Broadchurch Series 2 Episode 5 Review.

So I was kind of right about the roots of the Knight and Bishop feud; still on the fence about the missing girl theory; as the furnace in this episode could just be a red herring.

So we’ve gone full on legal drama, with the main focus of this episode being Knight and Bishop dealing with their personal problems intersecting with the trial. Through this, we get some insight into their joint back story; with Bishop’s bitterness over Knight refusing to defend her son. Bishop completely drops her professional façade, when she finds out about her son being assaulted in prison. This is something she holds Knight responsible for, though Knight seems to be of the opinion that that case wasn’t worth defending. “A man died because of your son”  - this is a very effective piece of character development for both and finally shows Bishop reacting as a parent rather than a lawyer.

Bishop isn’t really shown in the best light however as her actions in the trial are now less for the benefit of her client and more for the sake of humiliating Knight. While effort is made to show Knight’s lack of empathy with parents, it’s Bishop who comes out worse off in terms of audience reaction (from me at least).  While Knight is taking pot shots at Bishop it’s not really over anything personal. Bishop (or rather her junior) makes an amateur mistake in calling an unreliable witness during their defence. This is the source of Knight’s mockery, while Bishop’s motivation is both personal and unprofessional. Bishop seems to be projecting her own screw-ups and her son’s peril onto Knight.

In the B story, the suspects for the Sandbrook murders are stacking up. It seems like the neighbours may have been involved in some sort of wife swap situation…erm ok…

Other than that, the big development is Miller and Hardy finding what could be the place where the missing body from the Sandbrook could have been burnt. Other than that everything else in this episode didn’t really interest me. Bishop trying to coerce Paul into being a character witness. She doesn’t seem to be aware that he’s not Rory any more so won’t be so much of a push over.

This episode is alright  - the legal drama is taking over, which I can see being a problem for some people. The problem is that everything else happening (with the exception the Sandbrook investyigation) doesn’t seem to be very interesting.

Broadchurch Season 2 Episodes 1&2 Review

So I’m a week behind on this, but whatever.

Broadchurch has returned and is picking up about nine months after Danny Latimer’s killer Joe Miller was caught. As I’m behind, I’m going to be skipping over most of Episode 1, as it was mostly about setting the new dynamic.

Eessentially, Chris Chibnall used episode 1 to shift the A-story of Broadchurch from a murder mystery into a courtroom drama, with Joe Miller disregarding his own confession and changing his plea to not guilty. This leads to the appointment of Sharon Bishop (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) as his defence counsel for a full trial. This in turn leads to the Latimers appointing Jocelyn Knight (Charlotte Rampling) as the prosecutor in the case, as for some unstated reason the Crown Prosecution Service didn’t seem interested in doing their job. I don’t know whether this is a misunderstanding on how a criminal trail works on the part of Chibnall or a deliberate move to keep the family drama aspect of the show alive. The two are immediately great in their parts, but there’s no explanation of how Knight was able to convince the CPS to let her prosecute on a high profile murder case when she apparently hasn’t practiced law for several years.

Anyway, onto episode 2. This is where things start to go down hill a little bit on the legal side. The B story about DI Hardy and DS Miller conducting an unofficial investigation into the Sanbrook murders is good drama, but the legal side falls down a bit.

Essentially, the point that it gets stuck on is that Joe Miller confessed on tape in a police interview. He’s pretty much done. However, in the style of an American drama, Bishop is able to have this confession ruled inadmissible as there’s no guarantee that the injuries he sustained (from his wife) weren’t part of the process used to obtain his confession. Of course, Knight points out that that confession was made before he was assaulted, which is proof that the CPS should have let someone else prosecute in this case. I mean if she was the amazing barrister everyone keeps saying she is, she could have pointed out that an application to exclude evidence should not be made in front of the jury. It might seem like I’m being unfair with that point, but consider how stupid it is for a judge to “order” a jury not to consider something they’ve been told about during the trial. It is impossible for the court to be certain that the jury will not consider a confession as part of their ruling once they have been made aware of it. For this reason, if a confession can be excluded it has to be done I such a way that the jury will never know about it. The jury in this case knows that Joe Miller confessed and the likelihood of a judge solemnly nodding and agreeing with Bishop is very slim, based on her failure to follow the correct procedure. To add to that her failure to attempt to have his confession excluded at a pre-trail hearing could easily endanger her client’s chances of a fair trial. In the case that the judge did agree that the confession was inadmissible, it’s likely that she’d be minded to replace the whole jury, necessitating a whole new trail. I mean I know that Bishop is being built up as some sort of mad skills, maverick uber-lawyer, but I don’t think she’d risk invalidating the whole trail on day one for the sake of a cheap shot at Knight.

Well that’s the heavy bit over, onto the child murder from DI Hardy’s past. The off-the-books and inevitably botched operation to catch the Sanbrook killer provides a good B-story, although I find the conclusion of episode 2 a bit contrived. I mean I get that Beth is a grieving mother, but suggesting that Ellie consciously beat up her child killing husband with the knowledge that it would give him a chance at trial, is a bit stupid. I don’t think anyone actually thinks like that. I’d get her being angry at her on the grounds that Ellie should know better than to beat up suspects, especially given what it’s done to the case against him. But that just shows how unnecessary it is to have Beth react the way she does with the reasoning she has. She has a perfectly good reason to be angry at Ellie; I don’t see why Chibnall feels like she would need to make up another one.

So yeah…I’m enjoying Broadchurch series 2, but I’m acutely aware that shifting to a court room drama comes with risks. The writers have to take care to be accurate. I’m not saying that they should jettison all drama form the sake of characters wearing the correct wigs. I’m saying that the majority of criminal court procedure in the UK is based solidly in common sense. A judge turning to  jury and saying “I order you not to think about X” is just plain stupid.