Season two Here's season two. The first one pleased with the thoughtful and realistically shown investigation of a high-profile murder in a small town. Killer caught, what is the continuation?
Ironically, this is not about a new crime. In the first season, there was only one main storyline - the investigation into the murder of Danny Latimer. Now there are two main intrigues - the investigation of the same old case that ruined the career of Alec Hardy, and the trial of the killer Danny, who unexpectedly declared his innocence.
The line of the trial was very strong and unpredictable. To an untrained viewer, far from jurisprudence (me, for example), it is simply shocking – with what cynicism the participants in the process, especially lawyers, juggle facts and conjectures. It becomes scary - it would seem that the evidence has not gone anywhere, but having the gift of persuasion and legal literacy, you can send the innocent to prison, and the criminal to put an innocent victim ... However, it seemed to me that the lawyer’s behavior is somewhat unrealistic – sometimes she slanders witnesses and police officers and directly insults them on the basis of rumors and her own speculations. I do not think that in real life such techniques are effective, not to mention their professionalism.
The story of the Sandbrook case did not get too hooked. The problem is that we investigated Danny’s murder together with the heroes – we saw the moment of the discovery of the corpse, the crime scenes were studied “hotly”, followed the events from the very beginning. Here, from a place to a quarry, a lot of information falls on our heads and it is not so interesting to delve into it. Although the intrigue is also powerful and the denouement is not trivial.
This time, the mystical element, not too organically viewed in the first season, is completely absent. Apparently, even then he was a “back-to-ears” tribute to the classics – I mean “Twin Peaks” and its imitators. In the second season, Broadchurch completely gets rid of this - only realism and psychology.
But at the same time, the atmosphere of a small town went somewhere. First impressions cannot be made twice: Broadchurch is no longer a sleepy peaceful city, it is bubbling with news, all the intrigues are already known and the characters are well known to us. The emotional intensity is still strong, even stronger than in the first part, because both the viewer and most of the participants in the trial know the truth (I mean the storyline of the court). But this is no longer a classic English detective or atmospheric thriller (at least in the same “judicial” line, “the Sandbrook case” is quite canonical, but, as I wrote, not so interesting).
The actors are still good. Of the new cast and characters, Charlotte Rampling stands out as Jocelyn Knight, the prosecutor in court. The character is pleasant, the actress is famous and the role, like many of her roles, is partly provocative. Charlotte has to fight not only with the lawyers of the accused, but also with impending blindness, and with fatigue from life, forcing her to retire once. The tough but intelligent elderly woman is the exact opposite of lawyer Sharon Bishop, her opponent. Unlike a young female lawyer and her assistant, what matters to Charlotte is fairness, not just professional victory. I also note James D’Arcy as Lee Ashworth, the main suspect in the “Sandbrook case” – very charismatic, I do not want to believe in his guilt.
Result: The second season at the level of the first. The creators realized that neither the trial of the killer, nor the secrets of the destroyed career of detective Hardy will not interest the viewer as much as a mysterious murder – so they decided to combine them. This may seem excessive, but the opportunity to see the characters again, who became good acquaintances of the audience during the first season, pulls the series. 8 out of 10
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