Bath the Beautiful

ITV — JASON WATKINS & TALA GOUVEIA — McDONALD & DODDS — SEASONS 1 TO 4–2020–2024

BATH FASHIONABLE AND AQUATIC SPA

The whole series is not fascinating because of the cases, and the crimes themselves, but because we have a fully mismatched couple of detectives who are, in fact, on the ground, extremely complementary and that is perfectly matched.

We are in Bath, a nicely fashionable spa city in South-West England. The Detective Chief Inspector, a young woman actually, Ms. McDonald, who recently arrived from London, is strangely enough provided with a partner who is all the opposite of her. She is wildly ambitious to prove herself to herself and the city of Bath. Her partner is an older veteran Detective Sergeant who has just spent a long period at simple desk work in some kind of office far away from crime and criminals. But he is methodical, and extremely fussy about facts and logic because for him criminals do think about their acts before acting. They do not strut on the crime scene. They do not have time to do this. Criminals must be effective and quick, and they must leave no scent behind them. The detective who is trying to capture this criminal has to be just as methodical and quick. If he or she concentrates on the method used to commit the crime, they will get the criminals red-handed, the hand in the pot of gold and blood.

Then everything else is circumstantial, and the cases are varied enough for us not to see some kind of repetitive pattern. Each case is devised as being different from anything else, particularly all the possible cases of detective stories from Sherlock Holmes to Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, alias Robert Galbraith. It is funny at times seeing DCI McDonald coming to a stumbling block, being stopped there in her brilliant mind, and being saved by a plain, banal, commonplace remark from DS Dodds, who speaks from experience and memory. Even if all cases are supposed to be absolutely original, in fact, they remind the oldtimer of another case twenty or fifty years before, and that is enough to find a gate to the truth.

Enjoy this criminal world of ours.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU