#anjli mohindra is an appealing screen presence

[cantsayidont]

August 2021. I'll freely admit that Series 1 of VIGIL has a solid hook for a detective story: Scottish civilian police detective Amy Silva (Suranne Jones) is assigned to investigate a suspicious death aboard the Royal Navy ballistic missile submarine HMS Vigil while it's still on patrol, effective trapping her in a claustrophobic environment where everyone has something to hide, no one respects her authority, and the commanding officers seem eager to sweep the incident under the rug even though there may be a killer onboard. Meanwhile, Silva's partner and ex-girlfriend Kirsten Longacre (Rose Leslie) investigates a related murder ashore, with both the Navy and MI5 seemingly determined to obstruct her at every turn.

The first few episodes are well-directed and well-acted, with a cast that also includes Connor Swindells (of SEX EDUCATION) and the perennially underutilized Anjli Mohindra, and the show initially maintains a high level of tension despite some implausible and cliched story elements. However, much like the American NCIS shows, the plot eventually does a jarring about-face that transforms what initially seems to be a rather sordid exposé of the Navy into a propaganda piece about the importance of maintaining Britain's nuclear deterrent, with activists who want nuclear weapons out of Scotland painted as cowardly dupes (a reminder that costar Rose Leslie is a Tory who campaigned for Remain in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum). All this is on top of some really egregious copaganda even by policier standards.

The main reason I bothered with the show at all was learning that the two lead characters were actually presented as lovers, or ex-lovers (as opposed to fandom "gay"). I'm as susceptible as anyone to Suranne Jones' expressively pensive frown, and Rose Leslie is certainly attractive despite her terrible real-world politics, but the faux-mo relationship between Amy and Kirsten is neither very convincing nor ultimately very satisfying. Part of the problem is that it plays second fiddle to Amy's traumatic memories of the death of her former boyfriend and her determination to regain custody of the daughter she raised with him — a lot of plot to squeeze into a six-episode series that's also preoccupied with murder investigations, official coverups, and nefarious Russian spies — but even the flashbacks to the beginning of Amy and Kirsten's relationship seldom suggest any real affection between them, much less passion or love. Given a choice, I guess I'd rather have a bad show with chaste and unconvincing wlw than a bad show without any, but it still feels like pinkwashing, a half-hearted and somewhat cynical attempt to attract viewers who might otherwise find the show's subject matter and politics too unpalatable. Given the show's surprising popularity, it seems to have worked.

I only watched the first part of the ill-advised second series, which awkwardly retains the same title despite no longer having anything to do with the submarine. The second series has Amy and Kirsten back together, but they're still at odds because they're about to have a baby, which replaces the first season's conflict about Amy's commitment phobia with a tonally identical conflict based on her being a passive-aggressive control freak about Kirsten's pregnancy, thus once again sparing Jones and Leslie the need to feign too much unseemly gay affection. There's one (1) scene of them cuddling to suggest that perhaps these characters do indeed love each other, but they're then separated by the contrivance of the plot, which has the same problems as the first series and is also chock full of racist, Orientalist nonsense involving a fictional Arab country called Wudyan. Truly dire.

#vigil #vigil bbc #suranne jones #rose leslie #paterson joseph #martin compston #connor swindells #anjli mohindra #jones has of course played various lesbian characters #including anne lister in gentleman jack #although that ended up focusing a lot more #on lister being a tory landlord and aspiring coal baron #than on historical lesbian drama #anjli mohindra is an appealing screen presence #but she's been criminally underutilized in at least THREE recent shows #the others being the lazarus project and the peripheral #teevee #wlw #hateration holleration #i eventually half-watched the rest of s02 #which is PAINFULLY racist and without virtue