DCI Banks (TV Series) Friend of the Devil: Part 1 (2011) User Reviews

Kevin...we hardly knew ye

[safenoe · 9/10 · 28 August 2017]

I only watched Friend of the Devil (this review relates to parts 1 and 2) recently, and after the news that DCI Banks got the ax and sadly will no longer be with us after five solid seasons. Seriously, how on earth could DCI Banks be axed after only 5 years? What will happens to the Leeds tourist trade? Anyway, the opening crime in this episode relates to a previous episode, and we see the murder from the chilling and cold opening scene from the Yorkshire Dales/Moors. Talking of chilling, Raquel Cassidy put in an incredible performance as Dr Elizabeth Waring.

Sadly, DC Kevin Templeton is written out of this episode in gruesome manner. It's a shame, as DCI Banks singled him out for distinction, which in TV-land is quite foreboding if you know what I mean.

Murder in the Rue Morgue

[Hitchcoc · 9/10 · 8 January 2019]

This is an interesting episode because we know who one of the killers is right from the start. Someone we've met before has been destroyed. She is take to a field by a woman and that woman cuts her throat. At about the same time, a pretty young girl who has a bit of a harsh side is found in room off a dark alley. She has been raped and killed. Banks does what he does best. He scatterguns everything. He is so different from many of these British cop show cops. He lets his emotions distract him. He also get involved with women on a superficial level and forgets about good police work. Annie, one of his partners, ambitious and decisive, and also emotional, is a constant foil for him. But she is also quite good. This episode ends with the arrest of a man who they think killed the girl in the alley.

Friend of the Devil: Part 1

[Prismark10 · 6/10 · 26 February 2021]

The episode begins with a gruesome murder of a helpless badly disfigured woman in a wheelchair. She has a throat cut by a woman.

DCI Banks investigates the rape and murder of a college student Hayley Daniels in a store room in a back alley. She had been out drinking with her friends the night before.

Pretty soon the two cases are connected. The pathologist Dr Elizabeth Waring who examines the body of Hayley was the woman who sliced the throat of the woman in the wheelchair.

It is another episode where Banks goes after all and sundry. Everyone's a suspect and every suspect lies.

Meanwhile DS Annie Cabbot again shows her ambitious side. She investigates the wheelchair victim and discovers that she was Lucy Payne. The serial killer from the first story in the series.

Dr Waring seems to be some kind of vigilante and she makes a grave mistake at the end of the first episode.

There was no mystery as to who killed Lucy Payne. Given that Payne had been so badly injured in a prison attack, her life was a living hell. I would have thought Waring would had been better to keep her alive.