Case Histories Episode 6 - "When Will There Be Good News? part 2"

Jackson Brodie (Jason Isaacs) finds himself in jail for assaulting a police officer, but DI Munroe (Amanda Abbington) straightens it all out with the help of Reggie (Gwyneth Keyworth) who told them that the officer threw the first punch.
Reggie's apartment gets ransacked, more than that, destroyed by a couple of drug dealers who are looking for the drugs her brother took but hasn't paid them for. She tells Brodie that it'll be alright and lies to him about her mother being out of town on holiday. Brodie finally finds out the whole story about the drugs - Reggie had hidden them at the old woman's house (in the previous episode).
Brodie finds the man who stole his wallet and phone dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on the beach where the crime the man committed 30 years ago took place. Everyone seems convinced that the woman Reggie nanny's for is just laying low since this Jones fellow had just gotten out of jail, everyone except Brodie.
Munroe brings Brodie his phone and wallet back and tells him to disregard the message she left when she drunk-dialed him, so of course he listens to it and goes over to her place to talk to her about it, interrupting her date with the handsome doctor who just happened to have looked after Brodie all the times he has been in the hospital in this and the last episode. He covers by saying he is there to talk about the missing woman, and Munroe tells him to piss off.
Reggie takes Brodie to the old woman's house to recover the drugs she had hidden there when her brother shows up demanding them. They have a bit of a row and Brodie leaves it up to Reggie whether or not to give the drugs to her brother to which she says not to and tells her brother to take off and go into hiding because he can't have the drugs.
Brodie and Reggie go to see the missing woman's husband and he finally admits that his wife and baby are being held captive by gangsters until he pays them the money he owes them. The two follow the gangsters after they leave a meeting with the man in hopes of finding the missing woman and baby. But, by the time Brodie can get into the shed she's being held in, it's all over. The woman took it upon herself that noone else could help and took out both men. Brodie helps her cover up the scene by dousing the shed and the contents including the bodies in petrol and lighting it on fire.
Brodie gets a call from the man who hired him for the job at the start of the previous episode and says he's got it all figured out now and just by the way he says it, Brodie knows the man is going to do something horrible. When he gets to the house where the wife is staying, Munroe's DC is just arriving, Brodie tells him not to go near the man but he doesn't listen. The man thinks the DC is having an affair with his wife because he saw him before and the man shoots him dead.
The episode ends on Christmas day. Brodie talks to his daughter and then goes by to give a gift to Reggie and has a little talk with the woman, asking her if she intentionally guilted Jones into killing himself. She asks him if they've met before, but he denies it. Reggie tries to get him to stay, but he has one more visit, which is to see Munroe. He finally gets her to tell him what he said in the hospital that he can't remember, and when she says it was nothing, he tells her it must be okay to tell him then, when she says that he told her he loved her, Brodie answers that that sounds about right. Instead of going in, he goes for a run and ends up overlooking Edinburgh at sundown and recalls an incident when he was a soldier where he found a missing girl, that just happens to be the woman who thought she knew him.
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Best episode yet. I think Keyworth is delightful as Reggie and her interaction with Isaacs is pure gold to be all cliched.
This was another action packed episode that would have gone completely different if it were an American show. Brodie confronts the two thugs who had trashed Reggie's home and doesn't throw a single punch, he just grabs one of the dudes by his balls on puts on the pressure figuratively and literally. An American P.I. would have thrown at least one punch.
I wonder if this show will be back. I know that the BBC has ordered a second series, but I also know that Isaacs is the lead in the American police-procedural-with-a-sci-fi-twist, Awake. It's not completely inconceivable for him to do both shows, especially since this series is only six episodes compared to the 13 of Awake and the 22 to 24 next year if it gets picked up by the network.
Oh, and while Isaacs American accent is very good, I prefer him with a British one.

