"The worse it gets, the better" - Lee Thompson
The second series of Blue Lights (BBC1/iPlayer, created by Declan Lawn, Adam Patterson, and Louise Gallagher and directed by Lawn, Patterson, and Jack Casey) is tense, moving - at times, and brutal but there are times it tends to drag on a teeny weeny bit. Times it's a bit 'same old, same old'. Perhaps that's what it feels like if you're a response police office on patrol in Belfast. Everything changes. Everything stays the same.
It's one year on from the end of series one and Stevie (Martin McCann) and Grace (Sian Brooke) are dealing with drug overdoses, Tommy (Nathan Braniff) and Annie (Katherine Devlin) are dealing with small time burglars - and drugs too.
There's a lot of drugs being pumped into Belfast so new recruit Shane Bradley (Frank Blake) is drafted in to help deal with the drug fuelled crimewave. As is the overbearing and rude DS Murray Canning (Desmond Eastwood, relishing the unpleasant role) who has arrived from the Paramilitary Crime Task Force and has plans for Shane way above the response unit. Canning's been brought in to oversee Helen McNulty's (Joanne Crawford) section and McNulty is none too pleased about that.
Canning does a very good job of making himself unpopular and Shane Bradley is unlikely to win any personality contests either - although his gigachad looks and supreme confidence stand him in good stead at least to begin with. Jen Robinson (Hannah McClean) - the copper who preferred desk work to getting her hands dirty - has become a solicitor. That won't keep her out of the story.
But out on the streets, they call it murder. A loyalist feud has erupted between the equally unpleasant Jim 'Dixie' Dixon (Chris Corrigan) and Davey Hamill (Tony Flynn) and finding themselves caught up in the middle of this feud is Lee Thompson (Seamus O'Hara) and his sister Mags (Seana Kerslake). Thompson runs a loyalist pub and is being forced to pay protection money to Dixie. That's not something he's very happy about so he decides to do something about it.
Sure enough, it's not long before fires are started, Orangemen and marching bands appear, ghosts from the past return, and skeletons come out of their cupboards. In Blue Lights, the spectre of the troubles still lingers in the air and we get to see not only how it affects our generation but how it may go on to affect, even poison, many generations to come.
Treble whiskies are downed, Combat 18/swastika tattoos are revealed, random scallies appear and disappear again fairly quickly, there are redacted files aplenty, an investigation into a historic burning down of a chip shop, and there's even a brief consideration of things that happened in the Afghan poppy fields during the most recent war there.
There's some biting commentary about the state of the UK towards the end of fourteen years of Tory rule, there's lots of evocative shots of Belfast (the Harland & Wolff shipyard probably should be credited as an actor in the show), and there's a decent soundtrack with contributions from Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Sinead O'Connor, Jackson C.Frank, and someone called iiola doing a rather impressive Bonnie Raitt cover.
It's sillier than the first season (less copaganda, more what can we now to shock people - like when Eastenders and Brookside decided to start bringing in gangsters, at one point I was even reminded of Rob Reiner's 1992 film A Few Good Men) and there are probably a few too many strands to the story (it's hard to see how they'll all tie up in the end or if they even will) but some of them are great. Perhaps the best, for me, is the story of Lee and Mags with O'Hara putting in such an excellent, tortured, performance that it reminded me of Matias Varela's Jorge Salcedo Cabrera in the third series of Narcos.
Stevie and Grace's relationship seems, initially, to revolve around them discussing their packed lunches but, as the series develops, you start to wonder if romance is on the cards and they're not the only two cops who find themselves in a will they/won't they type scenario. Which breaks up the tension (admittedly with what's just another kind of tension) and adds a further soap opera element to the second series of Blue Lights.
Where it works best of all is when it touches on the way that social media can spread dangerous lies very very quickly and the real life outcomes of that and there's a very well handled side story about a man, Chris (Chris Robinson), who may have assisted his terminally ill husband in taking his own life. That's handled brilliantly as is the story of young Henry (Alfie Lawless), Lee's nephew, who idolises his uncle and wants to be just like him. Something that looks like ending up in very shocking, and upsetting, circumstances.
Perhaps, the overall theme of the series (all the action and on/off romance aside) is how police officers find themselves conflicted and tormented by the situations they find themselves in and the morality issues they have to navigate. Poor, innocent, Tommy who is just looking for love becomes the reluctant poster boy for that and in the last episode - one which made the whole series worthwhile - the viewers, like the characters, are forced to ponder how important, yet difficult, the act of forgiveness is. Without forgiveness, we are stuck forever in an endless loop of reprisal, hate, and death. Somebody needs to break the cycle.
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