Way back in 1950, the great American crime writer Raymond Chandler authored an essay on the current state of thriller writing. “When in doubt,” he wrote, “have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” Chandler was sending up a tawdry trend among his contemporaries, but the snippet came to define his oeuvre too. Men with guns were, after all, frequently coming through his doors. And if the second season of BBC One’s Vigil is anything to go by, this approach hasn’t gone out of fashion in 75 years.
After a demonstration, in Scotland, by a weapons manufacturer goes horrifically wrong, resulting in several casualties, DCI Amy Silva (Suranne Jones) is brought in to investigate. She partners up, in more ways than one, with her pregnant girlfriend Kirsten (Rose Leslie). “It’ll probably mean we have to stop holding hands when we get there,” Kirsten observes, as they embark on a mission that will take them from the Scottish Highlands to the (fictional) Middle Eastern state of Wudyan. Among the suspects in the investigation are Dougray Scott’s stern military bod Marcus Grainger, David Elliot’s rogue veteran Ross, Romola Garai’s plummy squadron commander Eliza, and Sabi (Hiba Medina) the daughter of a missing man whose login credentials were used to hijack the killer drone.
