Reviews

The Cheaters is normally a great show with intriguing and well-acted dramas - as indeed is this. The problem is that the plot falls apart at the end, and makes no sense. Warning - if you read on, there are major spoilers ahead.

This looks like it is going to be a drama about murderous twins, where the bad twin Jane kills the good twin Laura and takes her place to enjoy marriage with a rich aristocrat. All fine - yet this is not the resolution of the mystery.

It turns out that the birth certificates of Laura and her twin were issued 3 weeks apart. But it is never explained what this means. It presumably means there is no twin, and Laura and Jane are the same person (though this is not stated). Where the second birth certificate came from isn't clear, or why Laura would order it at 3 weeks old. If the second certificate were somehow faked, why did she put the wrong date on it? Anyway, Jane either doesn't exist, or is otherwise explained away.

So now we have a single individual, Laura, who wants to settle down with a rich aristocrat while also sowing her wild oats on the sly, and to do this, she sets up two establishments. But then in each of them, she poses as twins. Why do this? Why not set up the second apartment under a false name (since she can forge birth certificates, it shouldn't be impossible), in which case no-one would have reason to associate the two, the 'good girl' and the 'good time girl'?

Anyway, she sets up a fake twin, to have a good time in the bright lights. But then, when marriage is imminent and she needs to get rid of Jane, why doesn't she just pretend that Jane has gone back to Canada? What she actually does is murders one of her photographic models, which is a bit drastic, and dumps the body in the river. She needs to be sure to identify the body, so she needs to be sure that it spends a long time in the water. She also needs to be sure that the dead girl's mother isn't also asked to identify the body first, as it's her daughter that is missing. Anyway, she gets away with it.

But then, why make an insurance claim on double indemnity? Granted, £50,000 is no bad thing, but she is about to marry a rich man, so she doesn't need the money, and it simply draws more attention to the case.

It looks like they were so concerned to put in a twist, that they forgot to check whether the twist made sense.

One might forget one's wedding, just about. But it is hardly likely that, if you did find yourself mysteriously married, knowing it to be a scam, and you were at the same time organising a secret conference, that you would then invite the wife, whom you knew to be a fraud, to your house to meet the secret guests. Still less likely that the spooks you had invited would welcome her with open arms and make a fuss of her. And almost impossible that they would all then quite happily welcome into the house a previously unknown and unannounced brother-in-law. They wouldn't know he was armed, of course, because they didn't search him or his luggage.

It is also incredible that a load of enemy spies would think that the best way of weedling their way into the secret set-up would be to fake a marriage between one of your agents and the man hosting the conference. Wouldn't there be a better way of getting into the house, given the complete lack of security.

But least credible of all is that Lord Brett would be telling jokes and getting sentimental with his ex-ex-wife, when she had just been a party to the brutal and callous murder of his faithful family retainer.

This is an awfully long programme, and the time doesn't fly by. All the JC ingredients are there, but it's stretched out to breaking point with plot, subplot and subsubplot. What is particularly odd is that, despite the disappearance of two women, the police are barely involved at all. Calling the police might have been the immediate reflex of anyone involved at the first disappearance, and when a kidnapping ransom is paid without return of the victim, maybe someone might have dialled 999? But no, Jonathan and Joey just tag along with the Gesslers, and no policeman gets a line.

There are also a number of unexplained minor items. Why did Glen padlock Mina in the attic room (there might have been a fire, she may have wished to go back to her own room, she might simply have been cold in the night)? What happened to the second body? Was it entirely explained how Nichola ended up with Alex? Why did Glen continue to be the gardener in the house where Elodie had disappeared?

Hmmm. A well-acted show which takes us down many blind alleys lined with red herrings. Fun to watch and to puzzle out. But ...

***SERIOUS SPOILER BELOW***

There really are too many coincidences to make any kind of sense. In particular, lovely Dr Halliwell, beloved by all, actually manages to botch the treatment and cause the death of three people, all of whom either own, or are a close relative of someone who owns, the same gun. Even in a very claustrophobic housing estate, even with a tight nexus of gang crime, that is a level of carelessness and coincidence that is hard to believe - especially as he is also a drug thief as well as being targeted by a husband he is cuckolding.

On top of that, he rejects a doctor from his surgery who has gangland connections because he wouldn't fit in. He would fit in perfectly!

