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Warning: this review contains spoilers for Shetland series nine, episode one.
Shetland isn’t all sheep farming, ceilidhs, and charming gift shops selling hand-poured scented candles. They also have spies. Well, they did, until Annie Bett was killed by a single shot to the chest from an automatic pistol. Now they have a mystery to solve – who shot Annie the spy and fellow victim Anton Bergen, and why?
DI Calder had put the spy angle together by the end of episode two. Something about a maths genius so brainy that she’d gone to Oxford aged 15 but now spent her time doing tax returns for the local Chinese takeaway just didn’t add up. Of course Annie had been recruited to the British intelligence service. That’s what happens to those beautiful mind kids. Aged nine, there’s a picture of them holding up their GCSE certificates in the local paper, and by the time they’re legally old enough to drive a scooter, they’re passing cyphers to their man in Berlin under cover of a German exchange tour of the Reichstag.
Accountancy had been Annie’s cover story until it was blown by her death. That, and the sudden arrival in her extremely remote hometown of the man who is presumably her handler. If Professor Rossi hadn’t pitched up and forgotten to disguise his familiarity with Police Scotland acronyms in front of Ruth, then perhaps she wouldn’t have put two and two together, and Annie Betts would have gone down as a Honda-driving mum instead of a double-life-leading spy.
Not that Shetland doesn’t have time for Honda-driving mums; they’re some of its best people. Tosh will solve her friend Annie’s murder, just you see if she doesn’t. It won’t come without a personal cost though. That’s the trouble with policing a small community; you’ve probably borrowed Tupperware from the murder victims.
Tosh’s response to Annie’s death was commendable. While visibly shaken, she stuck to the books and kept a cool head. A cooler head, at least, than Ruth, who approached the interrogation of Annie’s husband Ian with all the control of a child trying to shake a pound coin out of a piggy bank. Ruth was certain that Ian’s guilt was in there and, red-faced, she was going to get it out. Their “It felt like we were arguing, from your body language/I get that a lot” exchange in the car afterwards was a top bit of character work, incidentally. We’re still getting to know Ruth Calder, and lines like that tug us closer towards her.
The same can be said for Ruth’s interactions with young Noah Bett (a chip off the old block if his primes-recital is anything to go by). Compare Tosh warmly hugging the boy at the party, with Ruth’s arm’s-length response to his panic attack at the hospital. Her bedside manner may need work, but when it came to his mum’s death, Noah seemed to respond to Ruth’s honesty. It doesn’t seem as though he’s grown up with a lot of that.
Noah’s dad didn’t kill his mum, but Ruth was right about Ian’s guilt. Despite sending Annie a slew of texts straight out of the Andrew Tate school of misogynist correspondence, he turned out to be having it off with one of her mates on the night she died. Classy stuff.
Speaking of romance, we discovered in episode two that the other victim Anton Bergen had summarily dumped his boyfriend just before he was killed. One phone conversation from a mystery caller and it was goodbye to Nathan Huang. Perhaps Bergen knew that he was in danger and wanted to protect Nate?
There’s deffo something fishy about the family Anton was working for, and not just because they’re Scandinavian. The beautiful Jakobsons in their stunning magazine-spread house, with their ill, melancholic daughter, are more than a bit sus. Are they spies too, or might they have something to do with the Nesting facility that conspiracy theorist Campervan Angus is surveilling? Are both things connected? And where do the mussel-farming Harris family fit in? One thing’s for certain: Angus’ tin foil hat blog is going to come in useful one of these episodes.
More useful than Lisa Friel’s shopping trip into Lerwick, at least. Rev. Calder’s latest project was so spooked by mention of the murders on BBC Radio Shetland that the sight of harmless PC Grant had her ducking into a fridge to hide faster than Boris Johnson on the campaign trail. Lisa’s argument with Annie on the day that she died must have been of consequence. A pity though. All that effort and she still didn’t get her Pot Noodle.
Pot Noodle feels out of place in this picturesque crime show, which feels more like a homemade preserves and organic loaves kind of place. From the windswept views to the lovely knitted scarves, this is a drama straight out of the pages of Country Living magazine. It’s so artisanal that even the police station evidence board is slate and chalk like the specials menu at a farm-to-fork bistro. No dry-erase markers for this lot, their coroner’s reports probably come cross-stitched into locally woven linen.
It all makes for a great contrast with the espionage storyline, which usually plays out against more steel-and-concrete urban backdrops than this. Spies on Shetland, whatever next? County lines drug-dealing? UFOs?
Shetland series nine continues next Wednesday November 20 on BBC One and iPlayer.
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