This episode had a distinctly different feel, so different that it made me wonder if I’d been tuning into the right channel for the last four weeks. People reacted like you’d reasonably expect them to, most of what went on made some sense, and despite submitting to those urges for Bourne-esque incidental music it all played reasonably well. Curiously the script is credited to Cameron McAllister, executive producer of ITV’s Primeval, LWT’s Daylight Robbery and a director/writer of Sky One’s Mile High. And given this is his only Code 9 outing, he made a half decent stab at it. Plenty happens in this story, which I’m not going to entirely spoil here, but what was noticeable was that they’ve given up with character development. With only one show to go it looks unlikely now that we’ll ever understand who Vik is, and frankly many of the others haven’t been fleshed out in any meaningful way from the pilot. My biggest disappointment in this respect is for Georgia Moffett, whose Kylie character looked great initially but overall she’s failed to make the half the impact she did in one episode of Doctor Who. In this one she gets some spy things to do, but she’s never one exhibited the firebrand personality she had in episode one, much to my personal disappointment. The worst bits this week were the annoying interactions with their supposed boss, who seems to turn up each week just to wear petulance like a Chanel fragrance. They also injected a stupidly sentimental rich mother/misunderstood daughter relationship, where you hoped both wouldn’t survive, but they unfortunately did. I know that within the 50 minutes running time they’re forced to use cinematic shorthand to tell a story, but nothing those characters said or did convinced me of their emotion for one nanosecond. In a word, sloppy. Even with those impediments this was probably the best episode so far, but that’s a little like saying a horse won a race because amongst the field it was the only one with a symmetrical layout of legs. Most have been weak and at least one has been abysmal, so the standards haven’t presented much of a challenge to better.Next week we get the final outing, which unless it moves dramatically up a notch I’d predict is the last we’ll be seeing of Code 9.
