis, you fool, handwriting analysis!’ but it seemed that hadn’t occurred to the writer.

(I forgive everything, though, for a brilliant moment when Boyd is questioning a suspect. To unnerve him he says ‘We’re going to dig up your brother’s body. Well, [smirk] what’s left of your brother’s body.’ Boyd actually works better as quietly vicious rather than ranting.)

In The Blind Beggar we have much the same problem, but it’s given another twist; we know what’s been going on because we know something that Boyd doesn’t. He’s not stupid, he simply hasn’t heard what we have. But again, this puts us far ahead of him, and we’re left waiting for him to catch up. And unlike the pilot episode, we haven’t got anything to fill the vacuum left by the lack of suspense.

A Simple Sacrifice is slightly hampered by the lack of available suspects, but I think it’s more successful. (The ending is also very reminiscent of Argento’s Il Cartaio, though it was made before then) However the honours lie with Every Breath You Take, which also serves up a short but well-made and very uncomfortable climax.

Every episode from the first season is worth watching, and it ends on a high note indeed. Waking the Dead is not as unique as it wants to be, but when the results are this good, I doubt it really matters.

It’s certainly better than the other BBC series I’ll shortly be reviewing. In today’s political climate, when terrorists are better organised than ever, when Britain is under ever growing threat, what we really need is a bunch of incompetent morons protecting us. Stay tuned.