User Reviews

Until now I didn't think the episodes this year had been very good. Blind Spot was contrived and full of homophobia; while Cuckoo, which had a great premise, fell apart at the end with a resolution that wasn't adequately foreshadowed and didn't make a lot of sense. So I wasn't sure if Cold River would be any better. To my surprise, it was a considerable improvement over the previous two broadcasts.

I would say that Blethyn and company seem to do better in stories that utilize the supporting cast more, without everything focused just on Vera all the time. This story gave them all quite a bit to do. It was more of a team effort, which I liked.

Also, this is the first time an episode of the show had been written by a woman (Martha Hillier) AND directed by a woman (Carolina Giammetta). So it had a different, purposeful feel to it. I figured they were going to bring some #MeToo sexual harassment stuff into it. In this case, the topical political slant worked, because the backdrop was a business where women had been struggling. Women struggled to get hired, they struggled to keep their jobs and they struggled with the cover-ups that were occurring.

As a result of this theme, the murder investigation was less routine. I did think Vera's speech at the end was interesting, about how things had been worse for her generation. Yes, it seemed a bit heavy-handed. But it made me wonder if Vera had been a victim of any harassment when she was younger, and might partially explain why she doesn't really have intimate relationships outside work. So from that vantage point, I would say Cold River gives us newer, richer dimension-- some additional insights into a main character we've already known a long time.

My one small gripe with this episode, and it's a problem I have with a lot of the episodes, is how they always start with Vera and her crew on the wrong track, making the wrong assumptions, chasing down the wrong leads. Then halfway through, things become clearer to them and they finally understand the suspects and identify the correct motives.

Just once I'd like to see Vera's guesswork be right from the start. I'd like a few less (predictable) red herrings, with her knowing the truth up front but struggling to prove it. They waste so much time in the first half of every episode on false leads and incorrect guesswork, where much of that ends up irrelevant to final outcome of the story.

I know that is how police work might occur sometimes, but not all the time. We don't need to have these ridiculous red herrings and unnecessary subplots with the suspects in every single episode.

Sometimes all a viewer has to do is watch the opening segment to learn what the murder is about, and then once the basic premise is understood, the viewer can fast forward through the next 45 minutes and only watch the second half where the investigation is more on track...without missing anything vital or important.

I have to agree with the other reviewer about the financial scams in this, it was not clear to me exactly who benefited and how. It left me feeling very confused in the second half of the show.

It was never made clear who was behind the smuggling racket. Was it Richard? I'm still a bit unsure about his motive for killing Dani too, it seemed a little weak. Would you really kill someone because you didn't want to become embroiled in a police investigation in case they found out about something you did years before that was totally unconnected? Especially when the very act of killing that person causes the police to open an investigation into the victim's businesses anyway. Really?

This episode had interesting characters (especially Paula) and exciting twists and it was well acted and shot, but the plot is not comprehensible to someone poorly versed in finance. I am still confused as to how fake employees which receive a salary would be beneficial to someone, where the fake life insurance comes in, how exactly they were dodging taxes or potentially creaming off for themselves, how the encrypted charges on the transactions served, etc. I do not know what is meant by "ciphering money", "inflating invoices", or "Richard had a lot of business put his way from the Varseys". Some of the things I've listed were hypotheses which were rejected when the detectives realized that they were dealing with money laundering in particular, but I still wish I could have understood them. If Vera and Aiden go to the trouble of explaining explicitly, through the most contrived exchanges, how they've deduced that the dead body was a victim of murder rather than misadventure, or how they've identified the crime scene, they could have clarified the financial scams in this episode in more detail too, in a stepwise fashion, pointing out the causes and the consequences, whereas the actual discussions of the matters in question in this episode were messy and fragmentary. With the way this episode was constructed, the only thing I understood in the end is that Richard was laundering money through the Varsey's, after beguiling Paula, and that Danielle found out. This was the main point, and arguably sufficient to understand why the murders were committed, but there were clearly plenty of other details. This episode therefore left me feeling frustrated, whereas there had been no problems of this sort in any of the previous ones. Regarding the earliest episodes, one reviewer complained of the profusion of characters and suggested that a Poirot-like denouement where everything is revealed in a lengthy monologue would be useful; I disagreed with him then, but this episode is another matter.

Furthermore, is there any reason why most of the characters, especially the more central ones, lacked surnames in this episode? Why is Paula just Paula and Richard just Richard? They did not even write out their names on the board at the police station as they usually do. Is this some sort of progressive propaganda about the insignificance of surnames and establishing social equality by referring to everyone by their first name? A rose by any other name, we're all merely Tom, Dick and Harry, or something like that? It really seems quite ridiculous. The show is about police investigations, not friendly exchanges between strangers in a pub, so some formality would be appreciated.