Like many a police procedural, Vigil always begins with a cold open. This time round, however, it’s absolutely freezing. We are, as per, thrown headlong into a niche and tangentially Scottish military world where a murder has occurred. The first series took place on board a nuclear submarine (the show is, confusingly, still named after the vessel), while the second split the action between an army airfield in Scotland and the fictional Middle Eastern nation of Wudyan.
For its third outing, we find ourselves in the (real) Arctic region of Svalbard. The area is supposedly demilitarised, but four British special forces agents are working undercover at a research centre, and tonight their mission is to extract a Chinese scientist who has made a discovery that could either save or destroy the world. En route, they’re ambushed by Russians who want whatever world-saving-or-destroying stuff she’s got. The scientist escapes – but one of the Brits later turns up dead in a Russian enclave.
