Dirty Deeds Done In Dundee
A Dundee-born young woman returns to her home town to take up a position as a technician at the local university laboratory which among other things, assists the police in drug-related cases and crime-scene analysis. As if coming back home after fifteen or so years to start a new job in her birthplace wasn't daunting enough, she's still haunted by memories of the unsolved murder and dismemberment of her own mother at a local beauty spot which caused her to leave originally. Her feckless, mild drug-habit natural dad isn't exactly welcoming nor does she appear to have much of a relationship with her mum's since remarried second husband so she's pretty much all alone in the big city, a regular babe in the woods.On the last leg of her car journey home, she's held up in a traffic jam caused by a suicide leap from the Tay Bridge. This later coincidentally ties in with her initial assignment at the university as it turns out the jumper owned a local night club which has just burned down with three fatalities, one of which is established as a murder while the two other appear to be have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, so that she's soon investigating material from the crime scene as well as the supply of a newly enhanced ecstasy-type drug which was being peddled at the nightclub. She duly impresses her new boss and colleagues with her zeal and initiative but is then shocked to learn that the college's new on-line crime-scene educational tutorial called M.O.O.C. seems to be based on her own mother's case. Soon both cases become linked but while the present-day deaths are routinely explained, the real mystery involves her mother's cold case and whether she can solve it and obtain closure in the process.
One final complication is her romantic involvement with the young owner of the construction business which carried out repairs on the nightspot years before but did so on the cheap and in breach of health and safety regulations and which led to the innocent deaths of the two young employees trapped inside on the fateful night of the fire-raising. The current ownership of said business was however passed to his son by his tough-as-nails father who seems to inspire in him a mixture of hero-worship and fear and who ran the company with the son as foreman at the time of the fire. The events leading up to Emma's mother's murder are then gradually unfolded to a background of sex, drugs and infidelity, leading to the big reveal in the final episode.
I enjoyed the setting of Dundee, I think the first time the city has been the backdrop to a major national TV series and the plotting and characterisations were well-realised once you allowed sufficient artistic licence for the all-about-Emma coincidences which abound. A number of details jarred with me however, besides some too-obvious P.C.-casting choices, as well as the love-at-first-sight encounter between Emma and the at-least-ten-years-older construction company boss plus there was a pointless background romance played out between a member of the crime lab and her American girlfriend who just turns up out of nowhere.
There were however enough twists and turns on the way to the revealing of the old whodunit to make this a satisfying watch all the way through. I thought the best acting was done by Martin Compston as the conflicted construction manager, Laura Fraser as the clinical lab boss, John Gordon Sinclair as Emma's sleazy dad and Michael Nardone as the diligent police investigating officer and while I initially thought that Molly Windsor in the pivotal part of Emma seemed somewhat lightweight, felt she grew into the part as developments progressed.
Even if it did at times resemble an extended Scottish version of "Silent Witness", this series provided good lockdown entertainment over its six episodes.
score 7/10
Lejink 9 May 2020
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw5721028/14557
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