On every weekday evening last week at 9pm on BBC Channel One there was the showing of the second drama in the series Criminal Justice which I delayed watching until this weekend using the i player. The first series was BAFTA award wining and although this series was a different story with different actors I quickly understood why so much critically acclaim had been given. I have not previously experienced such an intense in depth and complex portrayal of human behaviour relationships over a five hour period. It was at times unwatchable yet I could not, and did not, want to stop doing so.
Throughout the outcome was uncertain although the tone was such that the audience became prepared for something which left one unhappy and angry. While the writers were unequivocally hostile to the male dominated Criminal Justice system where tribal relationships and prejudices dominated, the main target appeared to be a system which parted good parenting mothers from their children. In this respect the programme was fundamentally flawed because too often children have been kept with damaged and dangerous mothers as well as with damaged and dangerous men, accepting that the record of fostering and the residential care system in the UK is also open to serious and justified criticism. However there is a difference between well trained and experienced people making the wrong decisions and situations where incompetence, prejudice and failure to provide appropriate resources prevails.
In this drama an abused and overpowered woman kills her husband in a flash of despair and the whole weight of the criminal justice system turns on her because her husband was a highly regarded prosecutor and she had become isolated without friends or allies. There is no doubt that had not a solicitor with the qualifications to represent in court as junior council to a brilliant young female barrister then the woman would have been convicted of murder and the child removed from her after its birth and placed into care and possibly for adoption. This is the everyday reality and happens with considerable justification rather because of prejudice although resource issues will be an important factor.
In fairness there were two men in the programme who could and eventually did make a difference to the outcome, a police detective inspector who eventually provided information which was crucial to getting the woman to say in public what had been happening to her, although despite having major doubts he was [previously pushed by a junior colleague to lying to the court to protect him and it was the colleague also a police detective, who decided to admit the truth and raise doubts about an important aspect of her husband’s evidence. The senior officer was interesting because he had worked for five years catching paedophiles with a certainty until one case had created doubts that all was not as clear cut as he had believed. He had significant doubts in this case and redeemed himself towards the end.
The other male was the family GP and family friend and someone who had crucial evidence which he failed to come forward not because medical ethics but because doing so threatened his professional future, his marriage and family life. When push comes to shove most people will protect themselves and their interests. For some people only society through its institutions and the employment of good people can provide protection and care and when that fails the society in question is doomed, and rightly so. Fortunately, largely under the influence of his wife he came forward with the truth.
The brilliance of this drama is that is shows that individuals are more complex than usually portrayed, behaviour which can appear reprehensible can arise from good motives and just how difficult it is for outsiders called into domestic tragedies to determine the true nature of what is happening and risks and implications of the different courses of action that are possible,
Early on in the first of the five episodes we learn that the couple live in a white, minimalist, obsessively clean and tidy home, that the husband is a top notch highly regarded criminal prosecutor who is training to run in the London Marathon for charity and that the wife is feeling particularly guilty about a secret outing with the suggestion that she has had a lover. The husband appears to have an unusually close almost conspirator relationship with his teenage daughter and the mother also has a close and warm relationship with her child. Thus what I suspected was a red herring, the possibility that father was sexually assaulting his daughter was introduced. We know that at night the girl listened to audio books when in bed but she also listened and sometimes observed what was happening in the bedroom of her parents and had done so on the evening when her mother left the marital bed and went into the kitchen and selected one of three kitchen knives and admits to having inserted and left the knife in her husband and then left the house wearing a coat, disposing a jar of Vaseline in a street waste bin before sitting on a bench and then going to the hospital where she is apprehended by the police and taken to a police station.
It is the teenage daughter who finds her stabbed father and removes the knife and then attempts to stem the blood flow while talking to 999. This fact understandably governs the attitude of the police when they are immediately required to investigate and determine if a crime was committed and if so who committed it. The debate posed in the series is whether it is also the responsibility of the police is also ask why and if they obtain answers which mitigate the crime, to then provide that information to those employed to protect the interests of the accused of being crime perpetrators. Such programmes usually forget to mention that the prosecuting authorities do have discretion about whether most crimes should come to court. Many offences which could be tried in the criminal courts are never investigated because they are not reported. Is a bank clerk who steals £10000 from his employer more likely to be prosecuted than one who defrauds several millions? The managers of the same bank may take a different view depending on the individual and the circumstances and whether the loss has become or is likely to become public or not.
The police only investigate a proportion of reported offences and they have powers to caution if the offence is admitted in a whole range of situations. The state, the Crown Prosecution service has the power to decide that it is not in the public interest to prosecute and this covers a range of situations and offences. The nature of the charges is also a matter for the police and for the Crown Prosecution service. Then there is question of the decision to remand in custody or bail, including placement in a bail hostel and whether the case is tried at a Magistrates or Crown Court and whether there is a Jury or not. Is the individual represented by a solicitor or barrister in court Obviously in a single drama most of these issues cannot be covered which is where the five episode series has the advantage, especially if shown on a daily basis. The brilliance of the drama is that is made no attempt to simplify and for every position or issue provided different perspectives, explanations and possible outcomes.
I will not attempt to cover all the issues raised or present the chronology of the series but concentrate on some aspects which were of interest to me. The main one as already mentioned was the question of should someone who admits to manslaughter or murder or a crime not directly related to children, be allowed to be with and keep a child born while in custody and during a long period of prison. Is it right for the child which must be the first consideration. If the woman commits a murder in cold blood, has planned and calculated the crime and attempted to cover up, should she ever be allowed to have the care of any children again, especially her own. Even if the murder was calculated was it provoked. There world has become familiar with the case where a man imprisoned his own daughter for sexual reasons for over a decade and then kept the children he had fathered also imprisoned. She may well have known that only by a murderous act could she obtain freedom for her children let alone herself and that this might have taken time and planning? Should this be judged different from an act of the moment, the crime of passion?
In the film the woman was kept in custody throughout most of her pregnancy and the for a time after the birth of the child so there had been plenty of time to bring forward the trial or arrange for the provision of a place in a mother and baby unit within the prison system as well as to investigate the long term position for any baby and any other children. Only in relation to her daughter and newborn child was the situation appropriately investigated and prepared for and something of the background study and collective consideration portrayed on screen. Prejudice and personal inclinations can and probably always do have a part in decisions made by one individual about another but should and are usually countered by appropriate training and supervision and management. The film attempted to show this is so.
