In its second season, Scotland’s crime drama Traces is continuing down the path where other great British series have missed the mark. Unforgotten betrayed its heroine in its last season, loading on so much darkness, challenges, and losses, the writers let the forces of evil and real-life struggles beat down what was a superb, brilliant detective. Traces is challenging its two masterminds of mystery solving: Laura Fraser (A Knight’s Tale, Doctor Who, Breaking Bad)‘s arson expert and professor Sarah Gordon, and Jennifer Spence‘s (Supernatural, Continuum, Stargate, Tru Calling) equally brilliant professor and scientist sleuth Kathy Torrance. But in this series it’s the challenges that make its lead characters really shine.
Whether you first met him as the sympathetic, put-upon teacher opposite Nicole Kidman and Alec Baldwin in Malice, the brother of the comatose guy in While You Were Sleeping, the President of the U.S. in an alien invasion in Independence Day, or the scruffy-looking rogue in Spaceballs, you probably love Bill Pullman. He’s just as endearing and amiable in his gritty mystery series Sinner, with all three seasons now streaming on Netflix. But he’s also troubled (more than the residents of Haven), a bit crotchety, and stranger than even the most odd detective you can conjure (even Adrian Monk). Detective Harry Ambrose may be the Sinner in the title of the USA Network television series, or that might apply more to the killers he tracks down and unthinkably befriends, as he works three season-long cases in upstate New York. Is it worth your time? That question doesn’t have a short answer. But a fourth season is in the works, so now is the time to find out.
In an age where television shows continue to be stretched into a bloated ten episodes, it’s refreshing to to find a six-episode series without the filler. One of those is the Scottish crime series Traces, a tightly, cleverly written story following a team of college forensic professors, scientists, and anthropologists and their work with the local Dundee, Scotland detective branch to solve crimes. The first season is a fictional account centered on the case of a woman who went missing during the real-life Tall Ships festival in Dundee in August 2001, whose body was later found in a shallow grave. The plot closely follows some of the more realistic and mysterious bits of any number of episodes of the true crime series Forensic Files, while working in some well-developed characters–enough to make for a compelling ongoing series. Fans of television from Great Britain are also near guaranteed to find several familiar faces from some of your favorite genre films and TV series along the way.
Another pandemic delayed production finally makes its way to TV audiences this week. It’s the Syfy Channel series Resident Alien, based on the crazy-good Dark Horse Comics sci-fi/crime/mystery mash-up comics by Peter Hogan (2000 AD, Tom Strong) and Steve Parkhouse (Milkman Murders, Doctor Who)–first reviewed here at borg back in 2013. Airing Wednesday nights, the show stars Alan Tudyk as the extra-terrestrial hero who survives a ship crash on what was supposed to be a quick mission to Earth, Coneheads-style. Taking on the part of Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle, he is able to mask his appearance using his otherworldly powers. Like E.T. he just wants to go home, but he must wait until his friends come to find him in the town of Patience, Colorado, an Everwood-style small town full of medical crises that he must attend to after the town doctor is found dead. He gets pulled into a murder mystery, which he takes to like Agent Cooper in the town of Twin Peaks. It’s this police procedural drama-meets-sci-fi blend that is taken forward in the story.
Anglophiles will be hard-pressed to find a more intriguing murder-mystery police procedure television series than with the five seasons (and soon to be seven seasons) of the BBC’s Shetland. Douglas Henshall (who won a BAFTA for the role) plays detective inspector Jimmy Perez, a one-of-a-kind, conscientious and thorough cop who manages a small police department on the Scotland archipeligo. The television series is based on a series of novels by British author Ann Cleeves, who chose to set her police story in the sparse, cold, austere setting in the far northern latitudes. Altogether Cleeves explored the exploits of Perez in nine novels, the final of which, Wild Fire, has just arrived in its first paperback edition.
Wild Fire finds DI Perez on the case of a murder of a young woman named Emma, who is found strangled and hanged in the barn of a local family. Among many quirks is the fact that this isn’t the first time someone was found hanged in their barn. Cleeves’ last case for Perez finds him chasing leads across the country, piecing together the background of the victim, which is unveiled something like Jon Krakauer’s story of Christopher McCandless in his novel Into the Wild. Emma is not so interesting as McCandless, but by the time the reader catches up to the murderer, you’ll feel like you’ve interviewed plenty of witnesses, including a young autistic boy in the home she worked in, and more than a few self-absorbed quirky couples, most futile diversions from the key story.