Case Histories Episode 5 - "When Will There Be Good News? part 1"

Jackson Brodie (Jason Isaacs) is on a job - taking photos of a cheating wife, somewhere along the Scottish coast. On his way back to the office, he stops to piss along the side of the road, and when he gets back into continue on, the car won't start. He calls DI Munroe (Amanda Abbington) and asks her in a round about way to send a squad car to help him, but she just hangs up on him.
At some point Brodie figures out that help is not on the way and starts walking. He is nearly run over by an old woman who swerves off the road after she passes him and crashes down an embankment on to the train tracks. He tries to get her out of the car, but a train is coming and hits the car and he is hurt quite badly.
Some man sneaks off the train and upon seeing Brodie on the side of the tracks, steals his wallet and his mobile phone, leaving his own wallet, or at the very least the one he was carrying. We see Brodie's perspective and he's walking along in the high grass near the sea and sees his sister all grown up and tells her that he is so very tired. She tells him to go ahead an lay down, that she'll call him when it's time to go. But soon he starts convulsing and we hear counting as the scene switches over to a girl, Reggie (Gwyneth Keyworth), performing CPR on him. Reggie is a friend of the old woman who was in the car.
Brodie comes to in the hospital and thinks Reggie is his sister at first and tells her that he thinks he's a cop. Reggie goes off to get someone and the next time Brodie wakes, Munroe is sitting there, but he thinks it is his sister, whom he tells is beautiful and that he loves her. Munroe is very confused and leaves.
Brodie checks himself out of the hospital against the doctor's wishes, the doctor who happens to be the new guy that Munroe is dating.
Reggie ends up convincing him to look for her boss, the woman she nanny's for, who is suddenly gone with the baby but without having taken anything for the baby or even packing any clothes.
Brodie also follows up on the case he was working on at the beginning of the show, finding the cheating wife who had gone missing while he was in the hospital and discovers it's the jealous husband she's running from and agrees not divulge where she's at once she convinces him that the husband was lying.
After tracking down the lies that the husband of Reggie's boss had told her, Reggie and Brodie are driving back when he get pulled over and severely beaten by the cops who think he is Andrew Jones - the man who switched wallets with him at the accident.
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"My name is Reggie, well, actually it's Regina, but I never go by that because people just say that it rhymes with vagina, which in fact it does..." Reggie is awesome. She keeps asking him why his daughter is in NZ and when he's not forthcoming asks him if she is down there making The Hobbit. The writer's have to know how much us nerds love having references like that thrown in.
Speaking of which, when Munroe is having her new guy over to meet the kid, he and the son finally hit it off by talking about Sunny Day Real Estate. I have to think that I'm one of about twelve people that got this reference and six of them were writers and producers for the show. Again, it's that whole thing about how us nerds love to be pandered to.
In reality, I'm sure anyone who is paying attention and cares enough to think about what is being said could get the first reference. Maybe not so many on the second one, but still lots, I suspect. I mean if a BBC show, filmed in Scotland with a Scottish writer is making references that some dude in Oregon is getting, they must be broader than my ego would like to think they are. Secretly though, I think maybe only a few thousand people out of the millions of viewers would have got the reference to The Hobbit without help from the internet, okay maybe as high as ten thousand because Peter Jackson is pretty famous. And for the Sunny Day Real Estate remark not more than a couple dozen of us actually are familiar with the band and maybe all of us have seen the band perform, but the hipster in me demands that I claim that I am likely the only one, okay maybe one other out of the millions of viewers of this program, that saw the band before they got big and lost members to the Foo Fighters. That's right bitches, I knew them when!

