!!!!! SPOILERS !!!!!
NO MAN'S LAND is a curious political thriller . It's set in the near future , or rather is set in the late 1990s where Russia is collapsing due to civil war amongst different ethnic groups leading to a massive influx of refugees into the newly reunified Germany . A policeman called Fisher investigates the murder of a woman who has connection to a refugee group . He follows up some leads and the more he investigates the more danger he finds himself in
Did I say this was a political thriller ? That's maybe a wrong description because though politics is involved the narrative and plotting is more like a mystery that Fisher must unravel . Unfortunately I had worked out what scriptwriter David Pirrie's big payoff at the end because the exact same idea had been used nearly 30 years before in a DOCTOR WHO story titled The Faceless Ones by Malcolm Hulke . In that story aliens called Chameleons were abducting humans on air liners after they'd sent relatives postcards home . In NO MAN'S LAND snakehead gangs would get the refugees to send postcards home to their families then after they'd done that they'd murder the refugees . Of course this type of borrowing plot devices is entirely different from plagiarism but it meant that when I saw the refugees innocently writing their postcards I knew the centre of the mystery hence no more suspense as to what was happening
What Pirrie can be accused of is writing a speculative political thriller where the politics is skated over very quickly in a shallow manner . In effect it's not about future politics or conflict and the plot could have been set in 1994 the year this teleplay was produced and you'd have the exact same story and one without ill conceived and distracting politics
NO MAN'S LAND is a curious political thriller . It's set in the near future , or rather is set in the late 1990s where Russia is collapsing due to civil war amongst different ethnic groups leading to a massive influx of refugees into the newly reunified Germany . A policeman called Fisher investigates the murder of a woman who has connection to a refugee group . He follows up some leads and the more he investigates the more danger he finds himself in
Did I say this was a political thriller ? That's maybe a wrong description because though politics is involved the narrative and plotting is more like a mystery that Fisher must unravel . Unfortunately I had worked out what scriptwriter David Pirrie's big payoff at the end because the exact same idea had been used nearly 30 years before in a DOCTOR WHO story titled The Faceless Ones by Malcolm Hulke . In that story aliens called Chameleons were abducting humans on air liners after they'd sent relatives postcards home . In NO MAN'S LAND snakehead gangs would get the refugees to send postcards home to their families then after they'd done that they'd murder the refugees . Of course this type of borrowing plot devices is entirely different from plagiarism but it meant that when I saw the refugees innocently writing their postcards I knew the centre of the mystery hence no more suspense as to what was happening
What Pirrie can be accused of is writing a speculative political thriller where the politics is skated over very quickly in a shallow manner . In effect it's not about future politics or conflict and the plot could have been set in 1994 the year this teleplay was produced and you'd have the exact same story and one without ill conceived and distracting politics