After 22 series of Silent Witness, we have learned that forensic TV pathology is a complicated job.
Of course it involves the obvious stuff, which requires zombie overalls and a pained expression. The facial discomfiture will vary, though the transition between mild indigestion and suppressed “Eureka!” will be as subtle as it is sudden.
There will be whispering, out of respect for the mutilated corpses on the slab, because to wake them would turn Silent Witness into a different kind of drama. There will be jargon: to baffle and display expertise. Crimes of vast complexity will be solved after an hour or two of concentrated murmuring.
This week, it’s a plane crash. A small plane, but a significant one. “So,” says Dr Nikki Alexander (Emilia Fox) immediately, “who was on it?”
An excellent question. Open, yet curious, which is apt, as the occupants of the plane include Miriam Heller, the public face of an NGO, and Jonathan Kraft — “as in ex-US ambassador Jonathan Kraft”. There’s also 12-year-old Ezra (Harrison Abel) who is not quite dead — blood pressure 80 over 50, techno soundtrack enabled — and handy for mobile phone videos of the crash. Plus a non-flying pilot. A NON-FLYING PILOT.
So, nothing suspicious there. True, the bodies are scattered around like barbecued rejects from Antony Gormley’s garden ornament factory, but as plane crashes go, everything seems to be in order. But remember Dr Nikki, with her ring-flash and relentless nose for truth. Sooner, not later, she is going to suspect there is more to this routine crash on which a former ambassador and terrorist target was a passenger. Attention will turn to the non-flying pilot. Who was he, and what was he doing if NOT FLYING?
There’s more. Silent Witness would be great if it just involved Emilia Fox wandering around looking worried, but there’s a whole team of detective pathologists, all of them trained in Googling and slow supposition. So when Dr Thomas Chamberlain (Richard Lintern) is called away from this international disaster to attend to a routine suicide in which the victim has a questionable browser history and a rudimentary smiley tattoo, things get complicated.
The non-flying pilot has the same tattoo. Strangely, the design is the same as the home-made tattoo done by film star Margot Robbie on last Friday’s Graham Norton Show. Which may seem like a coincidence. Except that there are no coincidences in television pathology...
