A fishing boat drifts somewhere between England and France. There are children hiding on deck. Stowaways? Refugees, perhaps? The boat is set on fire, by someone wearing a gas mask; it’s not clear if the kids are still on board.
One man is found when the charred vessel is towed into Ramsgate, he’s in the hold, alive, bound and gagged. But when the gag is removed by DCI Karl Roebuck (Stephen Dillane), he’s still not saying much, because his tongue’s been cut off. Ew.
Turns out he wasn’t much of a talker even when he had the equipment for it, especially not to the police. He’s a trafficker, those children were refugees, wherever they are now. No bodies then, at the start of The Tunnel: Vengeance (Sky Atlantic), but missing kids, as well as the missing tongue. Actually, it’s there, spat out in the hold, just no longer attached.
And that’s not the end of the horror. Rats run down the Channel tunnel. Not proverbial ones, escaping the sinking ship that is Brexit Britain, but actual ones, bloody great rodents, released into the tunnel deliberately. They knock over a French maintenance worker and have a gnaw on her face before being exterminated by pest control. It is, as Roebuck says, like a James Herbert novel. Or, combined with the missing children, like the Pied Piper, as Elise Wasserman (Clémence Poésy) finds while investigating on the internet. The Pied Piper of Calais?
Elise is no longer commander, she has demoted herself, plus she has got toothache. And, although she’s on the case with Karl again, Anglo-French relations have cooled, which may or may not have something to do with Brexit. His intent is at least cordial, but she’s giving him the old épaule froide.
Their relationship and chemistry, and the performances of Dillane and Poésy, are a big part of the success of The Tunnel and why it has successfully divorced itself from its Scandi parent, The Bridge, to become something in its own right. Karl, incidentally, has voted out of his marriage, although it seems to have been a relatively successful break with good deals on access to trade and children etc.
We won’t get to see how actual Brexit impacts on The Tunnel as this third season will be the final one. They probably did an impact assessment and decided that future international cooperation, with regard to both policing and making television, was simply too uncertain. And over on this side, all the Kent filming locations might be chock-full of lorries waiting to get through customs.
Elise already doesn’t have a high opinion of commercial fishermen from this side of la Manche. Is that true, what she says to Karl about female skate, the anatomy of their genitals and what British fisherman like to do with them? I started doing some serious journalistic research (Googling) on the subject, got as far as typing “skate + vaginas” and then thought: “NO! I do not want to be doing this, especially not at work.” Does Google remember if you just put the words in without hitting search? I’m hoping this paragraph might help me, come the tribunal.
Quickly, back to the children then, the three from the boat. They are refugees, from Syria, and they are alive and well, thank God. They turn up, one morning, in the beds of three middle-class English children in their beautiful Kent Channel-view home. Much to the dismay of the middle-class English mum, not so much because she has suddenly got three refugee children in the house (what do Syrians have for breakfast anyway?), but because her own three children have disappeared!
Yeah, it’s a bit bizarre, the sleepover kid-swap. Intriguing though, and it does mean that this series of The Tunnel is engaging with the Story in Europe right now: the refugee crisis. Specifically, the thousands of missing refugee children. And how the lives of some children are valued higher than others’, depending on status, nationality, passport (or lack of), wealth, race. The police, who really weren’t that interested when it was three Syrian kids missing, are all over it now that it’s the Carver children.
They’re alive, too, but drugged, apparently, being trundled somewhere in a trolley. Aleppo? For symmetry? To be honest, I doubt whoever is behind this is motivated by some kind of fortune redistribution. How does it end in the Pied Piper? Not well, Karl thinks. Depends which version I think. I would look, but I’m scared of the internet.
