Season 1 – Intruder

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Jim S @RT83100695 05/07/2023 A short series that is short on focus. Elaine Cassidy and Sally Lindsey are wasted in this shallow non-thriller. The premise is thoroughly tortured: one of two teen burglars is killed by the homeowner while attempting to escape after being discovered. The homeowner, his wife, and their mutual friend panic, realizing that Scottish law requires that the homeowner would have captured the burglar or allowed him to escape rather than killing him. No rationale is provided as to why this homeowner went completely against character in killing the boy instead of dragging him back in from the window that he barely started out. We saw him earlier partying with his houseguest getting drunk then being wired from snorting coke, as if this is somehow a reason for his panic. With all due respect, being wired on coke would likely have prevented someone from panicking. But that subtle detail gets in the way of the overwrought distress the three witnesses/collides expresses the motivation for the nonsense that follows. The houseguest suddenly decides she wants the husband for her own and so blackmail him to be her lover. He decides that he and his wife must kill her with her own medications, an apparent overdose. Meanwhile, the dead burglar is reflected through the grief of his father as a wonderful sensitive lad who, the father claims inexplicably and without the slightest gentle challenge from the police, would never attack the homeowner or anyone. So, just burglaries? The story attempts to include some moral lesson against racism by making the father a middle-eastern immigrant and so the dead teen also a minority, and by having the homeowner/home-defender/murderer employed as a talk-show host bent on ridiculing the apparently racist callers to his show, though we hear extremely little of any of their ranting. One wonders how it is that so obviously a politically liberal personality can sustain a radio talk show at all and why it is that he would have a daily que of callers who hold views that disagree with his. More curious and more relevant to the story is the question: why does the husband who wanted to kill the blackmailing backstabbing friend via overdose absolutely wet himself when learns that his wife has in fact murdered her. The writer uses cliches to substitute for genuine plot development. The director (same person) guides the actors to cliche delivery of their cliche lines. No subtlety here. The characters are so hollow that either they remain boringly predictable throughout, or they are so irritatingly inconsistent that the viewer has no one to care about their fate. Check this out: the story ends with a police officer who started off as victim liason and so wildly overstepped her purview as such, instead of referring the the father of the teen burglar to bring his completely unfounded suspicions about the circumstances of his son's death to the proper authority that she was reassigned to desk-bound paperwork, figuring out everything on her own and confronting the wife, who wisely has killed her wimp of a husband, and mourning 'that poor lad,' pronouncing a trite moral lesson upon the wife; whom we see in the closing shot startled awake by a vision of her dead husband rousing to life in the cave/tomb in which she trapped him. Thus the writer makes to end the series with a final yawn-worthy cliche. I wanted to get caught up in good British crime thriller. This series was British. See more Read all reviews

Intruder — Season 1

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