The question they’re all asking is, can Shetland survive the loss of Douglas Henshall as DI Jimmy Perez? After all, it was Henshall’s shrewd and quietly anguished performance which gave the show much of its allure. And now there’s no Mark Bonnar either, who could always be relied on to add a soupçon of angst.
Instead, it’s Ashley Jensen (Agatha Raisin, After Life etc) who’s front and centre in the new, revamped Shetland. She plays DI Ruth Calder of the Metropolitan Police, investigating the murder of a London gangster, Philip Remis. She’s looking for a runaway witness to the crime, Ellen Quinn (Maisie Norma Seaton), who has fled north to her native Shetland. By an amazing coincidence, it turns out that DI Calder just happens to have been born in Shetland too. Extraordinary!
The show has long since used up Ann Cleeves’ original Shetland novels, and we can feel screenwriter Paul Logue working hard to find ways to knit the new characters into a Shetland-esque backdrop. He has created a forbidding family dynasty, the Bains, to which Ellen belongs, even if she seems to have been doing her best to escape from them, and this entails a cold and frosty role for Phyllis Logan as matriarch Grace Bain (pictured above). Ruth Calder’s back story gets a thorough airing too, not least her distant but evidently not entirely extinguished love affair with Cal Innes (Jamie Sives). She also finds herself uneasily re-establishing contact with her clergyman brother Alan (Steven Miller), with whom she seems to have not a lot in common.
Alongside Sandy Wilson (played by real-life Shetlander Steven Robertson), the main survivor from previous series is Alison O’Donnell’s Alison “Tosh” McIntosh, currently an “acting Detective Inspector”. Always a likeable but somewhat insubstantial presence, Tosh seems more like a district nurse than a police officer. Now she finds herself in the slightly awkward situation of having to play host to the big city cop as she tramps around the landscape looking for the runaway Ellen.
Also on Ellen’s trail are a pair of hitmen, sent up from the metropolis by a so far unseen crime lord called Cassidy. Ellen stole a pile of money from the dead guy, and Cassidy wants it back. However, this propels us into the land of farce as the armed thugs Howell (Don Gilét, pictured below), who looks like he’s wandered in from the set of Top Boy, and Nowak (Arnas Fedaravičius) drive around the bleak and baleful Shetland landscapes waving their guns about like characters from a low-rent Tarantino knock-off. As an artsdesk reader aptly commented about Series 6 of Shetland, “the TV stories have read like London crime stories transported to Shetland, with gangsters, drugs and people-smuggling.” Which is exactly what we have here.
Already the bodies are piling up, with the luckless Ellen and a local shopkeeper now surplus to requirements, while Nowak has proved to be a danger to himself as well as to everybody else. But there’s more going on than meets the eye, since there’s a parallel toll of murdered sheep which the local constabulary haven’t yet got to grips with. This is evidently some sort of ritual, with the dead animals all marked with a mysterious symbol. Imagine Tosh’s amazement when she finds this same symbol tattooed on the leg of the deceased Ellen. No "lamb to the slaughter" jokes, folks. You can’t help feeling that while this is Shetland, it isn’t Shetland.