Much care and attention to detail is lavished on the very nude corpses they slice open on the slab. Luckily, the scenes in the mortuary are routinely excellent. If the police decide not to hunt down an incredibly tenuous connection between a victim and some missing person, the Home Office folks take it upon themselves to interview witnesses and relatives, jump into harm's way by visiting the ghetto in search of clues, and generally make a mockery of the legal system by circumventing police authority when it suits them. Are these pathologists or police officers? Now that the show has three leads instead of just Sam Ryan, the problem is less pronounced because they take turns doing it, but the bottom line is that the forensics team is always inserting themselves into the investigation. That brings me to another problem with the show. and we have CTV footage of the victim's wife committing the murder.ĭetective: My god, ol' Davey-boy built a time machine, went back ten years and married that bloke, eh? Well we got him this time! Pathologist: Actually, we found a woman's DNA under the victim's nails.ĭetective: Ah ha! So Davey's disguising his DNA by removing the X chromosome. If the evidence suggests an opposing theory in the case, they reject it.ĭetective: Ah ha! It was that bastard Davey Henderson I've been after for years. If the pathologist wants to search for more evidence, they immediately refuse it. Most of the detectives they work with fit into a very specific mold, the jaded know-it-all. Where the show falters is allowing predictable tropes to invade the narrative. This means we often get new locales, unusual cases, and new detectives in nearly every episode. As Home Office Pathologists, the team has leave to work with law enforcement officials in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland (if my research is reliable). This change of venue is one of the show's core strengths. She also has an interesting South African background which has made for some diverting trips to Cape Town and other African spots. At first I was resistant to this blatant focus group appeasement but Nikki quickly won me over by being intelligent and mature as well as just adorable. She not only discovers new information about her father's death (finally giving us a payoff after years of blathering on about it) but also gets in touch with the son she gave up for adoption decades before.Īfter Sam's departure the show focused on the boys for a bit before deciding it needed some sexy spice to it and introducing Nikki Alexander. The storyline "A Time To Heal" saw Sam venturing back to Ireland to investigate some IRA victims' corpses. As the two male leads began to get more important roles in the show, it became obvious they were phasing Sam out, and they sent her out with a bang at the beginning of series 8 in 2004. It was those early episodes that had me on the verge of giving up too until they finally teamed Sam up with a pair of likeable pathologists, Leo Dalton and Harry Cunningham. Besides the rotating cast of disposable love interests, the show had an annoying habit of talking about Sam's dead father and the whole IRA conflict in just about every other episode. My friends gave up on the show early on thanks to the sludgy pacing and Sam's smug, cold demeanor. Over the course of the agonizingly slow first few seasons, Sam's mother dies, her sister accepts her again, and Sam goes through a parade of interchangeable boyfriends. They had a lot of emotional baggage to deal with regarding the 1980s IRA bombing death of Sam's father. Sam Ryan, a refreshingly strong female lead whose estranged sister and mother came back into her life after many years. When Silent Witness premiered in 1996 it focused primarily on Dr. I crammed all 13 seasons (or series, as they're called outside North America) into 6 months and was therefore able to fully note the arc of the show over the years. A Scottish show called McCallum is the only one I can recommend if you're looking for something closer to actual pathology and forensics.Īnother reason this show's entertainment quotient is improbable is because of how rough it started. CSI, NCIS, and Crossing Jordan deal with forensics and science in the most surface-level, populist way possible, usually involving muscular coroners, rainbow colored background lighting in the lab, and obnoxious DNA testing montages with techno beats. Quincy was good for its time but that time is 30 years past. I say improbable because, let's face it, good forensics shows are hard to come by. I've just finished watching the thirteenth and latest season of the improbably good UK series Silent Witness.
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