Martyn Forster

Underwhelming to put it politely. The incredible plot of the first two programmes in 2023 convinced me never to watch silent witness again.

Not to everyone's taste, and warnings about language and brutality are well earned. That said this series deserves a second look because the detail is mesmerising as it is shocking. This drama is as close as any of us will get to serving on a Victorian whaler above the Arctic Circle. Drax was wonderfully evil. Its every man for himself.

It was slow, sanitised, disjointed and marred by the poor script. It was, therefore, boring and a trivial treatment of an historically important topic. The costumes were not good enough to compensate for the above.