Remember Vigil, the BBC One crime drama in which Suranne Jones was trapped in a submarine? Jones played DCI Amy Silva, a police detective who was assigned to investigate a mysterious death aboard a submarine, then became trapped inside it, locked in with all the suspects and the killer. Meanwhile, her colleague and lost true love, DS Kirsten Longacre (Rose Leslie), helped to probe the case on the Scottish mainland, all the while worried her rightful life partner was trapped in a submarine.
Thanks to the ingenious tension-tripling twist of trapping the protagonist in a submarine, Vigil was one of the BBC’s biggest hits of 2021. So, where to now for the popular trapped-in-a-submarine drama? DCI Amy Silva is back for a new season, but she’s not trapped in a new submarine. Nor is she aboard a hijacked plane, stuck in a broken lift or wedged in a cave after a potholing mishap. She’s not trapped at all! What are they thinking?
It’s a bold move but, exposed to the unforgiving fresh air, Vigil survives – perhaps even improves. How? First, Jones is an excellent addition to the ranks of fictional detectives, displaying the classic qualities of a sturdy TV tec. DCI Silva lacks a gimmick and instead relies on confidence and capability: the low-key satisfaction of watching someone who is always on top of their brief, making steady progress by methodical accounting for small details, is addictive. Silva is also unfailingly assertive, in a controlled, non-aggressive way. When she means business, she puts her glasses on; when she really means business, she takes them off again, particularly when faced with male authority figures trying to fob her off.
Now she is no longer trapped in a submarine, the detective’s strengths have more room to come to the fore, and her total lack of deference to people in power becomes key. In season one, the fact that the murder was aboard a Royal Navy vessel with nuclear capabilities was a prominent but not too important part of the story. The bad guy turned out to be a Russian spy, and there was some stuff about Trident and the way the state suspends democratic accountability when certain military objectives are in play, but it wasn’t that big a deal.
In season two, that changes and Silva emerges as a specialist at uncovering wrongdoing in our compromised armed forces. A cracking opening sequence takes place on a military training ground in the Scottish countryside, where Air Vice-Marshal Marcus Grainger (Dougray Scott) is overseeing a demonstration drill in which four remotely piloted drones destroy an empty hut for the benefit of dignitaries from the fictional, oil-rich Middle East dictatorship, Wudyan. When an unknown person takes control of one of the drones and fires live rounds at people, DCI Silva has a murder case to solve. But the air vice-marshal, a smooth talker who can quickly bare his teeth, is more concerned about the future of the £1bn “partnership” between Wudyan and the UK.
Grainger is half serving officer, half representative of the arms company that makes the drones. He explains that 600 local jobs depend on these flying killing machines being sold to Wudyan, which is using them to, ahem, manage an uprising in a neighbouring country. Silva’s investigation is bound to be obstructed at every turn.
Thus, Vigil joins a fine tradition of BBC One primetime dramas casually dropping political truth bombs. Back in the day, Spooks used to regularly set out the realities of dirty state realpolitik, saying things that would have been unsayable on BBC News. More recently, Line of Duty has become the nation’s favourite cop drama despite proceeding on the explicit premise that the police are irredeemably corrupt. Vigil has much to say about the secret, lucrative business that drives our foreign policy, about how self-interest decides which foreign actors are allies and which are terrorists, and about the sinister future of automated warfare.
But, mainly, it is just a good crime thriller. A pacy opening episode keeps giving us juicy chief suspects, then shows them to be innocent, dead, or both. As the intrigue widens and the body count grows, DCI Silva’s home life turns her into a rounded human: she and DS Longacre are together now and expecting a baby, and Silva isn’t happy about Longacre continuing to work on an increasingly dangerous case. But, in part two – Vigil continues on Monday and Tuesday this week – it is Silva who is in deeper peril. She has to go to Wudyan, and hole up on a British army base full of people loaded with guns and secrets. In a more interesting way than last time, she is trapped.
Vigil is on BBC One and iPlayer in the UK and SBS On Demand and Binge in Australia.