For fans of the television series exploring the novels for the first time, expect many surprises. Perez of the novels is not quite so engaging, instead a man of few words and emotions that keeps his thoughts close to his vest. The only other main character common to the TV show is Perez’s reliable detective constable Sandy Wilson, who is completely the same put-upon, over-achieving character that he is on the small screen. Perez’s daughter Cassie is only a child here at the end of Cleeves’ novels, who spends most of the novel being watched off-book by biological father Duncan, yet fans of the show know her and Duncan as key to the appeal of the TV series.
With all the changes at the movies, including delays for The New Mutants, originally scheduled for release two years ago and seemingly cursed to never get released by the studio, a television series also based on comics still doesn’t have a firm release date. That’s Syfy’s series Resident Alien, which currently is marketed to arrive this summer on the heels of Syfy’s current, similar vibe, sci-fi comedy Vagrant Queen. Based on a sci-fi/crime mystery mash-up series of comics beginning in 2012 by Peter Hogan(2000 AD, Tom Strong) and Steve Parkhouse (Milkman Murders, Doctor Who)–and first discussed here at borg back in 2013—the television series will be headlined by Firefly, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and Doom Patrol fan-favorite actor Alan Tudyk.
Tudyk plays an alien posing as a human doctor (a la Coneheads), but he’s cloaked, at least to some. The big news for the series is that Linda Hamilton (The Terminator, Chuck) will co-star as a military general pursuing Tudyk’s alien visitor. Sara Tomko(Pandemic), Corey Reynolds (The Closer),Alice Wetterlund(People of Earth), Levi Fiehler (Mars), Mandell Maughan(Life), and Alex Barima(The Exorcist) co-star in the series.
While you’re waiting for this series, get caught up on the comics, released in five trade editions you can track down from Elite Comics or your local comic book store. In the first story arc we meet the alien and see how he goes undercover as Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle in the first murder mystery. The second collection takes the alien/doctor to Seattle to try to help a new-found friend. The third finds him sleuthing out a criminal also hiding behind an alias in town. The feds arrive in the fourth arc, and the fifth arc/collection finds him on a trip to New York City.
The movie-going world first met Anna Paquin when she co-starred in Jane Campion’s The Piano, which earned her the Academy Award for her supporting role at age 11–the second youngest Oscar winner in history. As the New Zealand actress gained experience in her craft she went on to star in True Blood, which earned her a Golden Globe Award. These days she’s best known as Rogue in the X-Men series, appearing in four X-Men movies so far. This past fall she starred as a murder victim in Netflix’s 19th century historical drama series Alias Grace, and this month U.S. audiences were introduced to her performance as a cop in one of the better episodes of season one of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. This week she returns to television in a starring role again as a cop in the new series Bellevue on WGN America.
Paquin continues to show her Oscar and Golden Globe wins were deserved. The actor has a command of the stage, and consistently her presence in a scene brings authority to her characters. In Bellevue we meet a down-to-Earth side of Paquin as she plays Detective Annie Ryder, a local institution in her small town, whose brash personality and working class roots put her at odds with other officers in her department and every other faction in the town of Bellevue. Her new case is locating a missing young man, a local hockey player and celebrity of sorts who we learn had a transgendered lifestyle and possibly was being counseled by a priest at a local church. Paquin’s Ryder has her own odd sense of humor as she makes the best of handling a daughter, a sad sack ex-husband, and the residents of a mining town with a newly closed mine and a newly opened brewery. The first episode really kicks in as we watch Ryder find a connection between the recent crime and strange messages left to her after her father’s suicide when she was a child.
You can see bits and pieces of a myriad of dark-murder-mystery genre TV and film in Bellevue, everything from the dark creepy vibe of Haven, Grimm, Twin Peaks, The Returned,The X-Files, and Wayward Pines–minus the supernatural elements–along with the serious crime material of Broadchurch, Fargo, and Thirteen. As for its pacing, this Canada production for WGN America is presented like many British mystery series–there seems to be more time spent in study of each scene, as found in better mysteries like Shetland or Hinterlands. One episode in and it already is more compelling than The Killing. For current audiences Bellevue may feel more like Riverdale–the series pilot even has Ryder’s daughter recounting a past murder in the small town as Jughead often narrates in Riverdale.
