Fear: Silent Witness S15E11+12 (Review)

While Fear does address a controversial and provocative issue with Silent Witness’ usual intelligence and brutal realism, it is rather wibbly-wobbly in terms of structure and writing; and at the episode’s close, leaves you wondering precisely what you’ve just experienced in a way that has nothing to do with the deliberate engagement of an audience’s…

Redhill: Silent Witness S15E9+10

This week’s Silent Witness gives us a good old fashioned prison conspiracy headily infused with multiple narrative levels, emotional blackmail and vicious brutality, as well as a brilliant rendering of a classic mystery-story attribute that is harder and harder to achieve convincingly nowadays: a culprit that you never suspect for one second. When a semi-intoxicated…

Paradise Lost: Silent Witness S15E5+6 – Review

This week’s Silent Witness is a merciful return to brilliance after last week’s yawn-fest and fits neatly into the great crime tradition of serial killers inspired by literature with great originality, replacing the usual culprit (Dante’s Inferno) with a new, but infinitely appropriate one – Paradise Lost. In this episode, an annoyed Nikki’s chance encounter…

And Then I Fell In Love…Silent Witness S15E3+4 – Review

It is perhaps understandable that after last week’s labyrinthine plot, the producers of Silent Witness thought going for something a lot simpler in this week’s episode would help give the audience a bit of a rest before things get really dark again: the TV equivalent of the gatekeeper scene in Macbeth. They have, to a…

Death Has No Dominion: Silent Witness S15E1+2* – Review

The dominant theme pervading each aspect of last season’s premier was depression: this time, it’s death, as Nikki, Harry and Leo navigate a grey mist of suicide, serial murder and loss in this complex opener of Silent Witness season 15. The many tiny, silken and vitally important threads of the episode’s spider web plot are…