The Shetland Islands are absolutely gorgeous for tourism and they attract so many people who should never set foot there. Hence Brexit to keep them out. But... that was not enough, I am sure, and anyway, there was so much crime simmering in the local population where everyone is the cousin of all his or her neighbors, they had enough inbreeding to make the sun explode with shame. And it did explode or rather implode. Jimmy Perez found a loophole in the system and enabled a black man who was supposed to be extradited to Texas to evade the sure death penalty he would have gotten with no appeal possible: legal lynching. But he was just retired for this ethically minded mistake.
3. ITV – BBC – SHATLAND SEASONS 6 & 7 – 2020-2022
These two final seasons give me the lie about what I said about the evolution of the first five seasons
when it was expressing and reflecting strong Brexit feelings. These two seasons are a whole and they
recenter the cases onto the Shetland Islands and on the personal problems of some inhabitants, the team of
Jimmy Perez, and DI Jimmy Perez himself. Let us be clear, he will quit the police force at the end of these
two seasons.
Season 6 is about a very nasty criminal who has been sentenced to life in prison and twenty or so
years later is dying of an advanced case of cancer. She manages to get permission to spend her last few
months in her home, which is difficult because she is hated by the local population, but she can stand this
and live like a recluse in her home with graffiti on the outside wall because her objective is clear from the
very start: she wants to get some kind of vengeance on two people, her husband at the time of her crime
which was the violent and vicious killing of the young woman, actually hardly of age, if at all, with whom her
husband, Duncan Hunter, had an affair while she was pregnant. Duncan remarries and has a daughter from
this second marriage that will end up with a divorce and the woman will marry Jimmy Perez later on, making
him the stepfather of her daughter, living with her and Jimmy, though keeping normal relations with her
biological father Duncan.
This dying criminal, Donna Killick, gets her vengeance all right but you have to find out the details by
watching the episodes. It has to do with manipulating Duncan, her ex-husband after all, into helping her
commit suicide, which is totally illegal in the United Kingdom. He will end up in prison. But she accuses
Duncan of the crime of killing her, even if it is at her demand, and Jimmy of some fictitious cover-up. Duncan
ends up in prison (we will know it in season seven) and Jimmy is suspended (we will know the result of the
investigation in the next and last season.
Season 7 brings us back to a case of several young people murdered, or, in fact, rather
assassinated, a young man and his girlfriend, and an American who is on the track of another black
American who evaded justice in Texas after being accused of killing a cop, which is a pure case of framing a
black man knowing that in Texas such an accusation does not need any evidence. Confronted by the fact
the American clandestine identity of the man comes up because he is for a short time suspected of at least
one murder. And that's the way Jimmy Perez puts an end to his career by freeing the black man two
days before he is to be extradited to the USA-Texas, providing him with his passport that had been seized by
the police and the advice to disappear one more time. He then resigns from the police.