Case Histories Episode 4 - "One Good Turn part 2"a

In the second part of "One Good Turn", Jackson Brodie (Jason Isaacs) is at the home of the writer, Martin (Adam Godley), the chap who lost his flash drive and wallet when he threw his computer at the guy with the baseball bat. He's there with the police looking at a body he found, that he thinks is Martin until Martin turns up in the crowd calling out to him.
Brodie has tracked down that the man in the coma owns the company that the dead girls worked for and goes to his house, but ends up meeting the man's wife who is still telling everyone that her husband is away - only she and Brodie knows he's in the hospital. From an address he gets from her and from a picture of her husband's employees, he is able to put a name to the face of his attacker, the same man with the baseball bat, and likely where he works with the cleaners/prostitutes.
Brodie is back at his office when his ex, Josie (Kirsty Mitchell), bursts in asking where Marlee (Millie Innes), their daughter is. She blames him, bringing up the parental consent form he has still not signed, while he tells her what to do while he goes looking for the girl. Brodie figures out where she might be and finds her there where they have a little chat about her going away to New Zealand before he takes her home to her mother, whom he gives the signed papers to.
Brodie goes to see Julia (Natasha Little) in her play and afterwards they brake up when she confesses to cheating on him.
The pieces finally come together and Brodie helps everyone get away with as much as they can out of it and avoid getting arrested by the police.  He never quite learns the whole truth until the very end when his police detective friend informs him that the man in the coma has died - and putting that together with facts he hasn't shared with her, he knows that the man was killed.
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Yay for breaking up with Julia. Yay for letting Marlee go to New Zealand. Yay for not taking advantage of DI Munroe (Amanda Abbington). Munroe is the only woman we've met in the show so far, not counting the ex whom we know virtually nothing about, who is worth a damn. Sure there are plenty of other women, but they have character flaws, like they cheat on him with creepy old comedians or they kill their brother-in-laws.
Brodie did more actual detective work in this story and had a lot of touching scenes with his daughter. I'm not being ironic or sarcastic here. This second two-part episode was better than the first.
It also added quite a bit more action than the first two-parter, allowing Isaacs to show off his stuff, but then he doesn't, and that's a good thing. Had this been an American series, the tough-guy-ex-cop-ex-military Brodie would either have beat the shit out of the bad guys, or they might have gone a comedic route, where he beats the shit out of the bad guys, and then winces in pain at his hurt hands or something. Instead, it's not showy, he's just trying to defend himself more than anything which explains why he gets beaten with a baseball bat when he's more concerned about protecting his head then wrestling it away from the guy.
Sadly, in ep 4, Isaacs keeps all of his clothes on. ;)

Case Histories Episode 3 - "One Good Turn part 1"

While on his early morning run, Jackson Brodie (Jason Isaacs) sees a body floating in the water. He swims out to it, troubled by visions from his youth when he saw his sister's body pulled from the river.
Based on distinctive ear rings she was wearing, Brodie starts to track down he she might have been, not allowing that the police will find anything. On the way into his office, he stops a man from beating another with a baseball bat which we are led to believe is a road rage incident, well a parking garage rage incident. A bystander interceded by throwing his laptop at the bat-wielding man, and his flash drive and wallet fell out, and were subsequently nabbed by a kid who was at the scene. The flash drive turns to hold the man's unpublished novel, and the boy who took it is the DI's son.
The writer stays with the victim of the beating since the man had suffered a concussion. Through a turn of circumstances ends up going to a hotel with him and drinking a drugged drink.
Brodie talks to a woman who may have worked with the dead woman after seeing a woman crossing the street who looked enough like the dead woman to be ehr sister. This woman was the call girl for some big time real estate developer who is responsible for the housing project where the new DC lives, the new DC for the DI
The second woman turns up dead in a way that is made to look as an overdose, but none of the cops think it is. Later, Brodie is attacked by the man who was the baseball bat wielder and by his Eastern European accent is tied to the dead women, who we know ot be Russian.
Throughout this episode Brodie did not deal with his daughter moving to New Zealand and he has decided to refuse to sign the custodial form needed for the girl to be taken away. We also learn more though flashbacks of what happened after his sister's death - that their older brother Frances blamed himself and tried to hang himself, but Jackson arrived just in time to save his life, but apparently not before brain damage was done, which we know when he visits the brother in an assisted living facility in Yorkshire.
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Brodie is still with Julia, but he's not sure why. They don't seem to have a lot in common. Brodie wants to be supportive but is more focused on his work and daughter than her. But we do see that having a regular girl means no sex scenes with a new woman in the last three minutes of the show.
I probably should have been counting, but they managed to find several more reasons for Isaacs to take his shirt off. Ya, I get it. He's a hottie. Quit rubbing my nose in the fact that he's better looking than I ever dreamed of being. Sheesh.
I wonder if they ever thought of Isaacs for playing James Bond. He has similar looks to Daniel Craig (if you're into that whole 'rugged good looking' kind of thing). I've seen Isaacs in fewer things than I've seen Craig, but I think Isaacs has the chops to do it. He may be too old now to take over after Craig. Oh well. Just a thought.

