Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: John Simm, Rakie Ayola, Brad Morrison, Laura Elphinstone, Craig Parkinson, Zoë Tapper, Clare Calbraith, Seham Aar, Shamail Ali, Faith Alabi, Ellis George, Daniel Adegboyega, Richie Campbell, Lucy Phelps, Lu Corfield, Alec Newman, Joséphine de La Baume, Amina Koroma, Jayne McKenna, Antony Byrne, Carolina Valdés, Stephen Boxer, Rebecca Scroggs, Ernest Kingsley Junior.
The harvesting of human organs for profit is an abhorrence, to kill for the body piece is to desecrate the bond that civility and humanity insists upon.
Such an action is more than a sign of the times, it has come to represent the whole diseased spectrum of what is our existence on this world, and whilst the donation of say a heart, lungs, a liver, or cornea is to be lauded, praised for the humanity it shows to our fellow travellers in time, to take with prejudice, to obtain with deceit and make a profit in the way that organised crime would be proud of, this is the way in which our lives have come to pass, that we believe our lives are more important than the dispossessed, the fragile, the hungry, and the migrant, the refugee, the asylum seeker.
We live in a time of greed, of emotional dissonance which insists that some lives are only good for the taking, and in the final episode of Grace’s second season, Dead Tomorrow, that unfeeling need to use, abuse, and kill an unknown just so that another’s life may continue, is raised, and answered with deliberate accuracy and depth.
If we understand just how much we disrespect the poor in this country, then we must surely recognise just how awful, how much contempt we seemingly have for the refugee, and how it is only a short step from murdering the migrant for a kidney, to slaughtering the poor to take advantage of the rest of the organs. The disease is not the physical one in the body, it is the breaking down of compassion, empathy, consideration, and one that will lead ultimately to a situation where we look upon the Morlock and The Eloi and wonder how we came to be the same terrible vision described by H. G. Wells.
It is in Dead Tomorrow, with the clock kicking down on the refugee chosen to be sacrificed and the recipient, who also should be cared for and sympathised with in equal measure, that this dreadful trade is highlighted, and as DSI Grace and his team battling the criminals via the darknet, it seems that even if one procurer of human organs is caught, there will always be another ready to take their place, another desperate soul in need of new life, and another frantic refugee chosen to be surrendered to the whims of capitalism and supply and demand.
Arguably the finest episode of the Grace series so far, it asks us to mind our conscious, to keep an observance on our fellow traveller, for where the undocumented go and hide, the parasites, the true disgusting bloodsuckers who see migrant as a commodity will be there counting their blessings and their bank accounts.
Ian D. Hall