Can Shetland still be Shetland without DI Jimmy Perez? Douglas Henshall spent seven seasons nudging the BBC One sleuth up the ranks of British crime shows, playing a bruised, haunted homicide detective with no gimmick apart from the steady erosion of his will. Last year, Perez finally crumbled, driven out of the force by an injustice that required rules to be broken, and by his desire to no longer be left personally broken-hearted by the job. Henshall quit the show, having created a TV copper of rare nuance.
Shetland has returned nonetheless, and it has plenty of attractions left to compensate for Henshall’s considerable absence. Most obvious is the setting, its treeless vistas painted in dark, guilty greens and greys, suddenly forgiven by the clean blue of the sea. The landscape’s alluring Nordic noir vibes would elevate any murder mystery. But for a while, Shetland hasn’t quite been a one-man operation anyway: fans are as invested in Alison “Tosh” McIntosh, the sergeant who was once merely a sidekick, as they were in Perez. Played with an open heart and a resolute intelligence by Alison O’Donnell, Tosh has been all the more beloved since the bold season three storyline in which she was raped – a catastrophe that was so honestly, sensitively handled by O’Donnell (and indeed by Perez) that we are now bonded to her and the show in a way that feels more precious than anything offered by a standard sleuthing box set.
Tosh, however, needs a new foil and Shetland needs new impetus. To answer those needs, the latest episode dips into several crime drama tropes, the first being one that’s nothing to do with regular Shetland: for the opening eight minutes, all the established characters are absent and we’re watching a different show altogether, dealing with organised crime in swanky London locations. A young thief, Ellen (Maisie Norma Seaton), burgles the wrong luxury flat and ends up on the run with a bag full of money belonging to the employer of two ruthless hitmen. Pursued by the assassins, she heads home, to Shetland.
Also on Ellen’s tail is a Met police detective, DI Ruth Calder (Ashley Jensen) – another Shetland girl who is not happy at all about being sent back there. So, we have the cliche of the big-city copper returning to the small community they grew up in, where the locals know their secrets and the resident detectives dislike their brusque arrogance. When the hitmen arrive in Shetland, though, they bring with them Fargo-ish black farce: one’s a wise and weary veteran, the other a hothead who is also, absurdly, a keen ornithologist. He wants to go birdwatching once they’ve killed Ellen and nicked back the cash.
Other developments further suggest that Shetland is overcompensating for its big personnel change. The surely doomed Ellen is a member of a powerful local family who “take care of their own”, with the presence of Phyllis Logan as its fierce matriarch being one of a few examples of the show flexing the casting muscles it has acquired since becoming the BBC’s Scottish drama flagship. Completing a mini reunion of the cast of Guilt, Jamie Sives is there too as the feckless but charming ex to whom DI Calder can’t resist returning when her arrival back in Shetland opens old fissures.
As Calder, Ashley Jensen already looks like a viable replacement for Henshall. Jensen often has a note in her performances of the inner child surfacing – she is skilled at playing women who are ingenuous, direct, vulnerable and sometimes petulant, and Ruth is all of those as she reluctantly revisits the childhood she spent years working to forget. The well-worn story of criminal investigations stirring up long-buried pain, mainly for the investigators, always receives an unusually thoughtful treatment in Shetland – and it seems it will power a finely constructed dynamic between the new crime-solving duo, Tosh and Ruth. Both bear the weight of deep trauma in their Shetlander past, but only one has written the place off as a result. From that tension, a dramatically fruitful partnership can grow.
The episode’s writer, Paul Logue, fleshes out what could have been a hackneyed chalk-and-cheese clash as the two women identify each other’s flaws. Ruth is irate at Tosh’s insistence on diffidently introducing herself as “temporary DI McIntosh” – such a perfectly Tosh thing to do – but then Tosh firmly steps in when an impatient Ruth counterproductively badgers a witness.
The new series still has work to do: despite the two blokes with guns causing bloody chaos, there’s no mystery to unravel yet. But Shetland can maintain its knack of rising above the familiar without its former leading man. It doesn’t need one.
• Shetland aired on BBC One and is available on BBC iPlayer