This relates only to Season 1. Brilliantly acted, with powerful characters and a strong sense of place, this nevertheless disappoints as a detective drama. DCI Cadi, whose face is built for worry, and her sergeant, a sort of mini-Sir Derek Jacobi, look for kidnapped and abused girls. Of the other performances, perhaps Mrs Harris, simultaneously the mother from hell and the most indulgent mother in the world, stands out. Episode 4, set entirely in the Harris household, is tour de force of writing and acting. The beautiful yet gloomy, expansive yet claustrophobic North Wales setting is almost a character in itself.

And yet ... (serious spoilers follow)

For a detective story, there is remarkably little actual detecting. The viewers are in the know as to what is going on, but Cadi never gets close. Painstaking interviews and cross-checking lead to nothing, except a realisation that the case is bigger than they thought, and requires loads more pictures and felt tip notes on their case whiteboard. They fail to rescue Megan, who gets out thanks to a bit of luck. They identify the perpetrator only when a WPC, who has been ticked off for going against protocol, belatedly confides to Cadi that this man 'looked at her funny.' Based on no other evidence than this, off they shoot. They not only fail to capture him, he merely pops next door - no bloodhounds or following trails through the forest. When they check on next door - bear in mind there is a known killer on the loose, concealed somewhere in dense forest - all that happens is that a WPC taps on the window and squints into the lounge to see if she can see anything.

To cap it all, Cadi's father was the detective who messed up the original investigation and incarcerated the wrong man for 12 years. Clearly, the North Wales Police (Heddlu Gogledd Cymru) has not improved very much in the intervening years.

Not only this, but the final focus on the main case means we don't really get closure on two of the other stories. Nurse Lowri disappears after episode 6, so we never find out how she responds to her fortuitous escape from peril (although she reappears in Season 2), while the drama of the Pryces is sort-of resolved with a throwaway line in the final episode. It surely deserved more, especially given the screen time it had, and the twist in episode 7.

Utter nonsense, as The Saint tries to move onto Avengers territory without any understanding of why the Avengers worked.

Unlikely students with odd jumpers and trousers are drawn into developing their homicidal skills for not very much reason. It's not clear why the villain didn't simply employ decent heavies of a more traditional variety (as he clearly did for the security guards on his island).

Several death game students have gone missing, presumably chosen by Vogler to work in his organisation. But then where are they? How much work do they have to do? Why aren't they busy guarding his island? How many murderous geniuses does he need?

And when Vogler has Simon and his ladyfriend in his clutches, why does he let them go and try to catch them again? Why not simply kill them on the spot? It wasn't to make the murders look accidental, as they were to be shot. If he wanted to test his new employees, why do the security guards come along with them? If he valued the sport (as in The Most Dangerous Game), then it came at a high price when Simon triumphs at the end.

An early (pre-May 1968) example of a paranoid style in which students are sinister, clever, psychopathic, but also naive and easily controllable by evil geniuses, Moore's film Crossplot being another example of the genre. It was always a silly genre, but this one is completely ludicrous, devoid even of an internal logic.

Early in this episode, we get two shots of a rather bizarre level crossing across a railway, recognisable because of the rickety gates and the speed and lack of warning with which they come down. They are very noticeable, and a couple of reviewers have already remarked on them.

This brings to mind the Russian playwright Chekhov's principle of the gun - if a pistol is obviously evident on the wall in the first act of a play, you know it will be used to shoot someone before the end. Nothing must be irrelevant to the story. Hence a dramatic climax at the level crossing, with a train bearing down, is foreshadowed.

Then the script plays with us a bit, because Cully gets a part in a new play. And guess what - it's Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, which with some irony is the only Chekhov play in which a gun is waved about that is not used!

Will the gates come down on Tom, or the killer, at the end? A nicely subtle tease from the author Tony Etchells.

Enjoyable tense Belgian conspiracy thriller, well-made and illustrative of the weird and paranoid politics of Belgium. Particularly good performances by Jo de Meyere, Mike Verdrengh and Koen De Bouw.

