Warning: contains spoilers (and potentially spoilery speculation).
With apologies for my icy heart, I don’t give a mussel spat about the Harris family. This week’s flashback opener, which showed Sad John Harris inducting into the family business the wee son he’d just brained to death with a grappling hook, left me cold. Not as cold as Ruth, Tosh and the rest of the Shetlanders are, admittedly – their every conversation shouted over cassette tape-hiss winds that play merry havoc with loose hair and must require hours of overtime in the dialogue replacement booth each series. This one’s set in June, incidentally. That’s a Shetland summertime.
My preoccupation with the weather is a bad sign for series nine; it signals that instead of being drawn into the story, my mind’s wandering. Tosh will be making a house call on the latest suspect to find out what they were doing on the night Annie and Anton were murdered, but instead of hanging on their every word, I’m gazing at the splendid coastline and making mental notes to research 2025 holiday lets. And thermal underwear.
The distance between this year’s whodunit players and the characters we know and care about is the issue. Yes, every series of Shetland welcomes a new guest cast, but when this show is at its best, that guest cast is properly entwined with our guys. Annie Bett may have been in Tosh’s Strictly WhatsApp group, but their connection is thinly sketched, as is the enjoyable-but-too-sparse rapport between Ruth and young Noah.
In two episodes’ time, when this murder gets solved, what will have changed for the main characters? Unless it tuns out in a shock twist that Rev. Alan Calder shot the pair of them with help from Sandy, Billy and Cora, where will be the lasting impact? Tosh learning that it’s hard to police an island populated exclusively by people you went to primary school with? She knew that already.
Now that Shetland has reabsorbed its prodigal daughter Ruth Calder, her development appears to have stopped. The tender story of her teenage years having been told last time, she’s been demoted from character to function. Ruth now exists only to roll her eyes at suspects and look at them like a scathing headmistress in the atmospherically decorated interrogation room (Farrow and Ball colour: Puffin’s Breath). I’d swap any number of scenes with Sad John Harris or the Tragic Jakobsons for a living, breathing conversation between her and her brother that lasts longer than a page of dialogue.
The Tragic Jakobsons were the major focus of episode four. Dad Stefan’s desperation to keep daughter Astrid alive is behind the whole business with the “marine research facility”. Once Ruth and Tosh had Mulder and Scully-ed their way down to Dr Mohan’s secret lab, and Cora had given her verdict (a marvel, that woman. Forensics to bioengineering to general practitioning… Like Miss Rabbit in Peppa Pig, there’s nothing she can’t do), the mystery was solved,
At Stefan’s behest, Dr Mohan has been developing and administering an experimental treatment for Astrid involving unlicensed human stem cells. The poor girl had had enough of the sci-fi injections, and was planning to run away to her birth mother in Estonia with Anton and his boyf Nathan. When her dad put a stop to that, she tried to stow away in the back of a lorry disguised as a box of ready-to-make prawn crackers, but her ailing health stymied that plan. It’s all academic anyway, as Stefan isn’t Anton and Annie’s killer.
The list of potential culprits is narrowing to the point when only one suspect would make dramatic sense with two episodes to go, and he’s not even a suspect: Young Noah Bett. If the boy did somehow pull the trigger on his mum and Anton, that would explain why he won’t or can’t talk about it, and why Euan Rossi is obsessed with the kid. It’d be in keeping with the rest of the deaths so far this series too – brother kills brother, father kills son, little boy kills mum?
Prof. Rossi was the subject of episode four’s cliffhanger. Following a helpful reminder to us that the gun used to kill Annie and Anton was still missing, we watched as Rossi retrieved it from a storage locker. He’s dangerous, Ruth’s old flame from Thames House told her. Is he though, or is he just trying to protect Annie’s son?
Shetland series 9 continues on Wednesday December 4.
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