Cleddau

Just finished the English language version. Starts well, good cast, typical but credible murder mystery. Sadly many of these shows seem to be written without planning a proper ending so get lost in the woods. After a dozen red herrings it becomes obvious who dunnit. Why? There's only one person left! The ending is utterly ludicrous. Save your time by watching something better. The cast is excellent and do their very best to rescue this turkey from the mess it sinks to. You can actually see mike's in advance what's going to happen next. I feel sorry for the actors who have to wade through this bilge.

This is what you would expect from the BBC and others.

Usual array of suspects and diversions. Worth watching and probably not for watching in a binge, as you want time to digest.

The usual use of the weather to set scenes and move the plot on.

There is good complexity of character development and the dialogue is believable.

I do wonder if there is always doubt about those higher up,.

And of course the bloke with the glasses is a bit mysterious.

I do wish they made them call "Taser, taser , taser" when they use them, but you can't have everything.

Can you?

And no CGI or AI.

Nice.

And satisfying at the end.

It's very hard to carry a murder mystery over 6 episodes unless the script is great, and this script is far from it. In my experience Welsh crime dramas are glacially slow, it's a slow and painful process keeping up with them.

It is so full of cliches, like a bad American police procedural. A DI is brought back to her former station to work on a case similar to one she helped solve 10 years before. She teams up with her former colleague/lover. From there it's downhill full of cliches. Every new piece of evidence sends them down another rabbit hole. This isn't a "Grace" or a "Vera" or any of the top British crime dramas.

Great cast members like Richard Harrington and Elen Rhys deserve better scripts. This should have been 3 separate crime stories, 2 episodes each and it would have been more successful.

We watch all the UK detective series and tried this because Richard Harrington is always pretty good since we first saw him on Hinterland. And he's good here too. Can't say it's aterribly original plot, with the reliable blend of false identities, family secrets, and discord between the male/female detective leads. But it held our interest well enough. However the last 30 seconds of the series, the thing which gives the show its name, is just preposterous. It simply couldn't happen based on what we'd just seen for 51 minutes. Not unless the entire criminal justice system has been ignored. Wales has to do better than that.

Brits are pros at this - well-executed police procedurals. You can rely on them to have solid plotting and carefully planned dramatic arcs, capable actors, and three-dimensional characters with realistically grounded problems.

I enjoyed that the pacing wasn't rushed - however, the series could've been an hour shorter. (It annoys me that it appears "compulsory" nowadays to have at least 6 episodes for one story.) There were some unnecessary coincidences, and to be fair, all and all the series wasn't really that groundbreaking.

However, it was still a good binge with lovely Welsh scenery to boot.