Another entry in the ‘no’ column: murder! No sooner do we meet Line of Duty’s Martin Compston as Chief Petty Officer Craig Burke than he’s zipped into a body bag and shoved up a torpedo tube. Burke died of a heroin overdose, says the Navy, but Silva says otherwise. She and Burke’s anti-nuclear activist girlfriend think he was was killed as part of a conspiracy. That much looks clear when Silva’s on-land partner (Game of Thrones’ Rose Leslie) unearths a video of Burke blowing the whistle and predicting that “they’re” coming for him.
Who is coming for Burke and which particular whistle he’s blown is for Silva to work out over the next five episodes (the second instalment airs tomorrow before regular Sunday service is resumed). Might it have to do with the enemy boat that’s possibly shadowing HMS Vigil – an act Paterson Joseph’s Commander Newsome describes as the single most frightening development in submarine warfare in his lifetime? In all our lifetimes, probably.
Whatever’s going on, Silva will get to the bottom of it. Suranne Jones’ character is gloriously competent and no-nonsense. Even with her standard-issue detective’s tragic backstory and PTSD, she’s exactly who you’d want investigating your murder and/or uncovering the next stage of the Cold War. She’s sure to find out why everyone talks about HMS Vigil as if it’s the Robbie Williams bad boy of the Trident Four, and why there seems to be no love lost between Burke and his fellow sailors.
The mystery arrives flanked by exciting action courtesy of Broadchurch and Vanity Fair director James Strong. The opening sequence shows a fishing trawler accidentally snag on a hidden submarine and get dragged beneath the waves (as happened to the real-life crew of The Antares in 1990). The cliff-hanger ending sees Vigil’s nuclear reactor go into emergency shutdown. Next ep: they battle a kraken, or something equally exciting.
The submarine setting makes Vigil a top twist on a familiar genre. The show’s essentially a country house murder mystery, if the country house were a top-secret nuclear-powered spaceship onto which Poirot had to be lowered from a helicopter. (Secrecy is so imperative when it comes to Trident boats that for reasons of national security nobody – not even the makers of TV drama – are allowed to know what they look like. Vigil’s creators made this one up on a best-guess basis and built it in a Dumbarton studio.)
Episode one really does have all the makings of the perfect Sunday night drama: a multi-layered puzzle, intriguing alien environment, peculiar vocab like “coxswain” (remember what a laugh we all had with Line of Duty’s acronyms, and how fun it was to bleat the word “kompromat” like excitable Daleks after 2018’s Bodyguard? Get ahead of the trend by addressing your cat as “Officer of the Watch” from now on), plus a very decent cast. In summary: get on board.