The second issue was how the mother was put into the position of making statements and admissions without the presence of a solicitor to protect her interests. She was tricked by a particular police officer, colluding with others with the promise of being able to see her daughter who was also at the police station as rightly the police had to first establish who had knifed the father and it could have been the daughter if she was being sexually assaulted and the mother may have been trying to cover up for her. I was reminded that in the Almodovar film Volver the father is killed by the step daughter resisting rape, and mother then buries the body and the crime is successfully covered up and the issue while precipitating the film story is not the main subject. In this series the male detective wants to ensure someone who he believes committed calculated murder, abandoning her teenage daughter to deal with the situation, a situation where had the daughter left the knife in the body, where in some instances because of legal and social representations a custodial sentence is not given and the individual is allowed to carry on as before there could have been a greater chance of survival, will stretch the position of every police officer and face teh temptation of wanting and being able to bend the rules.. A brilliant aspect of the drama was to show that the killed man had more common with the police detective than the detective was able to see let alone admit to, although this became something which his wife came to recognise.
The third aspect was the behaviour of the Family GP who provided a home for the teenage daughter when the disaster first occurred but then insisted that the girl be allowed to remain in the home long after her presence seriously began to affect their own daughter and their marriage, yet rejected foster caring the baby which he knew was his own son. The acting of the daughter, GP and his wife and their daughter was of a very high quality and the dialogue of the highest order in terms of authenticity and credibility. It was not just that individuals were unwilling to talk about their true thoughts and feelings because of the potential consequences but they were unable to understand or express themselves such is the nature of shock and the trauma, T S Elliot I believe wrote the line in one of his plays that human being cannot stand or cope with too much reality to which he could and probably did add, especially of themselves. Contemporary society needs people to function without continuous analysis and introspection. Faced with helping a friend and patient and then the woman who was bearing his child after an impulsive sexual act which she had initiated he was torn between conflicting emotions and interests. A parallel drama could have been created out of his story and that of his wife and teen daughter and the police and the authorities could have become just as judgemental about his behaviour as they did about the wife who killed her husband. His wife on insisting that he volunteer the truth to the court and the husband in doing so showed great courage which I suspect in practice is not always the position. The consequences would be dramatic and traumatic for all three members of the family and of no less a scale than on the wife and daughter who were the main subjects of the series.
The outcome? It emerged that the husband and used his daughter to help in the control of his wife although there was no attempt to explain why he had behaved in this way and which was a major flaw in the production. Who speaks for this man? The clerk in chambers attempted to do so, a man with his own past whose parents had saved him from holocaust and who had come to love his boys, as he called the barristers in the Chamber and the deceased in particular. There was the hint that the relationship may have had a different basis given that the husband did not appear to want normal intercourse but one object was to emphasise the many possibilities or every action. The defence, understandably seized upon the fact that the clerk had given the barrister a large amount of cash and that the a barrister on his run had stopped to talk to a group of youngsters who were under surveillance of the drug squad and that the barrister had been found with a £20 pound note in his possession from one of the young men. The explanation is that the clerk had drawn the money as sponsorship for the a barrister undertaking the marathon to raise money for a cancer charity of which the Clerk was suffering. The minor drug pusher had given the money as sponsorship having come to know the barrister from his training runs. The police had made sure the defence had the basics of this information in order to mud sling and therefore raise doubts about their defence just as the defence was able to reveal that the detective had lied to the court about the way the confession has been obtained without the presence of a lawyer. So all was not as it seemed. When the mother begins to talk in court about why she did what she did and did not attempt to explain why before and there is a reconciliation with her daughter after the revelation that she had originally intended to kill herself rather than her husband but everything had changed with the pregnancy and the birth of her second child the audience is led to believe that the outcome will be a good one.
Then the judge after the jury had found her not guilty of murder, a verdict with which he agreed, sentenced her to five years in jail towards the maximum of the scale which could have seen her released under supervision in the community. He was not only punishing her but the daughter who needed her mother and the recently born half brother. He limited the earliest day of release to two and half years, a year longer than the time when a mother is allowed to keep a child with her in prison. Although the woman had become a product of her husband’s needs and power, she had nevertheless killed him, she had left the daughter to cope in a situation where unintentionally the action of the daughter had contributed to her father’s death, she had given different answer to different people about the risk of injuring herself which in turn raised concerns for the future of the child The justice of the sentence was open to debate.
In the sixth defined episode of the 40400 hundred I felt the series had come of age and that however derivative its concept it was executed in excellent fashion and had been unpredictable whereas the previous one had. None of the three episodes of the second disk of season, however, came Criminal Justice nor did Sandra Bullock, as a creative disturbed and driven detective controlled by her past in the film Murder by Numbers. This writing could be called three degrees of detection seriousness, two of them criminal.
The third episode of the second disk of the second season of the 4400 (Life Interrupted) stands out because it while it features Tom and his son, Shaun, his young brother and girl friend, their parents, Tom’s ex wife and Homeland security agent Diana, it is not about the 4400 directly. Tom is at the 4400 headquarters for the funeral of Jordan Collier when he is called to the room when the body had been laying in state only to find that it had disappeared. How Jordan Collier came to die was the subject of the previous episode. When Tom returns to the home where he and his son live he is immediately struck by the warmth of his son and when he returns to the office of the 4400 investigation Unit he finds everything normal except the 4400 has not existed and he is welcomed back after being on sick leave after an underground operation where he had been caught, imprisoned and tortured, followed by rescue, a period in hospital and sick leave for recovery. He has little time to work out what has happened when the unit is called to the Collier centre which is the same building but now an arts centre, because of a suspect reported in the building. Jordan Collier is just not dead but the state governor although he does not appear in the episode which one suspects is a clue of some kind. In the chase around the building Tom is separated from his colleagues and thinks he has seen a man enter a room which unlike all the others in the building which have solid wood doors, has a round window through which he looks and cannot enter when he tries to do so. His colleagues enter and apprehend the suspect. The door had become like all the others and room bears no relationship with that Tom had seen although we the audience had only obtained a fleeing glimpse.
