Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Douglas Henshall, Brian Cox, Mark Bonnar, Alison O’Donnell, Stewart Porter, Sophie Carr-Gomm, Chris Reilly, Erin Armstrong, Rebecca Benson, Finn Den Hertog, Anthony Flanagan, Julie Graham, Steven Robertson, Gowan Calder, Francis Grey, Tunji Kasim, Cara Kelly, Anne Kidd, Freya Monk, Jana Reinermann, Matthew Zajac,
There is perhaps no place more remote in the U.K. than the Shetland Isles, the bleakness of the landscape betraying the cold that sits just below the surface of an island race who are closer perhaps in spirit to their old Nordic heritage than that of Scotland who has been their de facto Government since the 16th Century.
The coat of arms stands in judgement as it proclaims to all that “By law shall the land be built up”, though the law, in the form of Detective Inspector Perez and played by the superb Douglas Henshall, seems at a loss when the islands’ secrets start to become too much for one girl to hold on to in the return of the absorbing detective drama, Shetland and the episode Raven Black.
This new series sees D.I. Jimmy Perez investigate the murder of a young girl who has become a social outcast at school due to her reluctance to join social media sites and who finds the local recluse more interesting than almost any other person on the tiny archipelago that sits in the unforgiving North Sea. The young girl, Catherine Ross, played by Sophia Carr-Gomm has found out many secrets but one in particular has got her killed and in a world where the lonely, the confused and the uninterested in modern life are shunned, the spotlight falls directly onto the local recluse Magnus Bain, played with absolute conviction by the legendary Brian Cox.
It is a welcome return for the programme and in particular Douglas Henshall who never gives a bad performance in all the programmes he has been in but in Shetland he seems particularly suited to the role of the outsider, albeit just a slightly smaller island in the group, and who understands the loneliness that island life can bring all too well. If no man is an island then surely the exception to the rule would the one who makes it difficult to lower the drawbridge completely.
With secrets and lies coming out of the woodwork, the mysteries of a long forgotten death and the mob mentality attempting to gain control of the investigation, D.I. Perez has more than his hands full in Raven Black than he would probably have found on the streets of Edinburgh or Glasgow.
Ian D. Hall