Roush Review: A Cold Case, and Raw Grief, in New Season of ‘Unforgotten’
Review
Unforgotten
The long shadow of memory haunts the suspects in every season of Unforgotten, a first-rate Masterpiece cold-case mystery series. Each unearthed crime generates ripples of consequence, shattering lives as the truth comes into the light. But in Season 5, it’s the more recent accidental death of original lead detective Cassie Stuart (Nicola Walker) that has everyone spiraling — especially her former partner Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar).
Sunny’s sustained grief, revisited nine months after last season’s tragic climax, creates tension at work and on the home front, where his fiancée Sally (Michelle Bonnard) can’t help but complain, “It’s hard to feel jealous of a dead woman, but I do.” And that’s nothing compared to the chill that instantly sets in at the precinct when Cassie’s replacement is introduced: the brusque Jessica “Jessie” James (Sinéad Keenan), who makes no friends when she keeps messing up the names of the “Historical Cases” team and suggests she’s more interested in recent murders. On their first ride to a crime scene, Jessie tells Sunny, “I sort of forgot you were there.” Ouch.
To be fair, just before her first day in the new job, her home life falls apart in a domestic melodrama echoed by Sunny’s own personal woes. He’s justified when he complains to their boss, “She’s rude, she’s permanently distracted, unpleasant to my team” — although it’s actually her team — and it takes several episodes in an otherwise taut six-week season for their mutual antagonism to thaw.
Though Cassie is very much not forgotten, professional duty calls, and when a body is discovered in a London chimney, their team swiftly goes to work. The case, as usual, is front-loaded with emotional triggers for all those caught in a web of tragedy and deceit. Unforgotten is procedural crime drama at its best, slowly peeling away layers of literally long-buried secrets, which somehow connect a disparate collection of characters, including a retired Tory member of Parliament — keep an eye out for former child star Hayley Mills as his wife — a young petty-criminal junkie, a gig worker in Paris who left London under a cloud, and a restaurateur with deep anger and guilt issues. The twists don’t stop until the final scene.
“Why do any of us do things we know are wrong?” laments one of the tormented souls during interrogation as the search for the sordid truth brings Sunny and Jessie closer together. While it’s inevitable that fans of Unforgotten will compare Jessie unfavorably to Cassie, so indelibly and sensitively played by Walker, by the end I was looking forward to more of this new partnership.
Unforgotten, Season 5 Premiere, Sunday, September 3, 9/8c, PBS (check local listings at pbs.org)
