The Island

As someone said before, the lead acress is a miscast. Totally wrong for the role and makes everything else completely unbelievable. The lead actress is so wrong as a police and has the same confused and scared expression all the time.

Plot doesn't hold up and by episode 4 you never really care anymore.

With a better cast and a better script it might had a chance to be good but now it is just off.

It is boing and boring.

It's a no from me and I am Sorry to say that I do not recommend it...

I give it 4 stars because of the interesting and beautiful scenery and the gaelic languange being used.

Seems like an intriguing premise, but the lead actress is totally miscast. She looks like a scared high school student plus she can't act. She has only one facial expression, which is a childlike wide-eyed stare. It's also more than a bit strange how everybody switches between English and Gaelic as they speak. Perhaps this is real, but it makes watching it and reading subtitles rather challenging. Also, why is it that Brtish television wants so desperately to make lead characters gay? And they make a point of creating scenes where this is suddenly revealed through a same-sex kiss, as if to say to the audience, "aha, bet you didn't see that coming!" It's getting tired and old.

I really wanted this drama to be a success but it was awful. I would have turned off earlier if it wasn't for the beautiful scenery and the false hope this drama would get better. The plot was full of holes and the police investigation was laughable with a comedy of errors. As a reviewer has said the lead character was miscast and the overall acting so cringeworthy. This had so much potential but it felt to me that they had a rough storyline that cried out to be developed, but instead crammed it into a 4 episode drama. Therefore, none of the characters had much substance to them and the drama was a wasted opportunity.

Why make a drama in Gaelic and set it in Harris unless you're going to get under the skin of the setting and the language and of what makes them unique? They just took a poor script that we've seen umpteen times before, translated it into Gaelic and stuck some beautiful scenery in between the scenes.

While the old "Cozy Crime" series (Midsummer Murders, Poirot etc) were lovely to look at, their plotting was precision-tooled; with their DNA traceable to the masterclass-level writing of Agatha Christie (and Conan Doyle). They could also draw compelling characters in a few subtle strokes.

In this series, the visuals are there to paper over the gaping plot holes and lack of interesting characters - none of whom have been developed beyond servicing the plot. None of the dialogue sounds like language that people actually use in reality, more like language copied from other old TV shows.

We live in hope of a Gaelic drama that can stand alongside the best minority-language programmes but sadly this effort suggests that's it's a long way off.

This was such an exciting prospect - a flagship Gaelic drama, set in one of the most dramatic, atmospheric landscapes in the world, and told in the poetic and evocative Gaelic language. It should have been a game-changer but instead we got a series of creaking old cliches that would have been out-of-date 20 years ago.

As a murder-mystery it completely failed, with glaring plot holes and a laughably-inept police investigation.

The dialogue was just Daytime Soap-level melodrama translated into Gaelic. Out of four hours of dialogue there's literally zero quotable lines. There are also zero memorable characters because there's no character development. The dialogue is largely there to help grind out the plot, not to reveal any character depth, detail or colour.

The landscape shots are stunningly-beautiful but we can see amazing Hebridean landscape footage on youtube without having to sit through awful drama.

What's so frustrating about this show is that as the first big budget Gaelic drama, it should have been bulletproof, with a script stress-tested to destruction (especially a murder-mystery which requires meticulous plotting).

So much of the dreadful dialogue, tired tropes and plotting errors shouldn't have made it beyond the first draft. But they did, and because of that it will be a long time before another major Gaelic drama gets made, and that's a great shame.