When Tom returns home he finds his family and friends have gathered for a return to work party. In addition to his son being the fun loving student, his cousin Shaun is there, his younger brother and his beautiful, intelligent wife, Alana, who we subsequently learn owns an art gallery in the city centre. We learn that Tom is on good relations with his ex wife and her second husband and has a satisfying life as part of a good middle America urban community. When he persists that this is all unreal to him, the same words used by his son when he came out of the coma, his partner Diana traps him into a situation where he is then taken off to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.
It is at this point his “wife“ admits that she too is a returnee who has no recollection of him or his life and is just as distressed and perplexed about her present situation which appears to be a parallel reality much explored in the Star Trek and Dr Who series. They agree to cooperate with the medical and other authorities so that Tom can return home and together they can work out what has happened to them. This appears to work and two establish a good relationship which over two years develops into a loving an close one and what had been the charade of their marriage becomes an important reality. At one point Tom returns to the building and enters the room with teh glass window in its door and finds a corpse laying on a medical type table at the centre, in a room reminiscent of the second concert hall at the Sage which is circular with several narrow balconies. However this room is dark and stark and there are showy individuals standing looking down and for some reason I think of The Way to the Stars, although I may have got the film title wrong. Just when he is about to uncover the body on the table the room shatters and he finds himself in the room which existed when he first entered and remained when he had returned. For several days and weeks subsequently he returns to the centre to keep watch on the door hoping the mystery of what had happened has been revealed but as the relationship with his “wife” develops and he has the warmth and strength of his family and work colleagues around him he and his wife accept their situation and the episode jumps eight further years as they renew their marriage vows and go off on a honeymoon with all their friends and family at the ceremony, including his son who has become a doctor. He is set to become the new regional director of the Homeland security unit.
It is at this point he returns to the centre and finds the room and is able to enter and to remove the cover from the face of the body on the table and discovers it is that of his wife. He learns that all that he has experienced over past decade has happened in an instant and was intended to provide him strength for the challenge of coping with the 4400 and their purpose in the years ahead and that the way to break out of the dimension is for both to accept that this is unreality and end what is in effect a prolonged dream. However because they can now control their experience they bring together their family and friends to announce they have decided to extend their trip which is something they had been wanting to do for sometime but wanted to say goodbye and as they do they eliminate the present reality person by person and local community and home. He returns to his office and find it is back to the time of the 4400 and the challenges which they pose. He has just missed a returnee whose form he recognises and runs after her not only to find that it is the woman who has been his wife for eight years in his mind but she knows who he is and they embrace and we believe he is to have the love and support in reality which those who had unlocked the powers of the 4400 said he needed to help fulfil their mission. However I could find no reference to his wife and the actress who played her in the Wikipedia notes on the episode.
This episode contrast with the previous two in which Richard‘s wife Lily turns to her former husband a lawyer, for help when Richard is taken into custody for his failure to register as a 4400 living in the community. This leads him to Jordan Collier who comes a calling, and begs the couple and their child to return. Jordan has revealed that prior to trying to stop Richard and his wife taking the child away from the centre he had been full of personal ambition, power and the wealth of the situation but although the child and threatened his life when he had touched Lily, he had been fundamentally changed and become focussed on the mission. He wanted them to come back and participate in the mission freely and he wanted contact with the child again because he believed his present life would be validated. This turns out to be so and Jordan become a grandfather/uncle in their life and that of the child. Everything continues to go well as the time of great reunion approaches when the returnees will assemble from all parts oft he world.
It is as this point that Maia has a prediction about Jordan who she sees on TV, he is to die. Diana and Tom first persuade their boss that it is important to try and intervene and then persuade Collier that he needs to take greater precautions and allow them to his help protect him and try and prevent what so far has been the inevitability of Maia’s predictions. In this respect they are supported by Shaun who argues that Jordan becoming a martyr would place the Mission in jeopardy and Jordan himself is ambivalent about what to do, agreeing that the unit and Tom and Diana can enter the 4400 complex centre and take control of security. They would still like the reunion postponed
Jordan decides to consult the child of Lily and Richard and while we do not immediately learn the outcome, Jordan believes that he should continue and that everything will work out well. For a time this also appears to be likely outcome as one major suspect is apprehended having come close to achieving the assassination. Then Jordan is shot from a vantage point outside the building where the main reunion ceremony is taking place, a flaw because in the real word this possibility would have been taken into account and he would have been moved to a position in the building where an external shooting could not occur. (Have you not noted the way Parliamentary building chambers are designed, The Houses of Commons and Lords, the Senate and Congress Houses and the UN building in New York. Although Shaun attempts to revive , Jordan, he is declared dead.
I suggest that no one is surprised that the body then disappears leaving the way open for a resurrection, reminding of Bobby Ewing in Dallas, nor is anyone surprised when we learn that the shootist, reminiscent of the shooting of President Kennedy also in Dallas, is none other than Tom’s son. This is not et tu Brutus but Judas.
The son and Shaun’s cousin have become increasingly aggressive towards the 4400, attacking everyone and everything associated with the returnees, especially Jordan and his chief assistant Shaun, with Kyle resentful and afraid of his ability to lose time and find himself transported from one situation into another and without memory of what has occurred in the intervening period.
Shaun also remains troubled as his commitment to the mission of the 4400 grows. He is challenged by a group of young misfits, drugs addicts, petty criminals surviving by voluntary hand outs and prostitution, living in the shadow of the city, in the first upside on teh disk, Suffer the children, a continuing problem in the Sates but which has been largely eliminated in the UK by in effect Government and police action supported by the establishment of refuges by independent bodies funded by voluntary contributions and government funds.
Shaun encounters one of these groups gate crashing a ceremony in which the guests are provided free food and he takes an interest in a young woman of similar age to himself and to her plight and those of her friends, donating food, blankets and medical supplies. Jordan warns against revealing his healing powers because to do so to one and all will seek help and it is not practical for him to heal everyone. However he responds to a call from the girl when her boyfriend appears to be a bad drugs trip and Shaun cures him with the consequence as Jordan predicted all the down and outs want his help. This leads to the girl being disillusioned with Shaun who has become her hero and potential saviour. He persuades her to enter the 4400 which does, we suspect not out of conviction but to get close to him. Unfortunately Jordan has been assassinated and Shaun has to take over the role of leader and becomes too busy with too great responsibilities to have a personal relationship and symbolically the doors to his office are closed to her as she approaches him having progressed within the 4400 process of enlightenment. The scene reminds when Corleone’s son becomes the Godfather.
