Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Cast: Tcheky Karyo, Tom Hollander, Anastasia Hille, Barbara Sarafian, Talisa Garcia, Alec Secareanu, Boris Van Severen, Clare Calbraith, Omar Baroud, Zachary Baharov, Trystan Gravelle, Gijs de Lange, Anna Prochniak, Jessica Raine, Camille Schotte, Boyd van Den Bogert, Mihai Arsene, Nicholas Woodeson, Marc de Hond, Maja Laskowska, Martha Canga Antonio.

What drives a person to make another a slave, to see them as a commodity worth exploiting, to prey upon them as if they were nothing more than meat slowly being poisoned by the air they breathe and slowly seeing their will and their soul, wither and die? What makes a person worth so very little to another, from the bonds of some marriages and relationships through to the exploitation of young women being trafficked and sold around Europe and the rest of the world as if all they held the same value as an animal sold at market, a product in which supply and demand dictates the amount of respect they deserve or in which they can be discarded.

We all have our price, we have all been played by a system which insists on its pound of flesh in retribution for our daily needs, and yet as the six-part serial of Baptiste shows with disturbing elegance, slavery to a cause is only the tip of an iceberg which is scraping along the ocean floor, it is the abuse of such power in which some deem only fitting to employ; a pound of flesh, an article in which to trade and destroy.

Baptiste perhaps digs deeper than some have alluded to, especially in the home grown British market which doesn’t delve too deeply into the root cause of such troubling issues, instead only using it is a plot device to introduce some element of nationalistic fervour, almost signalling to the viewer that this behaviour doesn’t happen here, only on the continent, only in the history books. Of course, that assumption is far off the mark, it might not originate on British soil but there can be no denying that the ramifications and often pay offs are felt this side of the English Channel.

What the spin off from the hot series The Missing shows is that is unafraid to blatantly offer the argument that the trafficking of people is a direct correlation effect of the sex trade, of the abuse of power which comes with supposed strength as gangs seek out ways of making money; if sex sells then what price naïve innocence, what price the act of prostitution can have on society.

With fantastic performances by the likes of Tom Hollander and Talisa Garcia, both of whom offer a counter ideal to solving, or at least atoning, for the situation in which has arisen, this spin off from The Missing strikes a barrage of hits against the complacency of thought which suggests that such despicable acts are far from our own state of being, that indentured servitude, slavery, is an act of barbarism only to be found in history books.

Ian D. Hall