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IIf there is ever a “previously on…” to look forward to, it would be Marcella’s (ITV), if only to see how much they could pack into one recap. The third season of the largely ridiculous noir crime begins with Marcella, a former detective (Anna Friel, often in the bath), deeply infiltrated in Belfast. She’s taken on a new life as Keira Devlin, which she is capable of, you might remember, as she’s supposed to be dead, having opened her mouth with scissors at the end of the last season in one of his violent fugues. declares, after learning that she was responsible for the death of her baby girl. This is the short version of events anyway.
In Belfast, Marcella / Keira struggles to tell the difference between the two. She tries to fit in, with an emphasis on bed, herself within the Maguire family, who live a sort of Downton-meets-Top Boy lifestyle, running the organized crime scene in the city. and beyond. The runaway states seem to have vanished without mention, though they might be spared them for a big blackout. Keira is stuck in a nice house, with a nice car and a nice boyfriend, Lawrence, who takes care of the accounts for the Maguires, while slyly helping himself for a share of the profits.
Crossing a family like the Maguires is not a wise decision. They are led by Katherine, played with the coldness expert by Amanda Burton, taking on the cold matriarchal role that Niamh Cusack played with in the first season. As is often the case in gritty dramas, Katherine has funded a big new housing project in the area where she grew up, no doubt as a front for some of the family’s most horrific methods of making a living. She doesn’t trust Keira a little, no matter how far she proves herself. Frank, who oversees Marcella’s new assignment, is appalled at some of his officer’s less-than-conventional methods. “It breaks all the rules of the book,” he says. “Like using a suspected dead cop to hide?” she fires back, to which the obvious answer is, well, yes, especially the one who might forget what she’s doing at any moment, when the targeted family knows she was once a police officer, when Belfast really isn’t very far from London, and when that blonde wig isn’t fooling anyone.
Katherine has a more immediate problem to tackle, however, in the form of son-in-law Bobby, who is both desperate to prove himself and disaster-loving. Bobby tends to the docks, which is fine until a truck full of bodies exposes the Maguires’ human trafficking operation. On a trip to London, Bobby lets off steam a little too much and gets tangled up in the political establishment in the most unfortunate of ways. Who is sent to investigate this particular upheaval? Why, DI Rav Sangha, of course, last seen tied up in the bogs by Marcella in one of his “now where was I?” States.
If it’s a coincidence, it’s quite a coincidence, and the twists and turns that stretch gullibility are really starting to strain around the edges. Marcella is about to get away with some of her more whimsical stories because she was so ridiculously overdone. He’s always traded dark and vicious shocks and there are a lot of them in this double bill, but they don’t work quite the way they did. It’s almost like they’ve decided to try and get over the child murder from the last time, and have thrown it all away in the hope that something else horrible remains. A 13 year old heroin addict? Beat someone to death with a bottle of champagne? A pervert masturbating in the attic?
It’s always been divisive, but I liked its previous releases very much, even if background seems an odd word choice for a show so relentlessly violent and humorless. Partly, I think, was because it was one of the nicest shows to people watch on Gogglebox, to see audiences squirm at some of its more eccentric twists. Based on that opening, however, it all feels a bit done, which is an odd flaw for a series about a violent amnesiac sleuth who is believed to be dead. Of all the shows that might suffer from the feeling you’ve seen before, Marcella should definitely be one of the less likely contenders.
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