The main focus of Suffer not Little Children is a returnee teacher accused of child abuse by some parents at her school because some of children have been changed dramatically for the good while others have not. She explains she has been able to recognise the untapped potential in many of the children, some creatively in playing a musical instrument, painting and sculpture with others in more traditional scholastic subjects but not all. One particular father and one pupil becomes very aggressive towards her and getting her removed from the school. When Tom and Diana investigate they are satisfied with the explanation of her power and she is returned to the school with protection but too late to prevent the most disturbed pupil from entering her class with a gun, not to kill in her but to persuade her to change him so his father will be proud The father has become the town failure the teacher explains that not everyone has untapped talent which can be immediately recognised and transformed this does not mean the boy will turn out like his father and does not find contentment through his work and relationships in the future. It is the father who persuades his son to hand the gun over and it is time for the teacher to move to an environment where her abilities will be appreciated and use to their potential.
So much of the second season second disk has been constructive and optimistic but there are warnings. The consequence of first husband assisting in getting Richard out of jail has led to problems with his second wife and to her first daughter overhearing and discovering that her first mother is alive and going in search and making contact. However when she has contact with her half sister there is a discordant note and later when she returns home she becomes seriously ill so the first husband makes contact with her mother when the danger is over for her visit in hospital, Do we detect jealousy and a child who requires the exclusive attention of her parents? There is also pressure on Diana and daughter Maia. The child continues to wrestle with her powers and wish to be normal while discovering that she is having further visionary predictions, Homeland Security subpoenas their employee to surrender the diary. Why did the baby tell Jordan he would be safe if he went ahead with the Reunion? One would like more answer and to know more those returnee who pass by only in one episode
All is revealed and settled in Murder by Numbers which is at times a harrowing film about a police detective played by Sandra Bullock who as the films progresses we learn married at sixteen to a man who became jealous and violent towards and when she decides to stand up to him and tells him she is leaving him for good he stabs her over a dozen times and dumps her body in the countryside alive but dying. Fortunately she is discovered and rescued and survives scarred in body and in mind towards men. She is asked to attend a parole hearing when her husband is being considered for release but her response is to dent the situation and her past. However it dominates her life in other ways, as she engages in casual sex with her male detective colleagues appointed her partners but then falls out with them, picking fights so they reject her and refuse to continue working with her. This is both an emotional and physical response to what happened to her, unwilling to show her scarred body.
This is the background to a horrific murder of a young woman which has the hallmarks of being a random unplanned killing and then the work of the high school janitor who conveniently commits suicide as the police close in. However Sandra is not convinced and suspects the involvement of two student who pretend not to be friends within the school environment but who meet, debate and plot at a disused house on a cliff top.
The first of the two young men is the intellectual with a perverted interest in forensic science so her talks of undertaking the perfect murder in which all clues to the perpetrator are removed and someone else is framed leaving the usual links which killers who commit crimes of the moment will leave of themselves. However he is a loner who thinks but does not act. His conspirator is the doer, the rich kid who has everything including the means to buy what is needed to create a sterile environment to hold and kill the victim, to plant the clues on someone else.
It is not just good enough for the two to commit a crime which remains unsolved. They must be involved with the detection leading to the identification and conviction of the chosen perpetrator. To achieve the this they leave the footprint of a particular expensive designer trainers which the investigatory team are able to trace to the super rich kid student. He demonstrates that it was stolen and has been reported to the college and to the police. The trainers are found in the possession of the janitor who is shown to be the supplier of drugs to the school.
But the first mistake is that at the scene of thee crime the thinker throws up having had a caviar starter at the expensive restaurant in the area, and which the detectives are able to trace that the student had eaten there on a regular basis and on the night in question. Assuming this was practical, the young man given the brilliance and extent of knowledge about forensic science would not have left his throwing up in the vicinity of the site. This is a plot flaw although by then both perpetrators had become emotionally caught up by what they had done.
This young man is helped by a female student in exchange for help with one of her subjects and this leads to inviting her to see his collection fo rare and beautiful flowering plants. She is impressed and they kiss, a kiss observed by ‘the doer’ who then not only seduces the girl but films the experience to reveal to his friend that the girl is not a worthy companion. The two young men are not true friends as such but comrades in the deadly enterprise. The incident with the girl builds a wedge between the two and when they meet up which was against their detailed plan Sandra is there observing with her camera to hand and this reignites the willingness of her latest detective partner and their boss to pursue what had become an open and shut case. Gradually the net closes and the two men fall out, the doer trying to blame the other and then force him into a one sided suicide pact. The thinker works this out in time just as Sandra arrives, having radioed in she has located the pair she pursues them without waiting for her colleagues to arrive. This fits into her personality and leads nearly to her death in a melodramatic last sequence in which she and the doer wrestle on a veranda at the Cliff edge and eventually he does crashed to his doom and she is saved by the thinker who then pleads for his life claiming that the other committed the murder and that he had saved her life should be taken into consideration. She nearly buys this but then in a second dodgy moment she released that the when the doer had tried to strangle her he had left a mark from his signet ring on her neck and the murder victim did not have such a mark. The is unbelievable crass on the assumption that if the audience had gone along with the premise of the plot they would not yell out that given the care taken with the crime he would have removed the ring before strangling the girl. This however enables her to trick the surviving murderer into admitting his guilt and Sandra then observes that whatever one does or does not do in life one should and needs to face the consequences and no one will be able t run away indefinitely. (A very questionable statement indeed) This leads Sandra to accepting she has also to face what happened to her and to attend the parole hearing. She has found the redemption she had been locking for the sense of guilt and horror experienced. It is therefore a fundamentally flawed albeit clever film made above average by the performance of Sandra Bullock.
The film is based on a true story unlike Criminal Justice and the 4400.Nathan Freudenthal Leopold and Richard Albert Loeb were two wealthy Chicago University students who murdered 14 year old Bobby Franks in 1924. The murder was an attempt to commit the perfect crime. One had written to the other A superman is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from he ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do. The two students 18 and 19 years of age had planned to become lawyers. They were saved from execution by a brilliant lawyers who argued before the judge who heard the case that it was not fair to hand a boy because he had taken seriously the writings of Nietzsche and other philosophers taught to him at University. Only one of then was to survive prison, being released after 33 years, emigrating, marrying and working after having taught himself to speak 27 languages nearly one a year during the prison experience. The other died in prison killed by another prisoner. The true life story has been covered several times in film, with Compulsion the most well known and in literature.
