Shows about supernatural entities threatening small towns generally make the scares creepy and oblique, showing hints of whatever it is before showing what it actually is. But sometimes a show takes too much time dancing around the scary part, making things less scary and more annoying. That’s what we got with a new BritBox series.
PASSENGER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A bread truck trundles through a snowy, wooded area at night, next to a sign that says, “Welcome to Chadder Vale, A Place Where Everyone Matters.”
The Gist: The truck stops as the driver is spooked by an alarm going off in the cab. He goes out and sees a strange sticky black substance on the outside of the truck. But he goes on to the bread factory in town, opens up the back, and makes sure whatever he’s transporting doesn’t attack.
Katie Wells (Rowan Robinson) is at a pub with her friend Mehmet Shah (Shervin Alenabi); after her boyfriend John Towbridge (Jack James Ryan) punches his mate Mehmet out of jealousy, Katie transports a bleeding, drunk Mehmet in her car. But after something falls on the hood, she stops and looks around. Her scream punctuates the night.
Riya Ajunwa (Wunmi Mosaku) moved to Chadder Vale six years prior, so her husband could take care of his mother. She was a Met Police detective in London, but for some reason hasn’t gotten to investigate any big cases, including the case of a missing Swedish girl that has been the biggest deal the town has seen in years. She hears that Eddie Wells (Barry Sloane), whom she helped put away five years prior, is getting out immediately, halfway through his sentence. Oh, and it’s also Riya’s 40th birthday.
She breaks the bad news about Wells to Jim Bracknell (David Threlfall), who supervises a fracking site and has had to deal with protesters for months on end. Of course, he’s concerned, but he thinks Wells will go after Riya first.
During a get together for her birthday, Riya gets a call about an elk carcass found in the woods next to an abandoned car. The elk doesn’t look like it just got hit by the car; it looks gutted, with a strange black goo on parts of its carcass. The car is registered to Joanne Wells (Natalie Gavin), Katie’s mother and Eddie’s wife. Joanne ends up reporting Katie missing when Riya — who has no fans in the Wells family — tells her about the car. As Riya searches the woods, and finds Katie’s phone, Katie returns to the Wells house as if nothing happened. And even though Riya gets called off, something doesn’t feel right.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Passenger has a supernatural, X-Files-ish feel. It also feels like True Detective: Night Country. It’s interesting that Mosaku stars in this series, as she’s probably best known in the U.S. for a role in another supernatural series, Lovecraft Country.
Our Take: Written by Andrew Buchan, Passenger is a “weird stuff going on in a small town” story that seems to be about that and little else. Perhaps the first episode just moves the story a little slowly, but there’s a whole lot of people looking at things offscreen and being frightened, some monster-like screeching, and shots of Riya looking around.
Where the story is supposed to go is that Riya has a hunch about this case, and her boss and most of the town is just going to accept that what happened to Katie was a fluke. It feels like a lot of the story is going to be about Riya fighting to be heard in Chadder Vale, a well-loved but still relatively new person in town who just doesn’t buy into the inertia that affects the longtime residents.
What will save the show is Mosaku’s ability to be funny and warm one minute, as we see when she describes how she found herself in Chadder Vale and how she values her new friends, and intense the next. She’s going to be that determined police detective that keeps plugging away against all odds, and Mosaku’s ability to project that determination will make the series watchable. But as the strange events keep happening, we get the feeling we’re going to get frustrated by lots of withheld information and misdirections that could be eliminated with better storytelling.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Joanne finds out that her husband is out and coming home, and we see a shot of Billy Wells making his way back to Chadder Vale.
Sleeper Star: David Threlfall, simply because he completely rocks the curly white wig he’s has to wear to play Jim Bracknall.
Most Pilot-y Line: Riya questions Mehmet and asks, “What happened to your face,” to which he retorts, “What happened to yours?”
Our Call: STREAM IT. We were not super impressed with the creepiness or scares in Passenger, but we did like Wunmi Mosaku’s performance, and that may be enough to make this show tolerable.
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.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Passenger’ On BritBox, Where A Police Detective Investigates Strange Crimes In A Tiny Town appeared first on Decider.
