As long as the BBC keep making the island-based detective series, I’ll be watching
Oh, Shetland, with your whistling winds, isolated crofts, chunky knitwear, industrial port-core and unrealistically high frequency of violent crime.
I’ve been glued to the stalwart Scot-noir, set in its titular far-northerly archipelago, for two years, having caught up on its early series (it’s been on the BBC since 2013) in an obsessive binge during which I developed an intense fondness for its vaguely folkloric whodunnits, singular tree-free landscape and peculiar cast of characters. Nobody is more comforted than I that, just as winter looms, it’s back for a 10th series.
Douglas Henshall retired as the lonesome and charismatic detective inspector Jimmy Pérez (the original DI of Ann Cleeves’ books, on which the first two series were based) in 2022, to the great disappointment of many fans. In his stead, Ashley Jensen’s spiky, blunt DI Ruth Calder returns for the third time to lead Shetland’s detectives to whichever bloody-handed islander might have wrought havoc this year. Jensen has done a great job of making the role her own – slightly wretched love life and awkward communication style included.
Right behind her are calm, personable DS Tosh (Alison McDonnell), a Shetland mainstay from day one, still injecting warmth into proceedings, and DC Sandy (real-life Shetlander Steven Robertson), who, 10 years in, has not managed to drop the expression of a shellshocked intern and most of whose lines seem to involve him saying no, he hasn’t done that yet, but yes, he’ll get right on it.
Business as usual, then, and the first episode opens with a drugs bust of a fishing ship after Ruth gets a tip-off from a dicey local. But several pallet-loads of fish and ice on the floor later, and there’s still no haul – and the informant has scarpered.
But soon, the team has bigger fish to fry when the strangled body of a 76-year-old woman, Eadie Tulloch, is found by a shocked (or is he?) neighbour outside her house in Lunniswick, a remote village in the north of the island ravaged by a storm 20 years ago and from which its inhabitants have never fully recovered.
The action develops as we have come to expect. Potential suspects multiply: we can’t help but eye old friends Arthur and Lana Mair from across the village, along with their adult children, despite the fact that they are wrapped up in their own problems (Lana has severe dementia). There’s the teenage boy who’s just got out of prison, whose mother, Gina, seems a little too protective.
Over the road, a family from Edinburgh are holed up in a cottage for a not-so-sunny holiday, the destination for which – what with the wife behaving in a markedly shady way – we suspect might have motivations beyond Shetland’s unrivalled offering of waterslides and tiki bars. The boy, David Powell, becomes suspect number one when Eadie’s missing jewellery turns up under his bed and it transpires he’s quit his job without telling his mother.
As Ruth and Tosh dig into it, familiar characters pop up – Dr Cora (Anne Kidd) on forensics (Eadie’s been out there for several days), trusty bobby Billy (Lewis Howden), who may have a bigger role to play as the series wears on as he has personal links to the victim, plus ever-loveable, if slightly wet, husband Donnie (Angus Miller) and a new procurator fiscal, Matt (Samuel Anderson, replacing Tibu Fortes as Harry Lamont in series eight and nine) cracking the whip.
David is eventually released after revealing that he developed a genuine friendship with Eadie, lonely and just out of jail – but the episode ends with a bombshell, leading us towards new possibilities. As Arthur sleeps, Lana wanders down the lane to Eadie’s house – still marked off as a crime scene – and sets it ablaze without the officer on duty noticing. Could there be more to Lana than meets the eye? What does she know that we don’t? We cut to credits as huge flames engulf Eadie’s life and much of the remaining evidence.
This is Shetland as we know and love it. The beautiful, sweeping landscape shots, the dark, isolated atmosphere are comfortingly familiar and the cast of loveable characters have come to feel like old friends – yet somehow the mysteries remain as gripping as ever.
As long as the BBC keeps making it, I’ll keep watching until – if you’ll forgive my macabre mood – I’m the one Cora’s wheeling out of the freezer drawer.
‘Shetland’ continues next Wednesday at 9pm on BBC One
