Gary McGhee

Totally brilliant. The story-lines, characterisations and acting are excellent, and the setting is sumptuous Sicily. It is very Italian of course and also very touching, moving and funny and although the episodes are 2 hours long each, it flys by. It is darker than I was anticipating, complex and quite heavy on the bodycount, but never gratuitous or dull. Highly Recommended.

The first season is great. An intriguing premise, original, engaging fast-paced and believable. The 2nd season starts OK but seriously loses its way half-way and the 3rd season is rushed, muddled, nonsensical and implausible. It's as if the writers couldn't be bothered to make it work or make the coincidences and plot-lines convincing. The acid attack terrorists would have been arrested and nipped in the bud by real anti-terror operatives for instance. The convoluted motivations and machinations that were supposed to account for why they weren't, were just not plausible. The idea that the woman buying the restaurant in Moscow suddenly becomes a secret agent trusted by the deputy Prime minister is risible. The Russian agent in Norway being written as a lesbian with a pregnant girlfriend creating a Gay Rights group smacked of shoe-horning in a politically correct storyline. It jarred badly with the stereotyped representation of Russian Intelligence as evil, brutal and incompetent, which in itself is lazy characterization. Too much that we were led to believe was important was left hanging in the air at the end, which is a post-modern trendy trope in fiction these days, which makes a virtue out of rendering the whole thing pointless and meaningless and just leaves the viewer confused and feeling cheated. Why did the central intelligence officer blow his brains out and where did his wife disappear to with her daughter and would she have run in the first place? Where the hell would she go? The final nail in the plausibility coffin was Jesper becoming the mainman eco-terrorist at the end, able to engineer black-outs in all major cities. Yeah, right. Such a shame that a promising series nose-dived so spectacularly badly the longer it went on.