My wife and I watched this recently aired second series on the French detective Jean Baptiste after watching on catch-up and largely enjoying the first series from a few years back. This six-part second run was, however, a big disappointment for many reasons.
Most obviously, the story lacked credibility, was poorly structured, several of the lead characters lacked definition and there were just too many plot holes and plot jumps to blow away any pretence at realism. The contrived story centred on the middle-aged female British ambassador to Hungary, based in Budapest, played by Fiona Shaw, who you'd have to say, at least where her family is concerned, that if it wasn't for bad luck, she would have no luck at all. Firstly her daughter is stabbed to death by an Asian immigrant drug addict she disturbs in the act of breaking into the family home. The much-loved young girl sadly dies under the gaze of her parents and significantly her two late-teenage brothers. Indeed, the younger of these two promptly withdraws into himself and stops speaking out loud to anyone, including his parents and brother. Later, while on a family hotel break, the two boys mysteriously get up at the crack of dawn to leave for a secret rendezvous. However, their dad also wakens up early, sees them in the distance and follows them only to find his boys confronted with a gunman and in the ensuing stand-off the father is shot and killed. Both boys then disappear with the gunman which is when Baptiste joins the investigation, offering his services to the local female police detective and indeed the now wheelchair-bound Shaw.
From there the main focus of the story is on attitudes to racism and in particular on two racially-motivated attacks carried out in Hungary by a virulently anti-immigration pressure group under the command of its unknown leader who goes under the name Gomorrah. Baptiste does what he does, helping Shaw track down her two boys at the same time uncovering the pair of murderous plots designed to kill scores of immigrants and finally unmask Gomorrah.
Making use throughout of an ever-more irritating parallel time-line, we also learn that Baptiste's ex-addict daughter has died of an overdose for which he feels responsible and which has finally caused him to separate from his long-suffering English wife. We see him wearing a Revenant-type beard and living like a slob, when Shaw comes back into his life with a hostage, to reopen the case. I just couldn't accept all the plot points being thrown at me. They really are too numerous to mention but the fulcrum I just couldn't swallow was that two young English boys could so easily be radicalised as to become murderers by the man who shot dead in front of them their own father and then being so prominently used by him in the two planned massacres. It all ends up with a brutal beating handed out by Gomorrah to the youngest boy, which he miraculously survives and a no-holds-barred fight between Gomorrah and Baptiste which Baptiste somehow wins, even as we see his past life apparently flashing before him, implying that he is about to die. Next time you see him however, he's hale and hearty, meeting up with Shaw again and even reuniting with his estranged wife, who, in truth, he's treated really selfishly and shabbily.
I was nonplussed by the acting too. Shaw, in the main part opposite Baptiste, has a much vaunted reputation apparently but for me, was awful throughout, her anxious expression never changing, garnering no sympathy from me for her plight throughout. I found her characterisation an unhappy and unconvincing combination of overwrought and one-dimensional. As indicated, Baptiste's treatment of his wife is heartless and insupportable making him too an unsympathetic figure and that's before you get to the young son who gets to speak whole tracts of racist invective, betray his own mother and still slavishly obey his dad's killer, a known mass-murderer.
No, this was very unpalatable, unedifying entertainment with very few, if any redeeming features. Trite, clichéd and featuring as usual too many of Baptiste's from-nowhere Eureka moments, this second series was a failure and marked a big fall-off in quality from that encouraging first series.
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