User Reviews

This two part story opened with two key threads; Leo is in court giving evidence in a case concerning the death of a baby where he strongly disagrees with the findings of another pathologist and a woman is searching for bones after being told their location by a gaoled man. The man is Arnold Mears; he is imprisoned for brutally murdering three women. The woman doing the searching isn't an accomplice; she is going to the locations he gives her because she believes that when she has found all the bones Mears will tell her the whereabouts of her own missing daughter. The team end up on the case when the woman's son brings one of the bones to Nikki; she soon learns that there are more and analysis suggests they are from previously unknown victims. Meanwhile it looks as if the pathologist Leo disagreed with in court might be struck off as she has been illegally keeping tissue samples without consent… it also becomes apparent that she was obsessed with the Mears case.

This was a fairly unusual episode in that all of the murders took place quite a while before; the mystery was whether or not Mears would ever disclose how many he had really killed or where their remains were located. While the story was a bit far-fetched it was still fairly gripping; this was largely down to James Cosmo's performance of Mears; he was a character to make ones skin crawl... even though he was behind bars he felt dangerous; he had a 'Hannibal Lector' quality about him. One flaw that did strike me was how he was giving the woman directions to the bones; a six figure Ordnance Survey grid reference will take you to a hundred metre square: rather a large area to find a bone in! Still one should overlook such minor quibbles as explaining a more accurate method could have detracted from the story.

I was somewhat disappointed by this episode (I'm referring to "Paradise Lost" as whole, rather than just the second part), because it was so far from being a whodunit. There is a serial killer and viewers are told about the murders he committed early on, so the only mystery is whether the girls' bodies are going to be found, Annie's daughter in particular, if she was one of his victims to begin with. I didn't find this particularly exciting. Basically, the merits of this episode were the psychological development of the characters, their conversations and their actions, etc. I wouldn't really call it mystery-solving. Indeed, I found it interesting, and I think that it was well-acted and well-written and all that, but this is not what I expect from Silent Witness.

Silent Witness was originally about catching the killer, mostly based on the evidence the pathologists would find after conducting post-mortems on the murder victims. When Sam Ryan was in the show, the episodes came down to this. However, in the later seasons, everything changed. "Paradise Lost" in particular resembles Criminal Minds more than the original Silent Witness. I think that this is unfair to viewers - a show should target a particular audience and it should have a specific formula according to which it generates episodes. If the episodes are too different, many viewers find themselves in a position where they simply have to be selective. Indeed, it's not like the show has completely changed such that I should now stop watching it - there are still good whodunits, like "Domestic", which was also a part of this season. However, then there's "Paradise Lost", "Bloodlines", and many others like that - one big mess of genres. So, I have rated this episode as mediocre because it has failed to live up to my expectations from Silent Witness, not because I find it mediocre as a separate entity. In any case, I wish I had a reliable method of discovering which episodes are like this, so I don't have to waste time watching them, i.e. so that I could jump ahead to the whodunits right away. Oh well, at least I won't have this problem when I start re-watching these episodes in a few years.

The main raison d'etre for the entire episode is Annie's search for her daughter Tina.

Must we infer somehow that Tina fell victim to Mears?

Is Tina a runaway, alive but whereabouts unknown?

What?

Yet again, the writers of SW write no ending.

Is this some kind of artsy auteur device along with shaky cam and flash back, flash forward, flash back...ad nauseum.

We're getting into "Emporer's New Clothes" territory here similar to that of lazy, incoherent David Lynch and F-bomb king Scorcese & his vulgar accomplice DeNiro.

("The Irishman" has more than 700 F-bombs. "White Heat" has none.) 10 ratings are going to episodes which should be graded "Incomplete".

C'mon man !