Throughout the outcome was uncertain although the tone was such that the audience became prepared for something which left one unhappy and angry. While the writers were unequivocally hostile to the male dominated Criminal Justice system where tribal relationships and prejudices dominated, the main target appeared to be a system which parted good parenting mothers from their children. In this respect the programme was fundamentally flawed because too often children have been kept with damaged and dangerous mothers as well as with damaged and dangerous men, accepting that the record of fostering and the residential care system in the UK is also open to serious and justified criticism. However there is a difference between well trained and experienced people making the wrong decisions and situations where incompetence, prejudice and failure to provide appropriate resources prevails.
In this drama an abused and overpowered woman kills her husband in a flash of despair and the whole weight of the criminal justice system turns on her because her husband was a highly regarded prosecutor and she had become isolated without friends or allies. There is no doubt that had not a solicitor with the qualifications to represent in court as junior council to a brilliant young female barrister then the woman would have been convicted of murder and the child removed from her after its birth and placed into care and possibly for adoption. This is the everyday reality and happens with considerable justification rather because of prejudice although resource issues will be an important factor.
In fairness there were two men in the programme who could and eventually did make a difference to the outcome, a police detective inspector who eventually provided information which was crucial to getting the woman to say in public what had been happening to her, although despite having major doubts he was [previously pushed by a junior colleague to lying to the court to protect him and it was the colleague also a police detective, who decided to admit the truth and raise doubts about an important aspect of her husband’s evidence. The senior officer was interesting because he had worked for five years catching paedophiles with a certainty until one case had created doubts that all was not as clear cut as he had believed. He had significant doubts in this case and redeemed himself towards the end.
The other male was the family GP and family friend and someone who had crucial evidence which he failed to come forward not because medical ethics but because doing so threatened his professional future, his marriage and family life. When push comes to shove most people will protect themselves and their interests. For some people only society through its institutions and the employment of good people can provide protection and care and when that fails the society in question is doomed, and rightly so. Fortunately, largely under the influence of his wife he came forward with the truth.
The brilliance of this drama is that is shows that individuals are more complex than usually portrayed, behaviour which can appear reprehensible can arise from good motives and just how difficult it is for outsiders called into domestic tragedies to determine the true nature of what is happening and risks and implications of the different courses of action that are possible,
Early on in the first of the five episodes we learn that the couple live in a white, minimalist, obsessively clean and tidy home, that the husband is a top notch highly regarded criminal prosecutor who is training to run in the London Marathon for charity and that the wife is feeling particularly guilty about a secret outing with the suggestion that she has had a lover. The husband appears to have an unusually close almost conspirator relationship with his teenage daughter and the mother also has a close and warm relationship with her child. Thus what I suspected was a red herring, the possibility that father was sexually assaulting his daughter was introduced. We know that at night the girl listened to audio books when in bed but she also listened and sometimes observed what was happening in the bedroom of her parents and had done so on the evening when her mother left the marital bed and went into the kitchen and selected one of three kitchen knives and admits to having inserted and left the knife in her husband and then left the house wearing a coat, disposing a jar of Vaseline in a street waste bin before sitting on a bench and then going to the hospital where she is apprehended by the police and taken to a police station.
It is the teenage daughter who finds her stabbed father and removes the knife and then attempts to stem the blood flow while talking to 999. This fact understandably governs the attitude of the police when they are immediately required to investigate and determine if a crime was committed and if so who committed it. The debate posed in the series is whether it is also the responsibility of the police is also ask why and if they obtain answers which mitigate the crime, to then provide that information to those employed to protect the interests of the accused of being crime perpetrators. Such programmes usually forget to mention that the prosecuting authorities do have discretion about whether most crimes should come to court. Many offences which could be tried in the criminal courts are never investigated because they are not reported. Is a bank clerk who steals £10000 from his employer more likely to be prosecuted than one who defrauds several millions? The managers of the same bank may take a different view depending on the individual and the circumstances and whether the loss has become or is likely to become public or not.
The police only investigate a proportion of reported offences and they have powers to caution if the offence is admitted in a whole range of situations. The state, the Crown Prosecution service has the power to decide that it is not in the public interest to prosecute and this covers a range of situations and offences. The nature of the charges is also a matter for the police and for the Crown Prosecution service. Then there is question of the decision to remand in custody or bail, including placement in a bail hostel and whether the case is tried at a Magistrates or Crown Court and whether there is a Jury or not. Is the individual represented by a solicitor or barrister in court Obviously in a single drama most of these issues cannot be covered which is where the five episode series has the advantage, especially if shown on a daily basis. The brilliance of the drama is that is made no attempt to simplify and for every position or issue provided different perspectives, explanations and possible outcomes.
I will not attempt to cover all the issues raised or present the chronology of the series but concentrate on some aspects which were of interest to me. The main one as already mentioned was the question of should someone who admits to manslaughter or murder or a crime not directly related to children, be allowed to be with and keep a child born while in custody and during a long period of prison. Is it right for the child which must be the first consideration. If the woman commits a murder in cold blood, has planned and calculated the crime and attempted to cover up, should she ever be allowed to have the care of any children again, especially her own. Even if the murder was calculated was it provoked. There world has become familiar with the case where a man imprisoned his own daughter for sexual reasons for over a decade and then kept the children he had fathered also imprisoned. She may well have known that only by a murderous act could she obtain freedom for her children let alone herself and that this might have taken time and planning? Should this be judged different from an act of the moment, the crime of passion?
In the film the woman was kept in custody throughout most of her pregnancy and the for a time after the birth of the child so there had been plenty of time to bring forward the trial or arrange for the provision of a place in a mother and baby unit within the prison system as well as to investigate the long term position for any baby and any other children. Only in relation to her daughter and newborn child was the situation appropriately investigated and prepared for and something of the background study and collective consideration portrayed on screen. Prejudice and personal inclinations can and probably always do have a part in decisions made by one individual about another but should and are usually countered by appropriate training and supervision and management. The film attempted to show this is so.
