waking the dead

Waking the Dead has been running for quite a while now - something in the order of 10 years, maybe?

For those that are unaware, it's a mystery crime drama. The title comes from the fact that it's all about re-opening 'cold' cases - murders that were not solved at the time, mainly.

Generally speaking I enjoy it - the 'who done it?' aspect is usually quite strong and forms the main focus of the stories. Which isn't to say it's just about the cases - there's normally a fair bit of interpersonal stuff and character development kicking about.

Mainly the focus is on Boyd, the main in charge. Boyd is a bit of an odd character. He's very... loud I guess is the best word. He shouts at people a lot. It's also difficult to tell if he cares or not.

The reason he took the job was essentially because he was looking for his son, so there's a caring aspect there. But then he generally treats his work colleagues like shit. And he's not exactly kind to anyone he interviews - indeed, he's not above giving them a good slap now and again.

Which, for me, is where things start to go a bit wonky. How, in this day and age, has he kept his job? Some of the stuff he gets up to is way beyond legal, let alone acceptable, and yet he's never been fired.

The other week there was a storyline where he broke into someone's house to get evidence, for example. At the end the episode the internal investigation type people turned up and basically said "stop working on the case, we're investigating you."

Ah, I thought, next week will be about him being in trouble. But nope, it was apparently business as usual.

It's difficult to explain, but everything seems to be unravelling in a way. I mean, it's kinda supposed to be like that - the Boyd's son thing has actually been resolved, and I think he's meant to be spiralling out of control, and Spence, one of his team has left.

But the problem is they're not really being properly consistent and they're not really paying enough attention to the non-case story parts. For example, the girl on the team died in the first part.

Okay, fair enough, but it was done in such a random way - one minute she's okay, the next she's dead. And then there's basically no mention of her after that - Boyd treated her like shit, as per usual, but in these later episodes there's been no follow up to that. Grace, the psychologist, apparently hasn't even had a word with him or anything.

I dunno, it feels like while they're still doing interesting murders, the other aspects have gone a bit loose. Plus they're starting to interfere too much in the cases - it feels like none of the cases this year has been solved properly because of Boyd ballsing them up.

Which is fair enough, but where are the repercussions from that? He's not even gotten a bollocking from his boss.

It's difficult to explain, because it's always had that aspect of Boyd being a loose cannon, but this year it seems to have lost cohesion as an overall entity - the plot things running through the whole series seem to have gotten a bit mangled somewhere.