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. ;)