Blue Lights

For the last few weeks Mary and I have been watching Blue Lights on Britbox. Great show. Set in Belfast. Cops in a hardscrabble town fighting crime and drugs in the lingering shadow of the Troubles, the 30-year conflict in which ~3500 died and 50,000 were injured out of a population of 1.5 million.

Yesterday evening there was an episode in which a guy dies and one of the cops pulls out a rosary and prays long with him as they sit and wait for the ambulance to get there, which it doesn't do on time. Her hands are covered in blood as she cries and stumbles over the words. Her prayer is audible over an open channel, audible to all her colleagues. There's a scene in which two sergeants back at HQ look at each other quizzically while she does so.

Many of the cops in the show are implausibly good-looking, though not as bad as Hollywood might have done it. Guys and gals are partners in patrol cars and -- surprise, surprise -- they end up coupling up, having sex, falling in love. Conflicts arise between duty and personal interest.

So you see, the fundamental plot tension here, amidst all the drugs and guns and sex and parent-child issues (there's that too) and history, is the same as that of The Crown. It's the relationship between one's role in society and being an individual and a human. On The Crown it's all at a very high level. Here less so. But it's the same. What do you do when you're tending to a dying person but your sergeant insists you send the license plates of the cars involved in an accident? Do you hew the line of proper procedure when your community is falling apart?

That's why the true villain here, as is so always the case (and when it is, that's a clue as to what the show's really about) are the persnickety folks from CID who come in after the fact to second-guess what happened in the field. Was procedure followed? Or humanity?