The man with no name, no family, no history, is an action movie staple. It evokes memories of Clint Eastwood staring down his enemies in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, or Viggo Mortensen growling through the apocalyptic wasteland of The Road. It is a sure-fire route to a sense of mystery – who is he? What’s he doing here? – but it’s also a creative dead end. You cannot tantalise your viewers forever, and that’s the challenge for the second series of BBC One’s The Tourist, which picks up after the pieces begin to fall into place for our enigmatic hero.
After the ambiguous final moments of The Tourist’s first season, viewers will be relieved to discover that Elliot (Jamie Dornan) is very much alive. In fact, he’s swanning around south Asia with his girlfriend Helen (Danielle Macdonald), who has sacked off her career as a police constable. After a difficult time in Australia (which involved a car crash, loss of memory, and about a dozen attempts on his life), Elliot thinks he’s safe. “Are you really, really – like 100 per cent – sure about that?” Helen asks. Well, of course not. And it takes about five minutes back in his Irish homeland before Elliot is kidnapped by masked goons.
