River: Episode 3

December 3, 2015 12:18 PM - Season 1, Episode 3

River clashes with his new partner Ira, who wants to disclose the discovery of Stevie's second mobile phone to their superiors. Simultaneously, he and Ira investigate the serious injury of a construction site's foreman in a suspicious workplace accident.

To his surprise, River finds that the psychiatric report which was commissioned by his commanding officers following Stevie's death has concluded that he is fit to continue working.

posted by infinitewindow (1 comment total)

The most predictable episode so far, but only because recently I saw the episode of Sherlock with the locked phone, the episode of Doc Martin with Roger Lloyd Pack playing the closeted widower, and the episode of Hannibal where Will is cleared with regards to the Chesapeake Ripper murders.

This episode confirmed that River has been seeing his manifests all his life. This ties in with the tradition of broken television detectives, who have problems living in the regular world but have almost supernatural abilities to speak to the dead and to reconstruct actual narratives from physical and emotional evidence. I wonder what River's adolescence and early career were like—I keep picturing Peter Straub's novel Mystery except without the Lamont von Heilitz mentor figure.

There's a lot of compositional and editing focus on people of non-English ethnicities. I don't know if that's just multiculti metro London in a realist sense, or if it's a part of something much bigger. All of our leads are immigrants, all of our police interviews have been of immigrants, and all of River's manifests have been English (except for Stevie and perhaps Cream).
posted by infinitewindow at 12:39 PM on December 3, 2015