Is Jackie Twomey really guilty?
The third episode may as well have placed a big neon sign flashing ‘guilty’ over the gruff DCS’s head. The clues, or red herrings, that he was Goliath came one after the other.
He declared from the off that he couldn’t be the assassin who picked off people deemed a threat to the peace process, which prompted Tom and Niamh to dig into his history.
This resulted in Twomey’s old PO box number being discovered after a search of police files revealed it was linked to a less-than-professional cop handling Goliath victim Joe Harkin as an undercover agent.
Bloodlands was filmed in Northern Ireland.
“I think the audience are going to be like ‘oh!’” says Charlene McKenna, co-lead with James Nesbitt in the BBC crime thriller Bloodlands. “That’s Jed Mercurio not wanting to give too much away. You’re like guessin’ all the time.”
McKenna isn’t giving too much away about the Northern Ireland-set series from Line of Duty/Bodyguard executive producer either for fear of spoilers, something that also applies to the other series she’s a well kent face from, Peaky Blinders. The Irish actor is filming Peaky now in Manchester when we speak on the phone, but we have to wait till later this year for that to air, after Vienna Blood, the Freud and forensics crime drama set in the early 20th century Austrian capital which McKenna filmed during last summer’s lift in lockdown.
Bloodlands is more restrained, but trust me, it serves up a couple of lethal doozies.
Although you can follow the action without knowing the historical backstory, it helps to remember the basics. Starting in the late 1960s, Northern Ireland lived through a de-facto civil war between Catholics and Protestants, and the violence killed many thousands of its citizens. The conflict ran until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which brought about an uneasy peace in a small, intimate land where nobody was left untouched by bloodshed.
Bloodlands begins 20 years after this truce when a car is fished from Strangford Lough with what seems to be a suicide note in it. Assigned to the case is bottled-up police detective Tom Brannick (James Nesbitt) and his partner Niamh well-played by the sympathetically offbeat Charlene McKenna. Tom spots a connection between this note and an unsolved case and not just
It is one of the year’s most talked-about shows, and as Bloodlands reaches its conclusion, Gillian Halliday looks at five big questions viewers need answered in the final episode.