However, it really doesn't make a great deal of sense viewed as a whole. A couple of the major flaws have been recognised by other reviewers. First, why did Wolfs concoct his elaborate plot to expose Salamander, and then in the end just shoot Jonkhere? It might have been easier to do that in the first place (although admittedly he had just been shot, so perhaps he thought it would be his last chance). Second - more importantly - why did the 66 members of Salamander keep incriminating documents in their safety deposit boxes, rather than destroying them? It might have been that the Salamander organisation kept the documents for blackmail purposes, but Jonkhere seemed to have no knowledge of the boxes' contents.

The main problem, though, is that Gerardi falls in love with Wolfs' daughter when they meet in a car park at their daughters' school. Er, the rogue detective pursuing a conspiracy accidentally finds himself with one of the conspirators as a prospective father-in-law, out of a country of 11 million people? Klaus turned on Wolfs because, as he said, only a naive sentimentalist could believe it was a coincidence - but it was!! The plot would never have been unravelled without that glaring happenstance.

Other more minor issues - it wasn't really confirmed how Wolfs or Klaus got the inside information about the deposit boxes. There was a suicidal clerk who might have given them the information, but he can't have known that all the boxes would contain incriminating documents.

It also wasn't clear how the Salamander people sabotaged Gerardi's car. He had parked outside his house after a night out. He told his wife and daughter to stay in the car while he investigated the house. Only after a while did they join Gerardi inside. The sabotage could only have happened after that. But then Gerardi decided to send his family away on the spur of the moment, so the sabotage had to have happened before then. How did the bombers know that they had this extremely brief window of time to sabotage the car, and how could they be sure they would not be caught in the act? The reasonable assumption would be that the Gerardis would go to bed, and so the car could be sabotaged at their leisure at any time during the night, and so they would wait until the lights went off.

It is also a bit weird that an order of monks might be better equipped than the Belgian police to deal with a major conspiracy and coup attempt. Or maybe not.

Scene by scene it's all the usual Midsomer fun, slightly fewer murders than usual. This time the plot is derived from Hamlet, and for added frisson the play-within-a-play is ... Hamlet, starring Cully.

However, unlike the Bard's work, it doesn't make sense. Alan is murdered in Shanghai, and Ian discovers the motive after finding Alan's Chinese sketchbook with a pencilled note inside setting out his suspicions. But how did this happen? If Alan took the sketchpad on his Chinese trip, then why was it not incinerated in the car explosion? How did it get back to England, and in particular, how did it end up in his box of masonic regalia on top of the wardrobe? Who would remove it from his effects and hide it there in particular?

If, on the other hand, he didn't take it with him to China, that explains how it ended up on top of the wardrobe, but doesn't explain why he never mentioned his suspicions to anyone beforehand (e.g. His wife), or tried to prevent Charles' shady deals going through when actually in Shanghai.

Second, Tom - of course - gets the solution to the case on hearing Polonius' "method in his madness" line while watching Cully's performance, and rushes out. A day or two later, Cully is still mad at him - but by rushing out exactly when he did, Tom saved a life, never mind making his arrest. Did no-one explain this to Cully, or is she so up herself she only thinks of her own performances?

Third, there is no explanation for Ian's mad behaviour. His madness consists of sending Sophie/Ophelia off to a nunnery (or to the stock 'friend up North'), becoming an apparent convert to Charles' sneaky schemes, and telling his mother who the murderer is. There is no explanation for the first two of these, and no apparent reason why he doesn't share his information with the police.

So then why does Tom realise who did it when he hears the 'method in his madness' line, since there is no method in Ian's madness? If, say, Ian had drugged and killed himself to implicate Charles, having planted the seed of doubt in his mother, that might have made a bit more sense.

It would also have made more sense of the death of Peter, which, as it was, was just an accident. If Ian specifically wanted to destroy Charles and Peter, while disillusioning Hilary, he needed to be a bit more active than accidentally killing the one and being passively murdered by the other.

Fourth, surely wearing someone's cap and driving him around in the boot of his car leaves forensic traces? Hairs on the cap? Blood in the boot? Yet nothing is found, by this police force which must be the most experienced in murder investigations in the world.

And then, as the other reviewers point out, the complete lack of a resolution is a real problem. There must have been a better solution than this. It would be impossible to pin the Shanghai murder on Charles, with the lack of evidence (even given the autopsy). A neater ending would have given Tom something to play with. Had there been some method in Ian's madness, Ian might have provided it.