The latest installment of ‘Blue Lights’ began with a tight close up of Seamus O’Hara’s Lee Thompson as he faced questions about the discovery of £30,000 in the boot of one of his taxis.
Claiming it was the sum collected for charitable donations towards a new community centre in Mount Eden, he produced a statement corroborating his claim from its chairman, Dan Gordon’s veteran loyalist Rab McKendry.
However Jonathan Harden and Joanne Crawford’s Inspectors Jonty Johnston and Helen McNally were sceptical.
“And this just happened to be in the back of your taxi – is that right?,” Jonty asked, mustering up all the incredulity he could find.
“My driver was on his way to the Credit Union,” Lee deftly explained, resisting the temptation to let out a broad grin as he produced a letter from its manager.
As they headed out to verify the letters, Lee asked for the money back, reminding them that it looked pretty bad for the PSNI to seize legitimate funds raised by a local community.
“Not exactly winning hearts and minds,” he observed before recounting a story about the burning of poppy fields when he was serving as a soldier in Afghanistan despite the pleas of local farmers not to destroy their sole source of income.
For every field burnt, Lee told them the Army made 100 enemies.
As they watched Thompson leave Blackthorn Police Station, Helen wondered who he took orders from, with Jonty replying nobody.
When Helen asked out loud “what now?”, Des Eastwood’s paramilitary taskforce DS Murray Canning emerged from the shadows like a Batman villain to tell them: “Leave it to me”.
The next morning Andrea Irvine’s Chief Superintendent Nicola Robinson (thanks Andy Boal – point of information duly noted) was demanding an update on the forensics from the Jim Dixon murder, the progress of police enquiries on the Mount Eden estate and the intelligence on Lee Thompson.
The Chief Superintendent was told there was nothing substantive forensically, the community wasn’t co-operating and the paramilitary taskforce was working on obtaining information about Thompson.
Firing a look of contempt at Julian Moore Cook’s DCI Marshall, Jonty and DS Canning, she witheringly remarked: “So you’re a murder cop with no suspect, you’re a neighbourhood cop with no neighbourhood and you’re an intelligence cop with no intelligence?”
Turning to Helen, she twisted the knife in by adding: “And you’re in charge of all this, is this right?.. Wonderful!”
(SPOILER ALERT)
After last week’s bombshell announcement from Martin McCann’s Constable Stevie Neil that he thought it was for the best if his pairing with Sian Brooke’s Constable Grace Ellis came to an end, she found herself partnering her housemate Katherine Devlin’s Constable Annie Conlon.
On patrol, Grace was shocked when Annie revealed Frank Blake’s Constable Shane Bradley had taken a photo of them in bed together and had shared it on a WhatsApp group.
She urged her to report him but Annie insisted she would take care of the situation.
Before Grace could query her plan, the duo were whisked away to the scene of a domestic disturbance where Gerard McCabe’s broken man Gary White was standing over a kettle barbecue in the back garden burning his wife’s clothes and clutching a bottle of wine.
After Grace gently probed him about what he was doing, his wife Nicky Harley’s Marilyn turned up and explained that she had stayed at her sister’s house overnight to get a break from her husband who was an alcoholic and had lost his job as an English teacher because of his addiction.
Meanwhile Frank was paired with Nathan Braniff’s Constable Tommy Foster who was slurping a smoothie in their car in the Cathedral Quarter when his colleague received a mysterious text message.
Tommy was ushered out of the vehicle while his partner rang a private number.
Standing in the rain, he noticed some kids dealing drugs in Writers Square but Frank was disinterested, having received instructions from DS Canning to lean on a mid level drug dealer in Mount Eden, Jack McBride-Marshall’s Sandy McKnight for information about Lee Thompson.
Despite Tommy’s insistence that they didn’t do intelligence work, Frank told him they would today and ordered him to follow his lead and watch and learn.
“We’re taking the gloves off,” he bragged.
Outside The Loyal Pub, Lee’s nephew Alfie Lawless’s Henry Thompson innocently and rather alarmingly asked his uncle’s Army comrade and right hand man, Craig McGinlay’s Craig McQuarrie what his favourite gun was.
The Scotsman was being very cagey, especially when Henry asked him if he had ever killed anyone.
Inside the bar, Lee met Tony Flynn’s loyalist leader Davy Hamill who had come to make the case for him to be allowed to remain in Mount Eden, now that Abigail McGibbon’s Tina McIntyre had frozen him out of the drugs trade.
Recognising Lee was now the main man in Mount Eden, he insisted he wouldn’t cause him any trouble.
Lee was having none of it, though, telling him that he and Dixon had destroyed Mount Eden with drugs, debt and dirt.
“You had your chance. You did what you did and that means you don’t deserve to live here anymore,” he snarled before giving Hamill his marching orders.
In another part of Mount Eden, Frank was well and truly taking off the gloves with a search of the home of Sandy McKnight which he carried out without a warrant.
Searching a bedroom, he discovered drugs under one bed.
This enabled him to lean on Sandy’s mum for information about her son’s whereabouts before extracting crucial information from him about Thompson’s activities.
Cock-a-hoop with unearthing this nugget, DS Canning insisted on mounting his own covert operation in a Belfast city centre nightclub with Frank and Tommy.
However this inevitably went spectacularly wrong in a tense climax to the episode.
With the show’s creators Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson taking more of a back seat this week, screenwriter Noel McCann and director Jack Casey were let loose in this episode and they made a pretty decent fist of it.
As usual, there were some interesting things going on around the fringes of the main plot – particularly with the new pairing of Grace and Annie and an intriguing conversation between Stevie and Andi Osho’s desk sergeant Sandra Cliff about their experiences of grieving a loved one.
Lee Thompson remained a fascinating, complex figure, often justifying his life of crime by wrapping himself in a Mount Eden flag and portraying himself as a saviour of the community.
The Troubles legacy storyline, though, around a 1978 chip shop bombing which killed the family of Paddy Jenkins’ Happy Kelly remained a bit of a concern.
This subplot increasingly feels like it has been shoehorned into the show as a means of explaining the complexities of Northern Ireland policing to an outside audience.
The decision by Derek Thompson’s disaffected RUC Special Branch officer Robin Graham to give Hannah McClean’s trainee solicitor and former cop Jen Robinson access to confidential files felt a little too much to swallow and it did nothing to allay concerns that this element of the show is its weakest plotline.
Leaving aside this concern, while Seamus O’Hara continued to impress, there were also some nice moments between Osho and McCann, Brooke and Devlin, Harden and Crawford.
Blake, Braniff, Eastwood, Irvine, McClean, Gordon, Lawless, Thompson and MacGinlay did what was required.
However it remained a source of frustration that an actor of Seana Kerslake’s calibre has still not been given sufficient opportunity to showcase her skills as Lee’s sister Mags.
As things stand, O’Hara is the standout performance of the series so far.
However with two episodes remaining, you can’t help feeling, while it remains a decent watch, this series of ‘Blue Lights’ has not ignited in the way that it should.
Episode five will really need to pack a punch if it is to come anywhere near the watermark of Series One.
Dan McGinn is a journalist who was previously the Ireland Political Editor and Ireland Deputy Editor of the Press Association and has worked for the Irish News, Belfast Telegraph and other publications and for TV and radio. He currently works in communications and public affairs and is also a film and television critic with his own blog They’ll Love It In Pomona which covers the latest cinema and television releases.
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