Review | What to stream this weekend: Nicola Walker finds the bodies in Annika, BBC First’s Scottish police action series
- Nicola Walker plays Detective Inspector Annika Strandhed of the Marine Homicide Unit, investigating murders around Scotland’s waterways, in Annika
- Meanwhile, on Disney+, My Home Hero stars Kuranosuke Sasaki as Tetsuo Tosu, an Agatha Christie fan and family man who kills a gangster
Whatever production she is in, Nicola Walker has a way of owning it. Whomever the character, Nicola Walker seems ultimately to play Nicola Walker: a watertight cornering of the market.
Walker’s being Walker is a Good Thing, because she effortlessly carries a show. She can also do this by breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience directly, establishing an intimate connection whether we feel comfortable about it or not, as in Annika (BBC First).
Leading a team from the newly assembled (and, strictly, slightly misnamed) Glasgow-based Marine Homicide Unit of the Scottish police force, Detective Inspector Annika Strandhed is stranded in more ways than one: socially awkward and with a sense of humour so dry it could mop up the River Clyde, she is also a single mother who feels especially vulnerable where rebellious teenage daughter Morgan (Silvie Furneaux) is concerned.
Her philosophical asides to camera are often swathed in sombre cultural terms borrowed from her native Norway; nevertheless, the audience makes a better confessor for her insecurities than most of her unit, who, other than professionally, don’t understand her.
That unit also features Katie Leung as Blair Ferguson, its designated hacker and technology expert; and blunt leading diver Michael McAndrews (Jamie Sives), who, as Annika’s former beau, is in for some unsuspected personal tumult in this six-part second series.
The action features some gruesome finds, suggesting the Scots are inventive when it comes to offing those they find offensive. During her Scottish sojourn, Annika and her team retrieve from lochs, coasts, reservoirs and rivers bodies defiled by harpoon or propeller, and one restrained in a cage. So maybe some of that Norse gloom is fitting after all.
Deadly sins
Reading Agatha Christie confers many benefits. The novels of the “Queen of Crime”, beyond being merely entertaining, can double as how-to blueprints for anyone planning a criminal enterprise of their own – as Christie fan and aspiring fiction writer Tetsuo Tosu (Kuranosuke Sasaki) finds in My Home Hero (Disney+).
Inconspicuous Tokyo office worker Tetsuo is devoted to wife Kasen (Tae Kimura) and student daughter Reika (Asuka Saito). Thanks to the latter’s poor choice of boyfriend, their lives are abruptly upended.
Reika’s squeeze is violent thug Nobuto (Shuichiro Naito), who threatens to kill her. He’s a well-connected junior yakuza, but unexpectedly meets his lethal match in Tetsuo.
Drama’s archetypal “little man”, once humiliated, discovers some unsuspected personal courage – and in an instant becomes a killer, although Tetsuo is as horrified by that idea as he is at having done the gory deed.
Saying good riddance to Nobuto is just the start of the family’s problems, which gives this offhandedly comic, deadpan 10-part series its legs.
Disposing of the body of the yakuza is a taxing, grimly funny task, but beyond the initial crime comes the real dilemma: after all this, how can Tosu family normality ever be restored?
Will they live ever after as fugitives? How radically might their lives change?
In the meantime, Tetsuo must outwit another young gangster who knows he killed his fellow criminal but can’t prove it, even after kidnapping and torturing Tetsuo. What happens next is a plot twist that even Christie herself might not have envisaged.
The anime version of My Home Hero, broadcast as recently as April, garnered mixed reviews. Perhaps it required the live-action intervention of the outstanding Sasaki as Tetsuo to make the hero’s impossible choices relatable. In the transformation from grey office drone to action man in a morally grey area is a hero born.
