After the frenetic pace of episode two of Blue Lights, the halfway stage of this second series brought things down a little bit more.
With Jim ‘Dixie’ Dixon now dead Lee Thompson sought to fill the vacuum in Mount Eden and take control of not only the area but also the area. He travelled to Dublin to meet Tina and the big wig who we saw in series one to convince them that he was now the main man. They gave him a chance and a bag of cash and tasked him with doubling it.
Because Thompspn was small fry, he knew he had to move quickly turn himself and his operaton into something that could turnover millions of pounds. He began by trying to radicalise the Mount Eden neighbourhood and turn them against the police. We also saw his nephew flicker with radicalisation, too, as his uncle used his charisma to state that te community needed to stick together and look after itself. Did it heck – it was classic manipulation on an industrial scale.
And what were the police doing at this time? Terrified that Dixon’s death would provoke all-out street war, they sent in the big guns – big armoured cars, stop-and-search points… the works. It didn’t do anything apart from build resentment towards the police.
This was really fascinating, and all a bit grim – it showed what can happen when two sides are deeply entrenched with a them-and-us attitude. Both sides believe what they are doing is right, but what they’re doing is only inflaming a situation.
As that was continuing, Stevie and Grace were called out to a suspicios death. What they found was a terminal cancer patient laying dead in his bed, his distraught husband dazed and confused and emotional, and also suspected of giving him an overdose of morphine. It was a heart-wrench moral conundrum, with Stevie, in particular, find it hard – he had lost own wife to the disease. However, as emotional as these scenes were, they were a real juxtaposition with the gang war happening elsewhere. Despite being really good scenes I’m not sure they fitted together.
Jen was in on the action in this episode, managing to illicit a sworn statement from the original investigating officer of the chip shop bombing (played by Casualty legend, Derek Thompson). He told her that he knew about the bombing before it happened from a trusted source, but to keep that informant safe he lokoed the other way. This little stryline feels especially topical at the moment.
Paul Hirons
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Blue Lights is shown in the UK on BBC One and BBC iPlayer
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