Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bloodlands’ Season 2 On Acorn TV, Where Brannick’s Sketchy Past Catches Up With Him Again

Season 1 of the Acorn TV series Bloodlands gave viewers a pretty straightforward detective drama layered with its troubled detective’s past life as an undercover operative in Northern Ireland. Season 2 brings a new mystery, but Tom Brannick’s past catches up with him again pretty much from the jump.

BLOODLANDS SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “1998. 21st February.” We see the shadow of a man’s back as he walks towards the water, late at night.

The Gist: The man dons a ski mask and spies two other men starting to dig a hole to bury two large cases. He shoots both of them to death, unlocks the cases and gasps: Along with the high-powered sniper rifles he expected to see in the case were multiple gold bars. The man takes off the mask and we see that it’s a younger version of DCI Tom Brannick (James Nesbitt).

In the present day, Brannick and his partner DS Niamh McGovern (Charlene McKenna) are called to the scene where the body of a local accountant was found; he appears to have been shot from an indeterminate distance. He recognizes the man right away, but doesn’t say anything.

Apparently, the man had been helping Brannick hide the gold for the last 25 years. He goes to his house and finds a burner phone with the man’s texts that mention where he hid the gold, but it isn’t there.

Brannick and McGovern question the accountant’s wife, Olivia Foyle (Victoria Smurfit); the two of them recently bought a large modern home worth almost 2 million pounds. While Brannick plays the sympathy card, inconsistencies in what she tells the detectives quickly make her a suspect, especially her connection to a car service driver named Robert Dardis (Diarmaid Murtagh), who mysteriously drives up to the Foyles’ house and then speeds away when the police try to chase him down.

Brannick’s boss/frenemy, DCS Jackie Twomey (Lorcan Cranitch), tells McGovern to keep an eye on Brannick, especially knowing what he knows about their time on the Goliath team back in the ’90s. He does help Brannick’s daughter Izzy (Lola Petticrew) land a job at the station, but Brannick wonders if that’s just to have someone in the building to watch what he does. Twomey also knows the accountant, who used to manage his finances, but when the accountant was shown to have links to organized crime 16 years prior, Twomey distanced himself.

When a journal is found in a hidden compartment of the accountant’s car, Brannick sees the same notes calculating the value of the gold that he made, except for a cryptic location written in red. He figures it out during the execution of a search warrant at Olivia’s home, and after she’s brought into the station for questioning, he follows her to the very storage unit where the guns and gold are supposed to be stored — except one of the guns and all of the gold is missing.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? As we said at the beginning of Season 1, Bloodlands is a pretty straightforward detective show with a troubled lead, like Prime Suspect.

Our Take: The big difference between Season 1 and Season 2 of Bloodlands is that we know a lot more about Brannick’s shady past, having been identified in Season 1 as the Goliath that was the head of the secretive case the Police Service of Northern Ireland were involved with in the 1990s. Knowing that makes Nesbitt’s jaw-clenching performance even more impressive in Season 2.

We know that, despite the outer appearances that Brannick is a crack detective and doting father, he’s definitely seen some things in his time on the force, and had to do things that most police officers aren’t required to do, like kill people. We’re not quite sure how the operation that yielded this gold is connected to his activity as Goliath, but we do know that the presence of this gold has been hanging over everything Brannick has done over the last 25 years, and the fact that it might resurface is etched all over Nesbitt’s face.

But he seems to be well-matched by Olivia, who is hiding secrets of her own. How does she know about the gold? Did her husband tell her, or does she work for some of the people he worked for? Olivia and Brannick start to engage in a classic cat-and-mouse game in the first episode, as she lies to him, he finds out and tricks her into leaving her house so he can execute the warrant. We’re pretty sure that the two of them will likely form a begrudging team to find the gold together at some point.

The layers that creator Chris Brandon have put in place in just the first episode are fascinating; how will Brannick balance this investigation with his own greed? Will anyone on the force find out about the gold? Will Twomey, who knows what Brannick is capable of, intercede? McGovern is also suspicious of her partner and the line of questioning he uses with Olivia, so she may make some moves to undercut Brannick as well.

What we hope is that things don’t drift into the ridiculous, where it becomes obvious that Brannick is up to no good but it seems that everyone on the Police Service is blind to it. These are seasoned detectives; at a certain point you’d think the perpetually-stressed Brannick will slip up and show his hand.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Brannick texts Olivia from his burner phone: “I’m alive and I want my gold.”

Sleeper Star: There seems to be a bit of a cute chemistry between Petticrew’s character Izzy and Chris Walley’s character, the somewhat shy young DC, Billy “Birdy” Bird, so we’ll pick these two.

Most Pilot-y Line: Does no one in Northern Ireland button or zip their coats? Isn’t cold, raw and rainy there a lot? We didn’t see one buttoned or zipped coat during the entire first hour.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Season 2 of Bloodlands layers even more intrigue onto what’s generally a straightforward, unfussy detective drama, with James Nesbitt’s raw anger leading the way.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.