Returning Shetland leaves Daniel Gear with deep questions
Our reviewer sits down to watch episode one of series 11
I’ve never watched Shetland (the series) before, writes Daniel Gear.
At least not since 2013, when the first half of the first ever episode triggered a juddering existential continuity meltdown, where the only place on Earth that I considered to be inseparable from my own sense of identity was geographically and culturally deformed like the mind-bending dream world in Inception. So, I decided we were incompatible, I’d never watch it again, an ‘dat wid be da end o dat’.
Seemingly unaware of this context, Shetland News have asked me to review the first episode of series 11. Don’t read beyond this point if you don’t want spoilers.
The opening grips me. Subsurface noir, an underwater Volvo. An illicit lifting operation (involving a long-reach digger, old fishing net for rigging, and presumably a high degree of practical “country” stenkling) retrieves the Volvo from the water at Hamna Voe in Eshaness.
I immediately think “right, this is supposed to be a mystery programme, I need to participate by looking for clues”. I pause the episode and pull up a bathymetric chart. “Dat’s weird… dir’s hardly enough depth yundroo for a Volvo to be fully submerged…and mussel boats come an go fae yun pier…dey wid surely have ricket yun if it had been dere fur long…mosto joost recently geen in”.
With that inalienable truth in hand, I restart the episode. A wet policeman is revealed – a slow-rising beard shot. He’s in the absolute erse-end of nowhere, rain staandin-aff him, waiting at the side of a single-track road with a speed gun, which he fumbles when the only car to use the road that day drives past.
I pause it and Google “policeman’s salary”.
The computer in his police car makes Starship Enterprise noises when he haddock-handedly tries to use it, then he struggles to close quite an easy-looking gate, then it turns out the gate he has just closed is directly in front of his own car…I contemplate what the writers are implying about the competence of this man.
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The Eshaness stenklers apparently report the skeleton they’ve just found in the boot of the subsea Volvo, and then comes the most breathtaking piece of dialogue I’ve ever heard…PC Billy McCabe, the wet policeman who’s now on-scene with the Volvo, says to the supervising long-reach digger stenkler: “I thought you boys were dredging the loch o’ Mousa?”
I hit pause.
“Dredging the loch o’ Mousa”, I whisper to myself.
Six minutes in, we find out that the Volvo belongs to a guy that went missing nine years ago who nobody has spoken to since. “Must be his skeleton”, I conclude, “case 50 per cent closed”. But these writers are experts in subterfuge, and Wet Billy informs Calder, Tosh and Sandy (now all on scene) that it can’t be the Volvo owner’s skeleton, because there was evidence that he’d gone to ABERDEEN in 2017.
Then, out of nowhere, a massive spasmodic question orgy electrifies my brain: “why has the Volvo fared so well compared to the skeleton?”; “I keen yun voe is naturally sheltered, but how could a car have remained intact after a nine-year North Atlantic pummelling?”; “would it take much to get it through another MOT?”; “Why didn’t the murderer position the victim in the driver’s seat?”; “Are the bathymetric charts for the area even accurate?”.
I take a break, pull up Autotrader, and start searching for low-mileage used Volvos.
A while later, I get back into it, and more unhinged things start to happen at an accelerating rate – Calder and Tosh visit the Volvo owner’s mother, who asks if her son is deed, and Calder says: “we have no evidence to suggest that he is”.
I hit pause again.
Surely they have a crumb of evidence that he’s either deed, or is himself a murderer who fled to Aberdeen. Anyway, no worries – they visit the missing guy’s wife, who fails to ask anything about the condition of the Volvo, and therefore probably murdered him.
The other thing I’ve learned about Shetland (the series) is that it leans on an aesthetic of extreme tooderiness whenever it can. Almost everything is a bit tooderie. But I wasn’t prepared for the staggering tooderiness of the setting that poor Sandy is about to find himself in.
Sandy breaks into a croft house that possesses a special essence you only really get in the North Mainland or North Isles (allowed to say that, because I am of that). The house is absolutely stappit with proil. Among it, Sandy accidentally touches some magic fish, which have rotted under one of those wall-mounted bar heaters you used to get in public halls, which then causes an old man to appear from among the proil.
The proil genie offers Sandy a cuppa, but overcome by the visceral stench of multi-day bar-heated bream(?), and with a look of sheer horror on his face, he declines. You can tell he’s from the toon.
It was probably a mistake by Shetland News to ask me to write this review.
One of the things that makes the experience of watching Shetland (the series) so uncanny is the complete absence of opportunity to ‘redd-up kin’. Virtually nobody in Shetland (the series) is from Shetland, and therefore not related to anybody I know in any interesting way. Since this is series 11, I’m sure this has been mentioned by somebody before, but I’m left wondering what has happened to all the Shetlanders in this universe. Has there been such an abundance of murder in Shetland (the series) that the Scottish Government have simply relocated Central Belters to 95 per cent of the homes and jobs in Shetland?
Then, in a moment of profound relief, Cllr John Fraser appears, shifting IBCs on a pallet truck.
Another thing I have a duty to mention is something that DI Tosh does which I simply can’t live with. Instead of saying “missing person”, she repeatedly uses an abbreviated portmanteau: “misper”.
This is a multi-dimensional affront to decency, which leaves you wondering how close she is to slipping into full linguistic lunacy and running everything together. “Deadbod”, “Murdvict”, etc. Luckily, on the precipice of absolute verbal degeneracy, she attempts to travel from Lerwick to North Roe, ends up in Quendale, glowers randomly in a variety of sheds and outbuildings, before being lured into a giant underground tank by a Scooby-Doo baddie, and discovers another deadbod.
By this stage, I’ve experienced a total relapse of the 2013 incident. Time, meaning, and my conception of individual identity have lost all resolution. Shetland has been folded and tesseracted into a form that no Shetlander can comprehend. I have no idea how many years have passed.
However, introspection has revealed that this isn’t a Shetland (the series) problem; this is a me problem. People love this programme, and I understand – it’s comfort TV. But I will never emotionally recover from “dredging the loch o’ Mousa”, and so for that reason, I give it a 6 oota 10, and 6 is generous.
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