The second issue was how the mother was put into the position of making statements and admissions without the presence of a solicitor to protect her interests. She was tricked by a particular police officer, colluding with others with the promise of being able to see her daughter who was also at the police station as rightly the police had to first establish who had knifed the father and it could have been the daughter if she was being sexually assaulted and the mother may have been trying to cover up for her. I was reminded that in the Almodovar film Volver the father is killed by the step daughter resisting rape, and mother then buries the body and the crime is successfully covered up and the issue while precipitating the film story is not the main subject. In this series the male detective wants to ensure someone who he believes committed calculated murder, abandoning her teenage daughter to deal with the situation, a situation where had the daughter left the knife in the body, where in some instances because of legal and social representations a custodial sentence is not given and the individual is allowed to carry on as before there could have been a greater chance of survival, will stretch the position of every police officer and face teh temptation of wanting and being able to bend the rules.. A brilliant aspect of the drama was to show that the killed man had more common with the police detective than the detective was able to see let alone admit to, although this became something which his wife came to recognise.
The third aspect was the behaviour of the Family GP who provided a home for the teenage daughter when the disaster first occurred but then insisted that the girl be allowed to remain in the home long after her presence seriously began to affect their own daughter and their marriage, yet rejected foster caring the baby which he knew was his own son. The acting of the daughter, GP and his wife and their daughter was of a very high quality and the dialogue of the highest order in terms of authenticity and credibility. It was not just that individuals were unwilling to talk about their true thoughts and feelings because of the potential consequences but they were unable to understand or express themselves such is the nature of shock and the trauma, T S Elliot I believe wrote the line in one of his plays that human being cannot stand or cope with too much reality to which he could and probably did add, especially of themselves. Contemporary society needs people to function without continuous analysis and introspection. Faced with helping a friend and patient and then the woman who was bearing his child after an impulsive sexual act which she had initiated he was torn between conflicting emotions and interests. A parallel drama could have been created out of his story and that of his wife and teen daughter and the police and the authorities could have become just as judgemental about his behaviour as they did about the wife who killed her husband. His wife on insisting that he volunteer the truth to the court and the husband in doing so showed great courage which I suspect in practice is not always the position. The consequences would be dramatic and traumatic for all three members of the family and of no less a scale than on the wife and daughter who were the main subjects of the series.
The outcome? It emerged that the husband and used his daughter to help in the control of his wife although there was no attempt to explain why he had behaved in this way and which was a major flaw in the production. Who speaks for this man? The clerk in chambers attempted to do so, a man with his own past whose parents had saved him from holocaust and who had come to love his boys, as he called the barristers in the Chamber and the deceased in particular. There was the hint that the relationship may have had a different basis given that the husband did not appear to want normal intercourse but one object was to emphasise the many possibilities or every action. The defence, understandably seized upon the fact that the clerk had given the barrister a large amount of cash and that the a barrister on his run had stopped to talk to a group of youngsters who were under surveillance of the drug squad and that the barrister had been found with a £20 pound note in his possession from one of the young men. The explanation is that the clerk had drawn the money as sponsorship for the a barrister undertaking the marathon to raise money for a cancer charity of which the Clerk was suffering. The minor drug pusher had given the money as sponsorship having come to know the barrister from his training runs. The police had made sure the defence had the basics of this information in order to mud sling and therefore raise doubts about their defence just as the defence was able to reveal that the detective had lied to the court about the way the confession has been obtained without the presence of a lawyer. So all was not as it seemed. When the mother begins to talk in court about why she did what she did and did not attempt to explain why before and there is a reconciliation with her daughter after the revelation that she had originally intended to kill herself rather than her husband but everything had changed with the pregnancy and the birth of her second child the audience is led to believe that the outcome will be a good one.
Then the judge after the jury had found her not guilty of murder, a verdict with which he agreed, sentenced her to five years in jail towards the maximum of the scale which could have seen her released under supervision in the community. He was not only punishing her but the daughter who needed her mother and the recently born half brother. He limited the earliest day of release to two and half years, a year longer than the time when a mother is allowed to keep a child with her in prison. Although the woman had become a product of her husband’s needs and power, she had nevertheless killed him, she had left the daughter to cope in a situation where unintentionally the action of the daughter had contributed to her father’s death, she had given different answer to different people about the risk of injuring herself which in turn raised concerns for the future of the child The justice of the sentence was open to debate.
In the sixth defined episode of the 40400 hundred I felt the series had come of age and that however derivative its concept it was executed in excellent fashion and had been unpredictable whereas the previous one had. None of the three episodes of the second disk of season, however, came Criminal Justice nor did Sandra Bullock, as a creative disturbed and driven detective controlled by her past in the film Murder by Numbers. This writing could be called three degrees of detection seriousness, two of them criminal.
The third episode of the second disk of the second season of the 4400 (Life Interrupted) stands out because it while it features Tom and his son, Shaun, his young brother and girl friend, their parents, Tom’s ex wife and Homeland security agent Diana, it is not about the 4400 directly. Tom is at the 4400 headquarters for the funeral of Jordan Collier when he is called to the room when the body had been laying in state only to find that it had disappeared. How Jordan Collier came to die was the subject of the previous episode. When Tom returns to the home where he and his son live he is immediately struck by the warmth of his son and when he returns to the office of the 4400 investigation Unit he finds everything normal except the 4400 has not existed and he is welcomed back after being on sick leave after an underground operation where he had been caught, imprisoned and tortured, followed by rescue, a period in hospital and sick leave for recovery. He has little time to work out what has happened when the unit is called to the Collier centre which is the same building but now an arts centre, because of a suspect reported in the building. Jordan Collier is just not dead but the state governor although he does not appear in the episode which one suspects is a clue of some kind. In the chase around the building Tom is separated from his colleagues and thinks he has seen a man enter a room which unlike all the others in the building which have solid wood doors, has a round window through which he looks and cannot enter when he tries to do so. His colleagues enter and apprehend the suspect. The door had become like all the others and room bears no relationship with that Tom had seen although we the audience had only obtained a fleeing glimpse.
When Tom returns home he finds his family and friends have gathered for a return to work party. In addition to his son being the fun loving student, his cousin Shaun is there, his younger brother and his beautiful, intelligent wife, Alana, who we subsequently learn owns an art gallery in the city centre. We learn that Tom is on good relations with his ex wife and her second husband and has a satisfying life as part of a good middle America urban community. When he persists that this is all unreal to him, the same words used by his son when he came out of the coma, his partner Diana traps him into a situation where he is then taken off to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.
