Can you justify doing evil to
destroy evil? That is one of the dark questions that slowly emerge from
the absorbing, unsettling five-part series that begins Touching Evil on
'Mystery'.
Touching Evil has a dashing
detective hero, Dave Creegan. But this is no frothy cat-and-mouse game; it
is a collection of twisted contemporary tales in which Creegan, part of a
team of high powered London detectives, comes face to face with
unspeakable killers. It would be easy to guess that Touching Evil was
created and largely written by Paul Abbot, who invented the great,
personally flawed, crime solving psychologist of Cracker. In the mould of
the most intriguing modern crime solvers, Creegan has psychological
turmoil of his own, and his cases have more to do with confronting the
criminal mind than with hunting down evidence.
Robson Green, who plays Creegan,
has piercing blue eyes, slightly thinning hair and a taciturn quality that
causes his partner, Susan Taylor, to ask if he has spent a lot of time
alone lately. He has; he is recently divorced, the father of two small
daughters, and quietly torn apart over it. He also has a conspicuous scar
on his temple. Touching Evil unfolds with such deliberation (too much in
the slow going early stages) that it takes a while to learn that the scar
is the result of a bullet to his head, taken during a not so distant
investigation. Creegan may be brave and smart, but he's not infallible
(the better to worry when he seems in danger).
The series follows three separate
cases. In the first episode Creegan joins the fictional OSC, the Organised
and Serial Crime unit, and tackles the most disturbing case of all. Three
small boys have been kidnapped. The clues - a buried sneaker and a plastic
daffodil left at the scene - lead to a cool, professional geneticist named
Hinks, who they suspect has kidnapped and murdered children before. If his
pattern holds, the detectives have six days to find the boys before they
are killed.
Of course, as the renegade hero,
Creegan is willing to break the rules to save the children. But it is the
unfolding of his character that becomes most fascinating to watch as Mr.
Green smoothly allows us to see the tension between Creegan's normal life
as a father and professional, and the flashes of dark intuition that help
him track the killers (In a more outgoing mood, Mr Green played the young
doctor obsessively in love with the middle-aged Francesca Annis in the
quirky 'Masterpiece Theatre' romance Reckless, also written by Mr.
Abbot). If Creegan ever takes on the complexity of Robbie Coltrane's Fitz
in Cracker, he has an enigmatic allure that grows through the series.
The next stories feature similarly
monstrous crimes. In the second, several patients are drugged and killed
in a hospital - in what appears to be unsolicited euthanasia. The third
has the least interesting crime, involving the Internet, college students
and mutilated corpses. But it offers the most satisfying glimpses into the
lives of the detectives. All are played with a crispness that suits the
series, especially Ms. Walker. With her cropped hair and brisk manner, she
brings an echo of Jane Tennison from Prime Suspect to the role of
Creegan's no nonsense partner. This precision exists in a world often
filmed to look ominously claustrophobic.
Though each case is
self-contained, there are threads that go through subsequent episodes, and
the question left dangling at the end of one episode leads to the
startling conclusion of the next instalment. Another murder is solved but
that solution only raises more questions of ethics and morality. This
psychologically chilling series takes on the big issues beneath all
detective stories: life and death, good and bad, the extremes to which
humans go. Among it's other qualities, Touching Evil is perfectly named.
© New York Times
The Criminal Mind