I've said this before, Silent Witness is at its best when dealing with domestic issues, but when it comes to minority cultures, it often resorts to cliches and stereotypes. So here's, yet another story about dodgy Muslims. In 2017....
But hey ho, let's have one of our characters show that they *know* the culture and that they 'explain' it to other characters. And of course may this be Clarissa. The tokenism is nauseating.
This is only one cringeworhty aspect in one of the weakest scripts of SW, with scenes where characters 'explain' the issue to us or to another character. The scene where Nikki and Thomas debate on immigration while examining a dead body is one of the worst in this respect. Other lines randomly thrown such as 'Look at those men who think they know us' by Clarissa sound only off-key in the context of that scene and the story - and especially when such lines are addressed to a lead character (Nikki) who is far from a feminist role model - how many times had she been told off by Harry and she was just standing there, wide-eyed, saying nothing?
The village idiot in all this is, again, Nikki Alexander who, steeped in her white middle-class privilege, seems utterly ignorant of the complexities of the issues in question and yet, as in the Afghanistan episode, she has stubborn strong views on these issues and even ends up breaking the law here, but, as others have commented, doesn't seem to face any repercussions for it. One plothole after anohter, including the chance encounter in a city as vast as London towards the end of the story, which other reviewers have pointed out too.
It's unfortunate that so far, this 'generation' of supporting characters have not had particularly strong backstories developed, at least so far, as previous ones had - Leo may have been the one with the most detailed storyline and, of course, Sam Ryan - I was thinking the other day, even if Emilia Fox has undoubtedly become the queen of SW, she never surpassed the gravitas of Amanda Burton, who I wish had stayed on the show for many more seasons.
But hey ho, let's have one of our characters show that they *know* the culture and that they 'explain' it to other characters. And of course may this be Clarissa. The tokenism is nauseating.
This is only one cringeworhty aspect in one of the weakest scripts of SW, with scenes where characters 'explain' the issue to us or to another character. The scene where Nikki and Thomas debate on immigration while examining a dead body is one of the worst in this respect. Other lines randomly thrown such as 'Look at those men who think they know us' by Clarissa sound only off-key in the context of that scene and the story - and especially when such lines are addressed to a lead character (Nikki) who is far from a feminist role model - how many times had she been told off by Harry and she was just standing there, wide-eyed, saying nothing?
The village idiot in all this is, again, Nikki Alexander who, steeped in her white middle-class privilege, seems utterly ignorant of the complexities of the issues in question and yet, as in the Afghanistan episode, she has stubborn strong views on these issues and even ends up breaking the law here, but, as others have commented, doesn't seem to face any repercussions for it. One plothole after anohter, including the chance encounter in a city as vast as London towards the end of the story, which other reviewers have pointed out too.
It's unfortunate that so far, this 'generation' of supporting characters have not had particularly strong backstories developed, at least so far, as previous ones had - Leo may have been the one with the most detailed storyline and, of course, Sam Ryan - I was thinking the other day, even if Emilia Fox has undoubtedly become the queen of SW, she never surpassed the gravitas of Amanda Burton, who I wish had stayed on the show for many more seasons.