DVD review: Waking The Dead season 7

Waking The Dead
season 7

Directors: Tim Fywell, Daniel Percival, Robert Bierman, Edward Bennett, Sam Miller, Philippa Langdale
Stars: Trevor Eve, Sue Johnston, Wil Johnson, Félicité du Jeu, Tara FitzGerald
Roadshow

HAVING never watched this UK cold case police/forensic procedural, my decision to pre-view seasons one and two, launched in 2000, quickly proved that the unique, two-hour split episode format utilised with Waking The Dead offers an effective and thorough examination of police procedures not available to the majority of 45-minute cop shows—providing deeper, more layered whodunnits with far less predictability.

The cold case team is run by the driven (and extraordinarily blunt) Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd (Trevor Eve), and the division is tasked to work old cases when presented with new evidence. The chemistry between the often impatient Boyd and his team, psychologist Dr Grace Foley (Sue Johnston), Detective Inspector Spencer Jordan (Wil Johnson), forensic pathologist Dr Eve Lockhart (Tara FitzGerald), and Detective Constable Stella Goodman (Félicité du Jeu) is realistic and, refreshingly, ebbs and flows just like relationships do in the real world.

Season 7 originally aired in the UK in 2008 and features 6 stories across12 episodes. Highlights include: Pieta (DNA from the blood of a man who assaulted a police officer is matched to a murdered mother and son whose corpses were unearthed in the wake of the Bosnian war); Skin (an anonymous email leads to the mummified body of George Andrews, a man who disappeared 20 years earlier after aligning himself with an extreme right wing group), and Missing Persons (a woman saves a man who falls from a train platform but flees when police attempt to question her, CCTV matches her as person of interest in an unsolved 1983 murder).

Waking The Dead delivers better-than-average TV and should prove a welcome relief to crime fans who are tired of knowing whodunnit within the first 10 minutes.