A tale of twists and turns set in a seedy Amsterdam can´t disguise our hero´s shortcomings Baptiste (BBC1) is not the man he was. `I´m not the man I was,` he tells Marta, the police commissioner in Amsterdam, and also an ex, who still goes doe-eyed at him from across the table. Marta needs the former detective´s help with the case of a missing girl. `I am not the man I was,` he later tells Edward Stratton, whose niece, Natalie, is the girl who has disappeared. I assume we are to use our own finely honed detective skills to work out that perhaps Julien Baptiste is not the man he was.We first met the man he was in The Missing, the Williams brothers´ masterful thriller, which, over its two series to date, unravelled the pain and trauma of losing a child and spun it into tense, complex mysteries. Viewers will remember that Baptiste had a gung-ho, blaze-of-glory attitude in the 2016 instalment, owing to a potentially fatal brain tumour, for which he was refusing a life-saving operation. In this spinoff-cum-sequel, he has been through the op, now sees his doctor every six months and has a clean bill of health. Given the amount of softly spoken yet profound advice he doles out, he seems much more peaceful than the grizzled French detective we once knew. Why? Because he is not the man he was, of course. Continue reading...
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