The only thing falling was the show's ratings

agitpapa-562-1441

The Fall lost 1.2 million viewers in its 2nd season at the beeb and for good reason. The show degenerated into a pathos of utterly improbable police incompetence, emanating mostly from the supposedly hot-shot chief inspector played by Gillian Anderson, whose entire function appeared to be to watch interminable surveillance and evidence videos while arching her brow and heaving soft sighs, in between wardrobe changes in the washroom where we could get a good look at her cleavage and assess the quality of her latest boob job.

Cops swarmed around the perp but lost track of him constantly, failed to locate any evidence, sent armies to tail him but never once thought of putting a camera in his house, held countless meetings where everyone would moronically stare at a screen displaying the waveform of a voice recording (because if they had recorded video they would have caught him in the 1st season), yet failed to make even a positive voice match when they finally nabbed the guy.

As the show ran out of steam in its second season, clumsily-inserted vignettes began to appear about Ulster loyalist former-terrorist-turned-gangsters and pedophile Catholic priests. An Ulster loyalist gangster with apparent patronage in high places terrorized the police, the lamentable story of the island's Catholic orphanages was alluded to, and a pedophile priest was put on display, but all of it sanitized and depoliticized to the point of WTF irrelevance.

Predictably, more people watched Masterchef than did the show's finale on the BBC, which drew even with a documentary on Apple.

score 5/10

agitpapa-562-1441 4 March 2015

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3195804/