After peaking somewhat early last week, Identity tried valiantly to keep the momentum going in Reparation, but overall this episode was a mixed bag. Bansi Dutta (Ramon Tikaram) is on the verge of signing a deal to buy a UK car maker with the backing of the government, except they want to make sure that he’s the person they think he is. Why this is actually important isn’t really covered because, based on his history, you’d think they’d be keen he was someone else. The Identity team is called in to find the truth, although, when they do work it out, nobody in the government wants to actually know. The entire story is based around the idea that you can have plastic surgery and be made to look identical to someone else, which I had a very hard time accepting. Yes, we’ve seen body doubles for Saddam Hussein and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, but they were people picked for having a natural likeness to begin with. That was a tough sell, but when they started to mix the Bloom story we were expected to swallow some bigger problems than that. Talk about the luck of the Irish! So, having put Bloom in two very difficult situations he gets out of both by actually doing almost nothing, which I found highly unsatisfactory. But I’m going to come back to my old chestnut about Identity: character development, which appears to have been entirely forgotten. As if to highlight the character-lite aspect, Keeley Hawes’ boss reappears in this story and spouts the same cliché drivel that he did in the very first story, calling Bloom a “loose cannon”! No shit, Sherlock. When this show works, it can be quite exciting and tense, but the lack of three-dimensional characters is becoming impossible to ignore. This is a shame, because the whole Bloom story looks like it’s heading to an explosive conclusion that could be given more gravitas if it was supported by a more realistic backdrop. Read our review of episode 3 here.
