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Aug 02, 2017PC1 rated this title 2 out of 5 stars
The first two in the series were a bit disappointing. This one was less disappointing, but a letdown none the less. There are a couple of plot twists in this that don't make much sense - very sloppy. After a couple of days of thought I came up with a way one twist could be explained away. But surely, that's the writers' job. I used to work in Shetland, back in the mid-1980s. In summer, the islands are like a scattering of emeralds in the bluest of waters, in the winter they are the broken wind-lashed teeth of hell. The makers of this programme seem to have opted to film in either the spring or fall and the place looks dank and miserable. That might have been what they were going for - a rip-off of the flurry of recent detective series full of Scandinavian angst, but done on the cheap. I think only two of the cast had anything like a Shetland accent. Is it possible the whole island group is now over-run by Glaswegians? This may seem a minor point but I would like to have been able to work out which characters were locals, with a well-developed social support network and family close at hand, and which were the more vulnerable incomers - sooth moothers as the locals label them. The writers' ignorance of Scottish Criminal Law, which requires a higher standard of evidence to secure a conviction than its English cousin, was disappointing. Why set a crime series in Scotland and then impose a alien legal system. I'm not sure the writers have much of a clue when it comes to what Procurators Fiscal are and do. If there is a series four, I don't think I'll bother. The money spent hiring actors Anna Chancellor and James Cosmo would have been better spent hiring some decent writers to come up with a plot that doesn't plod and makes better sense. I canvassed friends who still live in Shetland and they too are disappointed at the way the islands and their population have been portrayed in this series.