Case Histories Episode 2 - "Case Histories part 2"

Private investigator  Jackson Brodie (Jason Isaacs) is visited by the great nephew of his friend Binky. The young man at first seems to be concerned that Brodie might be ripping the old woman off, but when Brodie and his secretary, Deborah (Zawe Ashton) assure him that not one cent has changed hands, he's even more adamant that Brodie leave Binky alone.
Brodie later discovers that it is this very same nephew who has been following him and hit him in the head.
Unfortunately Binky dies unexpectedly after she had confided in Brodie that someone had been going through her private papers. We are lead to believe at the time that she's crazy, but later it is feasible that she was right and that the person was her great nephew.
The man who lost his daughter is comforted by Brodie at the hospital, but especially when Brodie works out who it was that was seeing the girl and that this person killed her. When he puzzles it all out and confronts the man, he turns him over to police.
Brodie also finds out what happened to the missing girl of 30 years ago, that she is indeed dead at the hands of her oldest sister who has spent her life since that moment as a nun. He finds the body buried in Binky's garden and lets the sisters know. He informs the police as well but refuses to tell the DI how he knew where the body was or who killed her.
The final case is wrapped up as well as the homeless girl who has befriended the grieving father mentioned above turns out to he the girl that he is looking for per the woman at the end of the first episode.
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The Brodie family life is a bit cliched - he insists on taking his daughter on work related visits with him, and of course she tells everything to her mother when he takes her home. On the plus side, the ex-wife's reactions are justified and not super-melodramatic.
Another plus is that they find several more excuses to get Isaacs to take his shirt off. It's so weird to think of Lucius Malfoy as a hunk. I guess reading the Potter books, I always thought of him as skinny git, and the movies staring Isaacs as one servant of He-who-must-not-be-named, didn't do much to change this opinion. Who knew?
Now that Isaacs got the gig starring in Awake, I wonder if there'll be any further series of Cast Histories? I know it's based on a novel, but more shows than novels certainly didn't stop Midsomer Murders. (I'm presuming that Brodie does not die some horrible death in the final episode...)
Also, Brodie ends up bedding the "hot" sister, and I wonder if that is how every episode is going to end, Jackson scores again, or some such.

Case Histories Episode 1 - "Case Histories part 1"

Former police officer Jackson Brodie (Jason Isaacs) is a private investigator in Edinburgh. When we meet him he is following the cheating wife of a client to take pictures catching her in the act. He runs to stay in shape, not jogging mind you, but running. While he runs, he reflects back on an incident in his own childhood when he was running and calling a girl's name.
While on stakeout his secretary calls him to say that Binky, who we learn is literally the crazy old cat lady, has called to report one of her cats missing and would Brodie come and find her. He heads over straight away after a remark about working a case he gets paid for, and while looking through the backyard he overhears a commotion at the neighbors and being the generally inquisitive type pops up over the fence to see what is going on. Two women are clearing out the home of their recently departed father and come across the stuffed animal of their sister who has been missing for 30 years, and as far as they knew so had the doll. They persuade Brodie to take their case and make one last look for the missing girl.
Back at the office, a man comes in asking for Brodie to look into finding his daughter's murderer, but is denied because Brodie doesn't want to work an open police case. We later discover why - not only does Brodie respect the police in doing their job, most of them don't like him, because he took down two of their own on rape charges. Eventually, the man tracks Brodie down at his home and convinces him to look into the case.
Throughout all of this, Brodie is spending time with his daughter who lives with estranged wife who informs him that she is taking a job in New Zealand, but will "only" be away for a year or so.
Brodie confronts the father about the daughter's having a boyfriend and pushes the point because he believes she knew her killer, but it is more than the man can take and he has an asthma and/or heart attack and nearly dies.
To put an otherwise horrible day to bed, Brodie heads to a bar where he does his best to drink his wine in private, but gets picked up by an attractive blond woman who later tells him in a post-coital conversation that she sought him out to hire him for a case. In the middle of being incredulous, he spots a car that has been following him for a couple of days and goes out to confront the driver, but is struck from behind and left lying in the middle of the street to think about running as a child - running to arrive at the scene of officers pulling his sister's body from the river.
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Isaacs is more than just eye-candy in this mystery. He is quite engaging as a somewhat stereotypical single father, who helps people for the right reason. He's enough of a bad boy to be interesting, though. The actress who plays his daughter, Millie Innes, does an excellent job as well. I never with a child actor, or any actor for that matter, if they're good at acting until I see them play at least two roles as you don't know if they're just being themselves. But you can tell right off the bat if they're bad, and this young woman fits the former category. I'm impressed when anyone can remember that many lines of dialogue and deliver it in a believable and unforced manner, but especially children.
I did find it a bit, um, jarring to suddenly see Brodie and the blond in flagrante delicto, but that is due to my prudish American television upbringing where it is okay to show a grizzly murder but not a person's naked arse.