Review: THE THIRD DAY, WINTER, Sky Atlantic

We're back on Osea Island, still home to a death cult, still accessible only by a tidal causeway and still bereft of 4G, landlines or motorboats. That wouldn't matter so much if we had access to a script that wasn't (even making allowances for the genre) preposterous to the point of making me exclaim, "Oh come on..." more often than we're told by mad eyed psychopaths that, "They have their ways, but they're good people here." Rather as I was during the first instalment, I thought of Scooby Doo, rated 18.

In the first of Winter's three episodes, we spend an hour with Naomie Harris (Helen) learning what we already found out with Jude Law (Sam) in the first episode, Autumn - it's best to get off the island as soon as possible. Helen doesn't though because she is - wait for it - Sam's wife, tracking him down, still grieving for their dead (or is he?) son and mad at her husband after he went off grid to become The Father.

There's lots of blood and guts, a twist or two you can see from the mainland they're so telegraphed and not a moment of humour in three hours running time. Much of the dialogue is leaden and characters appear in order to move the plot along and then disappear, their job done. We never learn (other than to bring in HBO) why Jess (Katherine Waterstone) is American when much of the story concerns the insular nature of the community, nor why casual racism is endemic, nor why much that happens in a mini civil war happens - beyond the regular solemn intoning that "This place is special".

The only special quality I could discern about the island is that its mud left no marks on floors when running into houses and finding hiding places, its waters, though riven by strong currents, can be swum in a thick woolly jumper and its plentiful rifles are hardly ever used by otherwise ruthless murderers.

By the end, the door is left ajar to a season two (though the unanswered questions had long since passed to the "Who cares?" folder for me) and, as a show that has divided viewers and reviewers, it make well get one. But I'm pretty sure it's not the balance of soil and salt on Osea Island that ails our world right now - those issues are rather closer to home and embedded in the absence of superegos, not a surfeit of supernatural.

The Third Day is available on Sky Atlantic.

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