Prey

Cop Marcus Farrow (John Simm) is on the run, wrongly accused of killing his estranged wife Abi and younger son Max.  We’re back in well-trodden man-on-run territory here with all the TWNHs usual to the genre.  It starts off promisingly enough, with Simm regaining consciousness having landed upside-down in a road accident and escaping custody.  Flash back to 3 days earlier, and he and Heather Peace are very good as the parted couple feeling their way through post-relationship arrangements with very different feelings.  Reliable Craig Parkinson also turns up as Sean Devlin, an (initially) sympathetic fellow cop and friend of Marcus.  When Marcus turns up at his family home to find Abi stabbed and dying, however, things spiral out of control in more ways than one.

First, we are expected to believe that Marcus, a trained policeman, fails to call an ambulance for his fatally-wounded wife, having left his mobile phone in the car.  He later blames shock, which presumably also blocks out his memory of having a landline.  Shock must also account for his lack of concern for his two young sons, since he staggers to a ditch at the bottom of the garden and wallows in it, rather than wondering whether his children are ok and whether his wife’s killer might still be in the house.

Then there is the unsympathetic cop Reinhardt (Rosie Cavaliero), stalking her ex-partner’s new family and immediately hostile to Marcus when he is brought into the station.  Forget sympathy for a colleague, or questioning him as a witness first and foremost; forget good-cop, bad-cop even, since Benedict Wong as her colleague remains largely silent; no, Reinhardt is frozen-faced and interrogates Marcus as though he is the culprit, because there was no sign of a break-in and he was covered in blood.  The fact that he had keys to the house, that the victim could have let in the killer and that he tried to save his bleeding wife and so was obviously bloodied don’t seem to figure in Reinhardt’s logic.  She informs Marcus that his younger son was also found dead in the house, but that his elder son is safe with grandparents, but no explanation is given beyond this and no questions are asked.

This leads us to the escape, and more disbelief as a trained driver transporting prisoners is distracted by the ruckus between Marcus and another man in custody and manages to cause a spectacular crash.  Having escaped, with a biro embedded in his shoulder (no, we don’t believe it would be strong enough either), Marcus embarks on a fairly woolly quest to find the man he thinks is responsible for the killings (an informant on an old case who made an unsubtle threat to his family in a pub).  Hereby hangs another TWNH, since the prisoner in the van and another man in the above-mentioned pub have already heard of Marcus as ‘that cop who killed his own kid’.  So the crime was committed, he was arrested, charged and escaped and the case made the papers all in a couple of days?  And if so, why is he able to run around in his local area undetected, with his ‘disguise’ consisting of a stolen hoodie?  (The latter was stolen from a washing line, so his turning green and muscular when angry wasn’t out of the question either.)

Finally, when in the house of the suspected killer, he tries to call his surviving son, who believes he killed his mother, and then his boss, who doesn’t seem to have spoken up for his previous good character at all.  Who should arrive at this unlikely location but Sean, attempting to destroy the floppy disks which are evidence of the crime he and Marcus were originally investigating?  Cue a fight, in which the injured, slight-framed Marcus overcomes gangly Sean and escapes to fight another two episodes. ‘Line of Duty’ this isn’t, not least because unless they’re going into fugue-state territory, we know Marcus isn’t guilty, and while the former had some implausibles, this is simply absurd.