It is at this point his “wife“ admits that she too is a returnee who has no recollection of him or his life and is just as distressed and perplexed about her present situation which appears to be a parallel reality much explored in the Star Trek and Dr Who series. They agree to cooperate with the medical and other authorities so that Tom can return home and together they can work out what has happened to them. This appears to work and two establish a good relationship which over two years develops into a loving an close one and what had been the charade of their marriage becomes an important reality. At one point Tom returns to the building and enters the room with teh glass window in its door and finds a corpse laying on a medical type table at the centre, in a room reminiscent of the second concert hall at the Sage which is circular with several narrow balconies. However this room is dark and stark and there are showy individuals standing looking down and for some reason I think of The Way to the Stars, although I may have got the film title wrong. Just when he is about to uncover the body on the table the room shatters and he finds himself in the room which existed when he first entered and remained when he had returned. For several days and weeks subsequently he returns to the centre to keep watch on the door hoping the mystery of what had happened has been revealed but as the relationship with his “wife” develops and he has the warmth and strength of his family and work colleagues around him he and his wife accept their situation and the episode jumps eight further years as they renew their marriage vows and go off on a honeymoon with all their friends and family at the ceremony, including his son who has become a doctor. He is set to become the new regional director of the Homeland security unit.
It is at this point he returns to the centre and finds the room and is able to enter and to remove the cover from the face of the body on the table and discovers it is that of his wife. He learns that all that he has experienced over past decade has happened in an instant and was intended to provide him strength for the challenge of coping with the 4400 and their purpose in the years ahead and that the way to break out of the dimension is for both to accept that this is unreality and end what is in effect a prolonged dream. However because they can now control their experience they bring together their family and friends to announce they have decided to extend their trip which is something they had been wanting to do for sometime but wanted to say goodbye and as they do they eliminate the present reality person by person and local community and home. He returns to his office and find it is back to the time of the 4400 and the challenges which they pose. He has just missed a returnee whose form he recognises and runs after her not only to find that it is the woman who has been his wife for eight years in his mind but she knows who he is and they embrace and we believe he is to have the love and support in reality which those who had unlocked the powers of the 4400 said he needed to help fulfil their mission. However I could find no reference to his wife and the actress who played her in the Wikipedia notes on the episode.
This episode contrast with the previous two in which Richard‘s wife Lily turns to her former husband a lawyer, for help when Richard is taken into custody for his failure to register as a 4400 living in the community. This leads him to Jordan Collier who comes a calling, and begs the couple and their child to return. Jordan has revealed that prior to trying to stop Richard and his wife taking the child away from the centre he had been full of personal ambition, power and the wealth of the situation but although the child and threatened his life when he had touched Lily, he had been fundamentally changed and become focussed on the mission. He wanted them to come back and participate in the mission freely and he wanted contact with the child again because he believed his present life would be validated. This turns out to be so and Jordan become a grandfather/uncle in their life and that of the child. Everything continues to go well as the time of great reunion approaches when the returnees will assemble from all parts oft he world.
It is as this point that Maia has a prediction about Jordan who she sees on TV, he is to die. Diana and Tom first persuade their boss that it is important to try and intervene and then persuade Collier that he needs to take greater precautions and allow them to his help protect him and try and prevent what so far has been the inevitability of Maia’s predictions. In this respect they are supported by Shaun who argues that Jordan becoming a martyr would place the Mission in jeopardy and Jordan himself is ambivalent about what to do, agreeing that the unit and Tom and Diana can enter the 4400 complex centre and take control of security. They would still like the reunion postponed
Jordan decides to consult the child of Lily and Richard and while we do not immediately learn the outcome, Jordan believes that he should continue and that everything will work out well. For a time this also appears to be likely outcome as one major suspect is apprehended having come close to achieving the assassination. Then Jordan is shot from a vantage point outside the building where the main reunion ceremony is taking place, a flaw because in the real word this possibility would have been taken into account and he would have been moved to a position in the building where an external shooting could not occur. (Have you not noted the way Parliamentary building chambers are designed, The Houses of Commons and Lords, the Senate and Congress Houses and the UN building in New York. Although Shaun attempts to revive , Jordan, he is declared dead.
I suggest that no one is surprised that the body then disappears leaving the way open for a resurrection, reminding of Bobby Ewing in Dallas, nor is anyone surprised when we learn that the shootist, reminiscent of the shooting of President Kennedy also in Dallas, is none other than Tom’s son. This is not et tu Brutus but Judas.
The son and Shaun’s cousin have become increasingly aggressive towards the 4400, attacking everyone and everything associated with the returnees, especially Jordan and his chief assistant Shaun, with Kyle resentful and afraid of his ability to lose time and find himself transported from one situation into another and without memory of what has occurred in the intervening period.
Shaun also remains troubled as his commitment to the mission of the 4400 grows. He is challenged by a group of young misfits, drugs addicts, petty criminals surviving by voluntary hand outs and prostitution, living in the shadow of the city, in the first upside on teh disk, Suffer the children, a continuing problem in the Sates but which has been largely eliminated in the UK by in effect Government and police action supported by the establishment of refuges by independent bodies funded by voluntary contributions and government funds.
Shaun encounters one of these groups gate crashing a ceremony in which the guests are provided free food and he takes an interest in a young woman of similar age to himself and to her plight and those of her friends, donating food, blankets and medical supplies. Jordan warns against revealing his healing powers because to do so to one and all will seek help and it is not practical for him to heal everyone. However he responds to a call from the girl when her boyfriend appears to be a bad drugs trip and Shaun cures him with the consequence as Jordan predicted all the down and outs want his help. This leads to the girl being disillusioned with Shaun who has become her hero and potential saviour. He persuades her to enter the 4400 which does, we suspect not out of conviction but to get close to him. Unfortunately Jordan has been assassinated and Shaun has to take over the role of leader and becomes too busy with too great responsibilities to have a personal relationship and symbolically the doors to his office are closed to her as she approaches him having progressed within the 4400 process of enlightenment. The scene reminds when Corleone’s son becomes the Godfather.
