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1 hour ago
5
Like many a police procedural, Vigil always begins with a cold open. This time round, however, it’s absolutely freezing. We are, as per, thrown headlong into a niche and tangentially Scottish military world where a murder has occurred. The first series took place on board a nuclear submarine (the show is, confusingly, still named after the vessel), while the second split the action between an army airfield in Scotland and the fictional Middle Eastern nation of Wudyan.
For its third outing, we find ourselves in the (real) Arctic region of Svalbard. The area is supposedly demilitarised, but four British special forces agents are working undercover at a research centre, and tonight their mission is to extract a Chinese scientist who has made a discovery that could either save or destroy the world. En route, they’re ambushed by Russians who want whatever world-saving-or-destroying stuff she’s got. The scientist escapes – but one of the Brits later turns up dead in a Russian enclave.
The action moves from (slightly less) snowcapped (than they used to be) mountains to the snuggly Glasgow bedroom of Vigil’s police protagonists: DCI Amy Silva (Suranne Jones) and her colleague and girlfriend DI Kirsten Longacre (Rose Leslie), who has spent the past year looking after the pair’s baby son, Fergal. As far as I can gather, Silva and Longacre are relatively run-of-the-mill detectives, yet Vigil relies on them being assigned to cases that could feasibly trigger a third world war on at least an annual basis. You know when people say returning to work after maternity leave feels like a nice break from relentless childcare? I don’t think that applies when your first day back involves flying nearly to the north pole to investigate a murder while ensuring the UK avoids an international incident with Russia. But at least Longacre gets some peace and quiet on the plane.
Silva, to her slight chagrin, is ordered to stay on home turf. Little does she know that’s where the explosive drama is. It’s climate conference season and a Scottish scientist has flown back from Svalbard with suspicious haste for the occasion. Moments after Silva doorsteps him at his university, he is blown up by a bomb in his lab. As she enters, another man runs out – a climate activist with a rather convoluted grudge.
In the Arctic, meanwhile, the violence is more psychological. In order to keep the peace, Svalbard’s Norwegian police chief must treat Russian and UK representatives with strict equality. That means the Russians are permitted to appoint their own detective, Col Zamorin, to the investigation. But is he friend or foe? And who will find the Chinese scientist and her mysterious grail first?
Vigil is, obviously, not your standard murder mystery – each series is set on the precipice of an alarmingly realistic geopolitical crisis. The second series revolved around the sale of British arms to the Middle East; this time themes include Russian expansionism, our age of trollish diplomacy and how the interests of the global energy industry trump concerns about the climate crisis (PS: we’re doomed). Playing out over this chaotic backdrop of current affairs is a stream of individual deceptions: pretty much every character is harbouring a major secret. Like a global Line of Duty, this is essentially a programme about not being able to trust a soul in the police, the intelligence services or the military. Far from being a guarantee against criminality, rank is probably a confirmation of it.
Wanton complexity isn’t always a bad thing in a thriller, especially in the age of second screening-related simplicity. The problem is that Vigil’s twist-rate is too high for any revelation to effectively land. The levels of conspiracy are flummoxing and seemingly never-ending: just as one layer of lies has been peeled off, we’re confronted by another. The capacity to be surprised is stripped away in the process.
If you can’t invest in the case, you need to be able to invest in the leads. Unfortunately, this is Vigil’s weakest link. Silva is essentially a blank slate: the closest thing she has to a personality trait is putting on and swiftly taking off a massive pair of reading glasses. Leslie assumes a very broad Glaswegian accent to play Longacre, whose defining characteristic is that she’s … quite nice? Not to suggest Silva isn’t also quite nice – she is! The pair’s working relationship is not impeded by their romantic one, either. They are both too sensible and professional for their (mild) domestic friction to tip over into popcorn-crunching drama.
Instead, what we’re left with is a mystery designed to wrongfoot the viewer to a tedious degree, which plays out over a backdrop of urgent real-world jeopardy. Unfortunately, those two things end up cancelling each other out. Vigil makes it hard to keep caring, even when it’s the planet’s future that is at stake.
