Those Upon Whom I Look

2025 has been a fabulous year for Batshit British Crime Thrillers: shows that can be best described as why must TV be good? Is it not enough to watch a haggardly hot, grumpy British guy have a really bad week?, with a tidy 6-8 episodes, really good actors, and wildly implausible plots.

Dept. Q stars Matthew Goode as DCI Carl Morck, an acerbic police detective in Scotland reassigned to investigate cold cases with a misfit team while recovering from physical and emotional trauma. The plot is completely bonkers and impossible to talk about without major spoilers, because the first episode ends with the reveal of what happened to ambitious prosecutor Merritt Lingard, whose disappearance Morck and co. are investigating: ( ... ) There's also definitely a vibe of maybe the real mystery was the friends we made along the way; the fact it closes with an instrumental cover of Radical Face's "Welcome Home, Son" really captures the emotional tone. So, yeah, 10/10, had a great time watching this.

Lazarus stars Sam Claflin as Dr. Joel "Laz" Lazarus, a forensic psychologist who is either having a mental breakdown in the wake of his father's apparent suicide and unresolved grief over his twin sister's unsolved murder twenty years earlier, or is being haunted by the ghosts of cold-case victims from his home town, leading him to investigate their deaths and whether they were related to his father's and sister's. ( Spoilers! ) This show is, objectively, not very good - it ends with multiple twists so stupid I did laugh out loud - but I actually really enjoyed the timey-wimey-ness of it, between the concept of flashback-based hauntings - the ghosts, when they appear to Laz, seem to think they are a. alive and b. having therapy sessions with Laz's father - and the way the show cuts between the characters as adults in the present day and the teenagers they'd been when Laz's sister was murdered. The big names in the cast are, of course, Claflin, and Bill Nighy as the late Dr. Lazarus Sr., but I was delighted to see Edward Hogg as the twitchy town loner who has lived under suspicion of Laz's sister's murder for decades, and David Fynn - who I've mostly seen as the goofier characters in Shakespearean comedies - in a more serious role as Laz's childhood friend, now a local police detective; I was unfamiliar with Alexandra Roach, who stole the show as Laz's wounded, woo-woo surviving sister.

Black Doves is technically stretching the definition a bit, as it's from 2024 and more of a spy thriller, co-starring Keira Knightley as a spy ten years' deep into her cover as the wife of a rising politician and Ben Whishaw as an assassin with a broken heart; I'd procrastinated on watching this for a full year, which actually meant I watched it at the best possible time (i.e., last week, over Christmas) because it is specifically set at Christmas. (Move over, Die Hard!) Absolutely spaghetti-at-the-wall plot - it's conspiracies all the way down, ( vague spoilers ) - and everyone in it is, like, so bad at the first rule of Being A Spy (don't freaking tell people you're a spy!!!) but both Knightley and Whishaw act the hell out of their roles and the writing is fun and there were a bunch of other great characters, including the incomparable Kathryn Hunter as a London crime boss, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Whishaw's character's normie ex, and a delightful pair of snarky zillennial hitwomen.