The main focus of Suffer not Little Children is a returnee teacher accused of child abuse by some parents at her school because some of children have been changed dramatically for the good while others have not. She explains she has been able to recognise the untapped potential in many of the children, some creatively in playing a musical instrument, painting and sculpture with others in more traditional scholastic subjects but not all. One particular father and one pupil becomes very aggressive towards her and getting her removed from the school. When Tom and Diana investigate they are satisfied with the explanation of her power and she is returned to the school with protection but too late to prevent the most disturbed pupil from entering her class with a gun, not to kill in her but to persuade her to change him so his father will be proud The father has become the town failure the teacher explains that not everyone has untapped talent which can be immediately recognised and transformed this does not mean the boy will turn out like his father and does not find contentment through his work and relationships in the future. It is the father who persuades his son to hand the gun over and it is time for the teacher to move to an environment where her abilities will be appreciated and use to their potential.
So much of the second season second disk has been constructive and optimistic but there are warnings. The consequence of first husband assisting in getting Richard out of jail has led to problems with his second wife and to her first daughter overhearing and discovering that her first mother is alive and going in search and making contact. However when she has contact with her half sister there is a discordant note and later when she returns home she becomes seriously ill so the first husband makes contact with her mother when the danger is over for her visit in hospital, Do we detect jealousy and a child who requires the exclusive attention of her parents? There is also pressure on Diana and daughter Maia. The child continues to wrestle with her powers and wish to be normal while discovering that she is having further visionary predictions, Homeland Security subpoenas their employee to surrender the diary. Why did the baby tell Jordan he would be safe if he went ahead with the Reunion? One would like more answer and to know more those returnee who pass by only in one episode
All is revealed and settled in Murder by Numbers which is at times a harrowing film about a police detective played by Sandra Bullock who as the films progresses we learn married at sixteen to a man who became jealous and violent towards and when she decides to stand up to him and tells him she is leaving him for good he stabs her over a dozen times and dumps her body in the countryside alive but dying. Fortunately she is discovered and rescued and survives scarred in body and in mind towards men. She is asked to attend a parole hearing when her husband is being considered for release but her response is to dent the situation and her past. However it dominates her life in other ways, as she engages in casual sex with her male detective colleagues appointed her partners but then falls out with them, picking fights so they reject her and refuse to continue working with her. This is both an emotional and physical response to what happened to her, unwilling to show her scarred body.
This is the background to a horrific murder of a young woman which has the hallmarks of being a random unplanned killing and then the work of the high school janitor who conveniently commits suicide as the police close in. However Sandra is not convinced and suspects the involvement of two student who pretend not to be friends within the school environment but who meet, debate and plot at a disused house on a cliff top.
The first of the two young men is the intellectual with a perverted interest in forensic science so her talks of undertaking the perfect murder in which all clues to the perpetrator are removed and someone else is framed leaving the usual links which killers who commit crimes of the moment will leave of themselves. However he is a loner who thinks but does not act. His conspirator is the doer, the rich kid who has everything including the means to buy what is needed to create a sterile environment to hold and kill the victim, to plant the clues on someone else.
It is not just good enough for the two to commit a crime which remains unsolved. They must be involved with the detection leading to the identification and conviction of the chosen perpetrator. To achieve the this they leave the footprint of a particular expensive designer trainers which the investigatory team are able to trace to the super rich kid student. He demonstrates that it was stolen and has been reported to the college and to the police. The trainers are found in the possession of the janitor who is shown to be the supplier of drugs to the school.
But the first mistake is that at the scene of thee crime the thinker throws up having had a caviar starter at the expensive restaurant in the area, and which the detectives are able to trace that the student had eaten there on a regular basis and on the night in question. Assuming this was practical, the young man given the brilliance and extent of knowledge about forensic science would not have left his throwing up in the vicinity of the site. This is a plot flaw although by then both perpetrators had become emotionally caught up by what they had done.
This young man is helped by a female student in exchange for help with one of her subjects and this leads to inviting her to see his collection fo rare and beautiful flowering plants. She is impressed and they kiss, a kiss observed by ‘the doer’ who then not only seduces the girl but films the experience to reveal to his friend that the girl is not a worthy companion. The two young men are not true friends as such but comrades in the deadly enterprise. The incident with the girl builds a wedge between the two and when they meet up which was against their detailed plan Sandra is there observing with her camera to hand and this reignites the willingness of her latest detective partner and their boss to pursue what had become an open and shut case. Gradually the net closes and the two men fall out, the doer trying to blame the other and then force him into a one sided suicide pact. The thinker works this out in time just as Sandra arrives, having radioed in she has located the pair she pursues them without waiting for her colleagues to arrive. This fits into her personality and leads nearly to her death in a melodramatic last sequence in which she and the doer wrestle on a veranda at the Cliff edge and eventually he does crashed to his doom and she is saved by the thinker who then pleads for his life claiming that the other committed the murder and that he had saved her life should be taken into consideration. She nearly buys this but then in a second dodgy moment she released that the when the doer had tried to strangle her he had left a mark from his signet ring on her neck and the murder victim did not have such a mark. The is unbelievable crass on the assumption that if the audience had gone along with the premise of the plot they would not yell out that given the care taken with the crime he would have removed the ring before strangling the girl. This however enables her to trick the surviving murderer into admitting his guilt and Sandra then observes that whatever one does or does not do in life one should and needs to face the consequences and no one will be able t run away indefinitely. (A very questionable statement indeed) This leads Sandra to accepting she has also to face what happened to her and to attend the parole hearing. She has found the redemption she had been locking for the sense of guilt and horror experienced. It is therefore a fundamentally flawed albeit clever film made above average by the performance of Sandra Bullock.
The film is based on a true story unlike Criminal Justice and the 4400.Nathan Freudenthal Leopold and Richard Albert Loeb were two wealthy Chicago University students who murdered 14 year old Bobby Franks in 1924. The murder was an attempt to commit the perfect crime. One had written to the other A superman is, on account of certain superior qualities inherent in him, exempted from he ordinary laws which govern men. He is not liable for anything he may do. The two students 18 and 19 years of age had planned to become lawyers. They were saved from execution by a brilliant lawyers who argued before the judge who heard the case that it was not fair to hand a boy because he had taken seriously the writings of Nietzsche and other philosophers taught to him at University. Only one of then was to survive prison, being released after 33 years, emigrating, marrying and working after having taught himself to speak 27 languages nearly one a year during the prison experience. The other died in prison killed by another prisoner. The true life story has been covered several times in film, with Compulsion the most well known and in literature.
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