Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * *
Cast: Archie Panjabi, Kris Holden-Reid, Karen LeBlanc, Mark Rendall, Christopher Plummer, David Hewlett, Dion Johnstone, Kelly McCormack, Etienne Kellici, Charlie Carrick, Wendy Crewson, Donal Logue, Jason O’Mara, Greg Bryk, Jennifer Podemski, Cara Ricketts, Diana Bentley, Florence Ordesh, Danny Waugh, Lindsey Connell.
Accidents happen, it is inevitable as a good man making a poor choice that leads to his ruin, and yet some accidents are merely the underplaying of planned catastrophe, the chance taken by one person or a group of like-minded individuals to further their cause but presenting it as a freak mishap, a calamity of coincidence that just happens to change the world, or at least the locality in which it took part, forever.
Accidents happen, people say the wrong word, the design they wish to produce goes awry, but to profit from the disaster and the open wound is more than upheaval of the community, it is a tragedy orchestrated in which human lives are reduced as if they have become strategically placed pawns on a chessboard, willing to be sacrificed if it means the Queen remains standing, if it means the King holds the court of opinion.
Some accidents though have the feel of contravening misfortune running through their seams that they are not just planned, they are intentionally ill conceived enough to keep you intrigued enough to just see how the project unfolds, and to which point the various strands start to become frayed enough that the whole misadventure becomes stranded, unfathomable, and the intention delves into a bigger disaster than the would-be terrorists or revolutionaries could have imagined.
Such is a case with the second series of Departure, a poorly executed thriller that is unpalatable as it unsophisticated as it cliched, and if the first series had the image of overworked unoriginality, then this second helping, one that surely was not asked for, nor required, lacks even the originality to be unoriginal.
A thinly veiled disguise of context, of manipulating the truth of automation over human experience to the point where it becomes exaggerated, almost offensive to the way it dismisses genuine fears of sabotage and the right of any person to have a job, it is a series that typifies the style over substance in performance which all too often is persuasive in society. We all like the glamour, the quick fix, so it seems, that we are willing to sacrifice detailed, perhaps dirty, and intricate storytelling.
There is little to take or be enthused from a series that is willing to adhere to a conspiracy of trite development, an assessment that might be considered cruel, if it were not so common placed in the world of derivative, almost worn thin and stale television offerings.
Departure, a series that unfortunately didn’t take the chance to leave after its first showing. Ian D. Hall