Netflix & quill Drama
Vigil: Suranne Jones’s classy new drama is Sunday night TV at its best
This multilayered murder mystery set on a nuclear submarine takes the usual police procedural beats and gives them a new lease of life
Joel Golby
Sat 28 Aug 2021 10.00 BST
There are three things we, as a nation, love and adore: bank holiday weekends, multilayered murder mysteries being solved by someone who keeps having flashbacks to that one time they had trauma, and Suranne Jones being class. The BBC knows this, which is why it’s putting out the first two episodes of Vigil (Sunday 29 and Monday 30 August, 9pm, BBC One) – a multilayered murder mystery featuring Suranne Jones being class – on this, the woozy long weekend that heralds the end of summer. Put the grill away and apply aloe to that welt of sunburn: Suranne is here, and – what’s that? Drop to knees, inspect ground, shine torch on ill-lit corner. Yep, just as I thought: that’s blood. Captain, this just became a murder investigation.
To HMS Vigil, then, a fictional vanguard submarine patrolling the cool Scottish waters west of Glasgow, and one loaded with enough nuclear firepower to “kill everyone”. Only one person is dead for now, though, and that’s why Suranne is here, to investigate how a crew member died on duty. The only catch is: if we turn off nuclear submarines for even one second Russia will have a field day, so she has to be winched in via helicopter and floated out on a raft once she’s discovered the killer. We have just been thrust into a spiky little chess game: the calm logic of the police versus the immovable hierarchy of the navy; the temptation of doing the investigation by the book versus the irresistible lure of the truth . . .