Review – The Straits – Episode 4

The Straits – ABC1 – 8:30pm Thursday – AUS
Episode 4: The Hunt For Vlad

Despite giving The Straits two positive reviews so far in its run I have been accused of being too harsh on the show. Apparently those positive reviews should have been simply glowing, as enjoying the show and pointing out its problems doesn’t seem to sit well with some people. One of the reasons that I have been perhaps a tad quick to pick apart elements of The Straits that don’t work for me is that the creators of this show have compared it to The Sopranos, Deadwood and The Wire. This wasn’t just Graeme Blundell in The Australian comparing it to Shakespeare and The Godfather (because Blundell’s pomposity seemingly knows no bounds) this was the creators of the show making direct comparisons to three of the most critically acclaimed television series of all time. If the creators are aiming to create that level of television then we should hold them to that standard no matter how much better this show is than other Australian dramas (and let’s be honest, some ad breaks are better than most Australian dramas).

With that in mind let me now give another positive review of The Straits that will again highlight some of its problem areas. I was planning on giving the show a bad review right up until the moment Noel fired a rocket launcher into the bikie’s headquarters, which was so joyously over-the-top that I couldn’t possibly mark the show down for it. That said this episode was certainly a step backwards from the last three episodes if only for simple reason that Brian Cox wasn’t in it. Harry has survived the shooting from last week but he remains in a critical condition and completely motionless in a hospital bed. This leaves a huge Brian Cox sized hole in the show that The Straits doesn’t know how to fill. It’s a self-made problem as the show gave us Harry, who is the most fun and most interesting of all the characters, and then they shot him so if The Straits suffers because he’s no longer present they brought it on themselves.

It wasn’t just the lack of Brian Cox that brought Episode 4 down it was a complete lack of momentum. After three weeks were the action moved at a brisk pace, so even if you didn’t quite buy what was happening it still made for an enjoyable ride, this week everything become strangely static. The first half of the episode found the Montebello clan glued to the hospital where Harry lay recovering, but things picked up late in the episode as the boys went on the hunt through the bush for their father’s attacker. Outside of the hunt for Vlad things were a bit of a bore. Again, this isn’t to say I’m not on the show’s side – because I am, and deeply want this show to succeed at what it’s attempting – but this episode was oddly boring for long stretches.

Contributing to this boredom was the fact The Straits sense of humour was also missing for the majority of the episode and it’s probably not coincidental that things picked up right around the time Gary and Marou had Vlad in their sights only for one of them to fart and the pair to do their best not to giggle. A good fart joke never goes astray and it helped remind us that The Straits works best when it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It would be good if Sissi could get that memo at some point because she kept up her sulk-act this week. Sissi found a big stash of cash that Paddy had hidden in his house, and she planned on skipping town until D.I. Sutherland, a bent cop who helps out her dad, pulled her over and talked her out of that decision. The scene with Sutherland was pretty effective but Sissi is still at risk of being a complete waste of space if the show doesn’t figure out a way to use her better.

One of my problems with the show last week was how is has a tendency to one-up itself for no reason and one of the scenes I pointed to as being particularly dopey was Gary being bitten by a snake after crashing his car. Now, I still believe think this was a case of lazy storytelling to get from point A to point B (Gary is bit by a snake, he hallucinates, calls his dad and tells him that he slept with Lola) but I’m beginning to come around to the idea that this is just how The Straits works. Every show has to establish the universe in which it takes place and sometimes the ‘rules’ of that universe don’t align with the ‘rules’ of the real world.

You could look at the scene where Kitty goes to Uncle George to have a curse put on the man who shot her husband and see a show taking some story shortcuts. We’re led to believe that because of this curse a spider appears on Vlad’s hand as he’s perched perilously on the side of the cliff; the spider scares him and he falls backwards onto a strangely placed fence spike that skewers him. Now, this is in some way lazy storytelling – I mean, Vlad is killed by a curse that involves random spiders appearing out of nowhere – BUT I am perfectly happy to buy this development because I kind of like that The Straits is a world in which curses exist; a world where Gary can be bitten by a snake, or Marou can be saved by an bird flying in the way of a bullet meant for him, because it adds a bit of out-of-nowhere fun to the proceedings. On the flipside, I can totally sympathise with anybody who treats these same developments as a deal-breaker.

The only element of The Straits that I find to be a deal-breaker for me is Lola, who continues to be an empty clichéd soap-opera villain and not a real human being. She thankfully didn’t get to do a whole lot this episode, although her bedside chat with an unconscious Harry was pretty irritating. There are still a wealth of characters The Straits needs to flesh out (Marou, Vince, Kate, Natasha and her little blonde son Andrew who is most definitely Harry’s) but none more desperately need another layer than Lola who is awful person but lacks any motivation for that awfulness.

The Straits is a troubled show that even at its clumsiest I find hard to hate (those great opening credits win me over every time) but it does need to figure out what it’s doing faster than it currently is. The show also needs Harry to recover so we can have our weekly dose of Brian Cox greatness. If the cast and crew of this production continue to insist that this is ‘The Sopranos in thongs’ (as the director of this episode did this week in an interview with the ABC TV Blog) they need to be taken to task when the show doesn’t live up to those ridiculously high standards they’ve set for themselves. This was the weakest episode of the series so far and with their eyes set on all of those HBO classics it seems this series is tripping over the little things they need to get right before it can ever find greatness.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright

This review is part of Change The Channel’s episode by episode coverage of The Straits. The full list of episode reviews can be found under Series.