“The fourth series in this production is new again. It is a three episode story and the problems it is dealing with are quite new too. For one, and it is not the side story or plot, Murphy gets a family, his own parents. His mother is the victim of dementia and has to be entrusted to a nursing home in Belfast because the father cannot cope with her situation any more.
The father is quite able to look after himself, at least for some time still, but age is a serious condition with some people because they lose their heads and their consciousness. And yet they seem to remain conscious of some things, at least in some physical ways, and the film is giving some examples of this residual consciousness within or beyond or underneath the dementia. Here it is her attachment to a cross on a necklace she lost, or her way of reacting at some signs of care or attachment from other people though she does not recognize them, or at the very end a caressing gesture and the accompanyin g repetition of "There, there! There, there!" as she probably used to do with her own son when she was younger. This is fairly important here because it is the human dimension of this series that is finally pushed slightly further, and integrated in the main plot. The main plot has to do with Pakistani practices in the banking tradition in Moslem countries that are used by some criminal minds who have migrated to the West to cover up drug trafficking and other illegal activities of that sort.
Moslem banking is based on the absolute trust of the banker for the customer. The banker is in Pakistan, and the customer is in the UK. The customer asks for a certain amount of money from the banker who provides the money in the UK though it will be paid back in Pakistan. The problem, and the advantage, is that the transaction crosses borders and enables dirty money to be laundered, since the customer will not ask where the money the bank representative will give him comes from, nor t he banker in Pakistan the customer in the UK. The tricky part in this story is that a rather new agent in the team leaves a confidential report describing the operation in his car over night and the car is visited by some street gangs and the report ends up in the hands of one of the criminals who sorts things out. How will Murphy get out of this fix? That's the real interest and suspense of this fourth series and it is brilliantly done. The fifth series is dealing with an extremely hot subject at the present moment in Europe, and in the UK. Illegal immigration from some European countries that are not members of the European Community, like Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Bosnia, etc, with quite often some complicity from some Poles or other Slavonic people from countries who are in the EU. Illegal immigrants, illegal overexploited workers, off limit housing or sanitation (which means very little), constant danger and fear with no health insurance or assistance in case of necessi ty, drug trafficking on the way to the UK as an extra profit and drug dealing in the UK, selection of some young women for prostitution, pornographic and even snuff videos, and so many other ways of using and abusing this human cattle, and make a DVD profit of course, and one day Blu-ray too, since we have to trust hackers and other pirates. This is a serious situation. The film doubles it with an inner problem in the police. The only way to catch the main criminals in that ring is to infiltrate undercover cops among them. Two of them disappear creating a real storm of panic and action and then we find out that in the hierarchy of the police the middle rank of command is very cautious about going through with the investigation and even action to save one of the two undercover cops who has disappeared and is still alive, because essentially it may create some waves in the establishment of this society that does not want too much publicity about this problem that could make pe ople vote against the government, but also because that may be critical for the end of the career of this middle rank of command who want to finish their professional life in a peaceful manner, and even because the missing and still living undercover cop is a woman who brought the doom upon herself. The film marvelously mixes racism, sexism and crime with some traces of these within the police slowing down the operations and bringing doubt in the head of some officers, doubts that lead to extreme reactions: self justice for the missing and finally released undercover cop but also the idea, and act, of suicide to get free of the stress. In other words, this last and final series is a masterpiece of social awareness and whistle-blowing.”
From: Dr Coulardeau
DVD
