North Sea Connection review: RTÉ's brooding thriller will bring you back for more
North Sea Connection is set among a fishing family in Galway.
Episode one of (RTÉ One, Sundays 9.30pm) is like a perfect pop song.
The characters are (mostly) spot on, the plot is tight, the pace is right, Galway is brooding and Icelandic, I want to see more.
It starts with Ciara Kenny, played by Lydia McGuinness having a morning coffee in front of postcard cottage. If I had to guess, I’d say part-time artist with a trust fund.
It turns out she’s the skipper of a small fishing boat who brings ashore a few bags of smuggled cigarettes every now and again, for her brother Aidan to sell on.
When one of her crew cries off, a replacement turns up. We know he’s sinister because he wears fresh white runners on a fishing boat. Things go wrong when they stop to do a smuggled cigarette pickup from underneath a buoy. Sinister White Runners man is very keen to get his hands on the cigarettes.
There’s a struggle and he ends up dead on the deck. Ciara opens the package and instead of cigarettes, we find bags of meth amphetamine.
It turns out Aidan has been working with a drug gang all along without Ciara, and White Runners Man is part of said gang. Now he’s dead and dumped over-board with an anchor tied to his feet, and a bag of drugs has sunk along with him.
Drug gangs on telly hate it when you lose their drugs. They always assume you’re scamming them and then they have to threaten you, along with some loved ones, in an isolated warehouse.
This duly happens, so Ciara agrees to do one more drug run to make things right.
So far so clichéd, but is still a tidy thriller to watch, as the evenings start to close in.
Aidan is believable as weak and snakey, with ambitions he can’t deliver. (There is a suggestion he has gambling debts.) Ciara has good culchie punk energy, although her accent is from somewhere around Wexford, — but don’t let that put you off. (The actress Lydia McGuinness was in Wild Mountain Thyme, so she’s probably still in accent-recovery here.) Sinéad Cusack is Sinéad Cusack, basically. She plays Aidan and Ciara’s mother, with a friendly Swedish boyfriend for the Scandinavian audience, who will warm to this show I reckon.
The only quibble I’d have with the first episode is they bring the drug gang on screen too early. I remember in , the Mexican drug gang was on the way for a long time, and that helped build the tension.
Here they arrive with the mandatory north of Ireland accents, blaming the Brits and Brexit for wrecking their supply lines. It doesn’t help that the head of the drug gang is about as menacing as an accountant with slight hangover.
I’ll get over that. There’s plenty more to come from this six-parter, apparently Swedish police are getting involved next week. If you like Scandi things like and , you’ll like this.
