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Dalgliesh: Series 3
R0 - United Kingdom - Acorn Media Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (29th January 2025). |
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The Film
 The third series of Acorn's Dalgliesh reboot takes the detective (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell's Bertie Carvel) to the dawn of a new era that was to become the Thatcherite eighties of free enterprise business and politics, which makes it appropriate that the season starts off with a two-part adaptation of "Death in Holy Orders" (45:20 and 45:58) in which the rigidly traditional order of St. Anselm's College is upset by the new trustee Archdeacon Matthew Crampton (The King's Speech's Andrew Havill) making public relations-friendly moves to rehabilitate the reputation of the college after an "incident" involving Father John Betterton (Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides' Anton Lesser) – whose continued presence on the faculty is a reminder as is their refusal to dismiss him – with some outreach donations funded by the appraisal and sale of the chapel's doom panels which if authenticated by Dr. Emma Lavenham (The Coroner's Claire Goose) may fetch as much as two million pounds. Fathers Peregrine (The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc's Michael Jenn) and Sebastian (The Bank Job's Richard Lintern), and lay trustee George Gregory (Apollo 18's Lloyd Owen) suspect that this is just the first step in disbanding the college, also threatening the sense of safety and belonging of young ordinand Raphael Arbuthnot (Charlie Cain), an orphan whose family bequeathed the school to the order decades before. When the Archdeacon is discovered at the altar with his head bashed in, the likely suspect seems to be Betterton who has the man's blood on his hands, but physical evidence turns up other fingerprints on the murder weapon but not his. Dalgliesh and his Detective Sergeant Daniel Tarrant (The Watchers' Alistair Brammer) - replacing Kate Mishkin (Carlyss Peer) from series one and two with no explanation – discover in their investigation several other likely suspects and motives including Betterton's alcoholic but fiercely-protective sister Agatha (Maurice's Phoebe Nicholls), Raphael himself who thinks of the Bettertons as his real parents, Peregrine who was vocally against the sale of the doom panels, Sebastian who had a past with the victim, groundskeeper Eric Surtees (Lloyd James) who would be out of a job if the school sold off its grounds, and his sister Karen (Phoebe Sparrow) who may not be who she claims. Compared to the 2003 version which was brighter, cozier, more faithful to the source novel, and featured a pre-George Gently Martin Shaw in the first of two Dalgliesh adaptations and pre-House, M.D./Chicago Fire Jesse Spencer, "Death in Holy Orders" is more streamlined and pared down. The school is on vacation so the only people present are the potential suspects, there is only discussion of the surrounding town and its attitudes about the school, and the finale reduces two near-drownings in the sea to a scuffle in a stream. Like the 2003 version, the episode includes a potential love interest for Dalgliesh but this version only gives them two or three brief scenes to demonstrate no real chemistry – indeed, most of the elements where the adaptation strains for poignancy are undercut by not enough screen time given to them earlier – largely due to Carvel's increasingly glum and dispassionate turn as Dalgliesh after spending the second series going back and forth between giving up the force for poetry and realizing that he is addicted to his police work. In the Carvel-directed "Cover Her Face" (45:20 and 46:02), housemaid victim Sally (Holly Cattle) is found dead in bed next to her crying child the morning after an eventful fete by here employers: soon-to-be widow Anita Mehta (Monsoon Wedding's Soni Razdan), beloved son Krishna (The Weekend Away's Parth Thakerar), and widowed daughter Devi (In the Earth's Ellora Torchia) along with her military officer husband's former colleague and her own current friend with benefits Felix Hearne (Jack Myers). Fingers are pointed in several directions with Sally's friend Derek (Ghost Stories' Oliver Woollford) accusing Krishna of pressuring Sally for sex, Krishna claiming he asked Sally to marry him and that the more socially-acceptable fiancee his mother was pushing on him Lady Catherine Bowers (Tell That to the Winter Sea's Allegra Marland) discovered it the night before, and Dalgliesh's temporary sergeant Clive Roscoe (Silent Hill Requiem's Sam Swainsbury) discovers that Sally's only surviving family includes her adoptive uncle Malcolm Proctor (The Bunker's Andrew Tiernan) who is high up in the National Front who are against non-white immigration. The family has been threatened both by members of the National Front who are against non-white immigration and by other Indians because the now-bedridden patriarch backed the 1977 anti-immigration bill, and there is evidence of a break-in, and no one thus far has been able to find out who the identity of the father of Sally's infant son from whom she was fleeing when she ended up at the domestic violence shelter of Paula Rice (Sara Powell) before becoming Anita Mehta's charity project. Previously adapted for the original Roy Mardsen series in 1985, "Cover Her Face" addresses the period's increase in anti-immigrant racism by changing the wealthy family who employs its unwed mother from an English one to an Indian one who try to ignore continuing veiled prejudice from their economic equals while trying to fit in through marrying into peerages and holding fetes as local landowners and pretending that the only friction comes from the lower classes (white and non-white). While the viewer knows that Dalgliesh is fair and open, it is also understandable why the family is suspicious of his lines of inquiry even if they too suspect other family members. Where the adaptation is lazy is in depending twice on scenes in which characters only see or hear one side of an argument and assume the identity of the other person, confirming their suspicions. Tiernan's racist is an obvious red herring – particularly since he is usually cast in such roles as of late – and the case meanders such that it culminates in a reveal not through Dalgliesh's deduction but by throwing his hands up and stating his intent to arrest all of them, driving the culprit to reveal themselves not out of guilt but being fed up that the others cannot appreciate everything they have done through the years to get the family where it is.  