"Every time I think you're done destroying my life, you find a way to make it worse" - Jake (to Max)
A woman wearing a giant cat's head pulls a gun on a group of lads. The gun isn't loaded. She thought it was. The group of lads chase the young woman through the streets of Edinburgh and to her flat near the top of a tower block. She gets out just in time so they throw her mum's partner, Big Al McKee, from the tower to his death.
Series three of Guilt (BBC Scotland/iPlayer, written by Neil Forsyth, directed by Patrick Harkins, and originally shown in April of this year) opens pretty strongly and if it's not able to keep up that pace for its duration it doesn't slow down much. As with series one and series two, it's tense, thrilling, and even emotional in places. Hardly anybody involved in the story, however, seems to ever feel guilty, or even slightly remorseful, about anything.
We begin with Jake (Jamie Sives) and Angie (Ruth Bradley) struggling in rainy Chicago. She's stacking shelves and their flat is full of boxes of fezzes (yes, fezzes) that he'd intend to use at a Turkish night in the struggling bar he runs with his brother Max (Mark Bonnar). Jake's into, or thinks he's into, the idea of being bohemian and having little or no material possessions. Angie not so much.
Plus Max appears to be ripping Jamie (who's now rocking a topknot a la Zlatan Ibrahimovic) off - or at the very least keeping him in the dark when it comes to their financial predicament and thus putting his livelihood, and freedom, in danger. Classic Max. He's set up an account with a large amount of money in and he's put it in Jake's name so Jake and Angie decide to withdraw the money and get the fuck out of Dodge/Chicago.
But, at the last moment, Angie screws them both over and Max and Jake find themselves returning to Edinburgh. At least they won't have to worry about Roy Lynch (Stuart Bowman) whom they've heard has died. However, Roy's widow, Maggie (Phyllis Logan), remains a serious problem. In series two she revealed herself to be a complete psycho capable of extreme violence and Max knows Maggie will be looking to seek revenge on him as soon as he arrives in Scotland's capital.
Kenny (Emun Elliott) is still on the wagon, he's still driving his beaten up old Nissan (an icon of the whole series but not really the sort of inconspicuous car you'd imagine a private investigator would insist on) and things are still going well with Yvonne (played, in this series, by Isaura Barbe-Brown). So well, they're trying for a baby. Teddy (Greg McHugh) has swapped an obsession with Papillon for a fascination with Zen but that's not completely put an end to his not inconsiderable anger issues. He's at least gainfully employed. Though the extremely leafy marijuana farm he's helping cultivate is not legal. Not yet.
Bent copper Stevie Malone (Henry Pettigrew) appears to be marginally less bent than before but he's still liaising with Maggie Lynch and there are reappearances, too, from Erin - the Lynch's daughter (Sara Vickers), scheming Sheila (Ellie Haddington), and hired heavy Archie (Gregor Firth).
There's new characters too. Skye Burns, Kenny's niece (Amelia Isaac Jones) who lives with her mum, Carrie (Anita Vettesse) and her mum's partner Big Al McKee (Jonathan Watson). It's Big Al that gets thrown from the tower block and that's because it was Skye wielding the gun and wearing the giant furry cat head. To ease her passage through university, she'd been procuring drugs for posh party girls and had, inevitably - this is Guilt, come into contact with some absolute wrong 'uns. Being £20,000 in debt isn't helping her either.
Then there's Sir Jim Sturrock (Euan McNaughton). Sturrock's a local man made good, a philanthropist who you know instantly will have his own, far murkier, agenda and, sure enough, that is revealed pretty quickly. All these characters, their vices, their money issues, their anger issues, and their revenge issues will of course come together and it will, undoubtedly, be messy.
But it will also be enjoyable (to watch at least). With the addition of Skye's boyfriend Danny (Anders Hayward) - a handsome lad who could be the lead singer in The Mock Turtles or My Jealous God but instead has fallen in with a rum bunch, Aliza, an American banker who starts to get very interested in the actions of Sturrock (Tamsin Topolski), and Max and Jake's long lost - but now returned dad Alex (David Hayman), we're taken on a journey of threats, burnt out cars, long hidden secrets, gasholders, going "under the hood", murder, sunshine on Leith, unflattering waders, crawling through cow shit, "how to make life work when it's bigger than four walls", an over reliance on the terms "due diligence" and "leverage", NDAS, hunting, shooting, and, yes, fishing.
Oh, and perhaps more than anything, long held family resentments. Propelled along by another great soundtrack (The Cramps, Roy Orbison, Wire, The 1990s, Glasvegas, The Stranglers, The View, The Mekons, Psychedelic Furs, and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band), there are elements to this series that reminded me of Breaking Bad and, though the makers of Guilt are unafraid to employ a deus ex machina to get characters out of tight holes, it remains compulsive viewing. Sometimes moving (the return of Max and Jake's dad who despite being the very definition of a deadbeat dad converses so poetically he could pen lyrics for Leonard Cohen, the scenes between Kenny and Skye as Kenny seeks a redemption he's surely already found) and there are even funny scenes including yet another joke about Max's suit. During one of the character assassinations he regularly suffers, and deserves, he only takes genuine offence when it's suggested he wears a Moss Bros. suit:- "it wasn't a Moss Bros. suit".
Elsewhere, Max continues to act a bit of a prick. He calls Angie Yoko, he refuses to take a tram "because it's a tram", he accuses Jake of seeing "failure as a natural bedfellow", and he seems to make a point of never being straight with Jake and then blaming Jake for that. There are lots of scenes in dark warehouses, empty multi-storey car parks, and gorgeous - yet ominous - lochs and mountains.
Teddy remains a psycho for the ages (though most of the violence is implied rather than enacted) and Sir Jim Sturrock is a great new character. He's rarely seen not boasting, humblebragging, about his largesse from behind a dais in front of a largely disinterested audience perched on uncomfortable wooden chairs. He wears a pink tie with polka dots and rocks a pocket square which is always a sure sign of a cunt.
Sir Jim Sturrock is, essentially, a suit full of ambition and greed but utterly devoid of character and morality. In that he's a worthy foe for the not entirely dissimilar Max McCall. But Max McCall, after twelve hours, of crossing and double crossing his enemies, his friends, and even his family has more than enough foes already. Will he ever find redemption? You might be surprised.
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