Vigil (Season two)

Trigger Warning This story deals with a clearly fictional world: there’s no British Air Force, it’s the Royal Air Force, the country the story is partially set in doesn’t exist - but it doesn’t take more than a cursory knowledge of geopolitics to work out who it is meant to be. The story also questions how nation states decide organisations are terrorists and what that means. It didn’t bother me at the time but it did make me think afterwards and it’s quite a live discussion right now, so it might be more of an issue for you. Vigil season two is a clear follow-up to season one, but instead of the closed world of a nuclear submarine, we have an RAF squadron that flies drones, attack drones with an AI element as part of a late stage equipment trial. Amy and Kirsten are still happily together. Kirsten is pregnant, Amy is massively overprotective and exactly how you react to that will vary I’m sure. I have sufficiently complicated feelings about it that I strongly suspect it’s based on someone’s real experience. I certainly know people who have been there or thereabouts, and it makes them feel real, even as parts of it make feel really uncomfortable. However, there’s a scene I can’t go into too deeply because of spoilers, that shows the other side of Amy, and the reason for at least some of her overprotectiveness, making her more rounded and sympathetic, making Kirsten less of a doormat too. Amy might still be a class A control freak and arguably a bitch, but she’s massively humanised by these moments. The actual investigation mixes politics, armed services and technology in a fairly heady blend. I’m sure if I were in the police or the RAF, I’d be capable of shouting about the errors in the show. There are parts I looked at and thought “that seems weird to me” but none were bad enough I was thinking about them as more than a niggle. Some of the errors are, according to an interview I read, deliberate - they know it’s the RAF not the British Air Force - but they’re highlighting it’s a fictional universe. Others are at the request of various people - they saw a real drone controller, and made a 'wrong' mock-up to prevent industrial espionage. I did have times where I thought some of those niggles exposed the mechanics of the script writing a bit, I was able to look at it and say to myself “oh, that’s how they’re bringing that part of season one over” but, since I loved season one, I didn’t mind either aspect of that. The bit where they put Amy under stress and humanise her didn’t strike me as one of them but, actually, although every detail is mechanically different, emotionally there is an identical scene in season one. I would say that, perhaps, Vigil suffers a bit from being on the BBC compared to Netflix. That straitjacket of 57 minutes of TV, cliffhanger at the end to make sure you tune in next week and so on felt a bit obvious and uncomfortable in a couple of episodes. On Netflix, I imagine we might easily have had the same episode endings, but some episodes might have been 5-10 minutes shorter, at least one might have been a few minutes longer with no loss of tension or plot. Of course it’s hard to be sure, and if they’d done that, I might be complaining that they needed spacers, time to let us breathe and take the story in. There are rumours of a season three, already, and I’d happily watch. Bechdel Test: Pass. If you’ve watched season one, you know one of the things they did was separate the (then not so, but here) happy couple. That’s repeated, but they do talk in a chunk of episodes. Amy gets to talk to a number of women, mostly to question them, and some of those interrogations are about men, but some are not, or are about them and their movements. Kirsten talks to a lot more men, and the only time I remember her talking to a woman outside the family it’s about a man. But Poppy, Amy's daughter, is part of the family, and she and Kirsten have quite a few conversations while Amy's away as well, mostly about Amy. Amy and Poppy have one too, but it’s mostly about Poppy maybe bf. Ko Test: Null. I’m rating this as null. Some, but not all episodes have a black British woman who clearly passes. Others don’t so it ought to be a fail. But they have Moroccan women speaking Arabic in Morocco, and the fact that Amy doesn’t speak Arabic is important. They’re also in an Arabic-speaking country (it’s not Morocco in the story, but that’s where they filmed), having them speak their native language in their own country doesn’t seem discriminatory in this case. It feels like the test not fitting again. Russo Test: Pass. Not one but two passing couples.