The final two-parter of series three moves the 1989 novel "Devices and Desires" (46:32 and 46:18) - previously adapted in 1991 – back to the late seventies as a serial killer called The Whistler targets the female employees of a Kent nuclear power station as much due to Thatcher's push to expand nuclear power as the manhunt for the Yorkshire Ripper (who is name-dropped). In the novel, Dalgliesh was actually a bystander who discovered one of the bodies. Here, he is co-running the investigation with temporary DCI Kate Miskin (replacing another former colleague exclusive to the novel). While Dalgliesh and Miskin are trying to stay ahead of press leaks – there has only been one murder prior to the story proper but a witness account of hearing whistling in the area has the press running with The Whistler and anticipating more deaths – MI-5 want to impose their own theories about a terrorist motive in the murders that Dalgliesh feels does not mesh with the more psychosexual elements of the crime. With local power station executive Alex Mayer (Johnny English Strikes Again's Adam James) - the brother of literary colleague Alice (Father Brown's Nancy Carroll) whose own memoir of loss Dalgliesh identifies most closely with – a potential pick for "Nuclear Supremo" and the power station planning to expand onto surrounding wetlands, a local protest group run by caravan-living graduate student Neil Pascoe (Robert Lonsdale) has drawn more and more members from the town and the outside including single mother Amy (Elizabeth Connick) looking for a better place to raise her son and willing to fight for it. Public relations representative Hilary Roberts (The Woman in Black's Liz White), who is having an affair with Alex and not willing to let him go, has made enemies with the public (particularly for downplaying the seriousness of the Three Mile Island meltdown). Plant department manager Giles Fleet (Grimsby's Robert Wilfort) fears that recently-vanished scientist Toby Gledhill may have had a breakdown but is eager to convince Dalgiesh and Miskin that he is no murderer, and other intrigues are taking place among the staff that might hint at espionage or sabotage. When a suspect turns up dead of suicide surrounded by physical evidence before the next murder, Dalgliesh and Miskin wonder if the dead man has been set up or if a copycat is taking advantage of the killer's modus operandi to settle some personal or professional scores. While a common complaint about the otherwise well-remembered Marsden series is that the multi-part adaptations were too long in their attempts to be fairly faithful, "Devices and Desires" is yet another one of the Carvel adaptations that feels too short, too stripped down, to the point where even the fewer suspects and their subplots still feel insufficiently developed. Rather than engaging the investigative faculties of the viewer, it just presents roles rather than characters, motives rather than behavior, and then resolves much of the case offscreen. While more than a little cynicism is healthy when it comes to tidy resolutions that satisfy government bodies, here it is the deployment of MI-5 that feels cynical and lazy. He catches the killer but seems like he cannot be bothered with so much other loose ends swept under the rug with an official cover story. The viewer never learns if there are any consequences to pursuing the investigation further and instead it ends on an optimistic note as he visits a potential love interest from an earlier case given a few seconds of screen time. While there are a couple more Dalgliesh novels the new series can adapt, one can hope that the team does not go the route of the increasingly dire Agatha Christie adaptations in shoehorning their detective into stories in which they did not appear and turning the actual protagonists into their dogsbodies (so hopefully no tossing Dalgliesh into "An Unsuitable Job for a Woman"). 
Video
The six episodes are spread across two discs with four episodes on the first and two on the second. More so than some of the more modern-set cozy mysteries that use shallow depth-of-field and digital defocusing, the 16:9 anamorphic 1.78:1 widescreen image of Dalgliesh has a filmic look with reasonable detail in close-ups for standard definition while long shots indulge the eye with some seventies period detail and much wider shots have a painterly look to the landscapes that mitigates an overall softness and lack of detail due to the mastering and grading. 
Audio
The Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo soundtrack is dialogue-driven with some directional effects and spare atmospherics. There is musical support but nothing so memorable as Richard Harvey's original and recycled cues for the Marsden series. Optional English HoH subtitles are poorly transcribed from the dialogue with a handful of errors due to the accents of the performers. 
Extras
The sole extra is a picture gallery (1:17).
Overall
While some of the original Roy Marsden adaptations of P.D. James were too long in trying to be faithful to their sources, one could argue that the Bertie Carvel Dalgliesh series adaptations are way too short, stripping them down and taking liberties with the plots.
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