If you can forgive the ponderous opening episode and its slightly by-numbers feel, there is much to enjoy in the new six-part police drama The Gone.
When a young Irish couple go missing during a stay in New Zealand, hardbitten-slash-maverick Dublin detective Theo Richter (Richard Flood) flies over to help the local cops investigate, despite the fact that he has just handed in his resignation after 20 years for no reason he is willing to give to his superiors. Unresolved trauma from an old case? Burdened by a secret sorrow? Something is prompting him to pick fights and find distraction in getting beaten to a pulp by thugs, and no doubt we’ll find out soon enough.
Why does New Zealand need Dublin? Because half the missing couple is Sinead Martin (Rachel Morgan), the daughter of Hannah Martin (Michelle Fairley), the judge who recently put away the head of an Irish drug operation run by the Fallon family, who are not the type to let that kind of thing go unpunished. Hannah survived a recent revenge attack – so maybe they have moved on to her family. On the other hand, it is soon discovered that the other half of the missing couple, Ronan Garvey (Simon Mead), was dealing drugs at his gym and had a temper on him that he may have liked to take out on his girlfriend.
Kiwi-side, the couple’s disappearance reminds residents of a pair of murders committed 17 years ago in the same remote rural town, the perpetrator of which was never caught. DS Diana Huai (Acushla-Tara Kupe) has returned to the town, her childhood home, after a long absence. It is clear from the strained relations she has with the inhabitants, including and especially those to whom she is related, that she too is carrying a sorrow that will need to be brought into the light over the next five or six hours.
There is also, as you might possibly already suspect, given the setting and the genre, a new business in town – a giant recycling-cum-fertiliser plant, led by a non-native CEO, who wants to acquire surrounding sacred land amid growing protests from the Māori community. These are led by older, stalwart members – Wiki (Vanessa Rare) and Buster Huia (Wayne Hapi), Diana’s uncle and aunt. They raised her as a child but are now virtually estranged.
Finally, there is Aileen Ryan (Carolyn Bracken), an Irish journalist who has been following the Fallon story for years and has duly pursued Richter to New Zealand to sniff out the latest developments. She proceeds, like most journalists, to cause nothing but trouble.
Once the opening episode has put all the pieces in play, the plot thickens (sometimes with so much indistinct dialogue that you feel but one more gobbet of half-audible information away from losing the thread entirely) and becomes intriguing, if not propulsive.
What really separates The Gone from the common herd, however, is the presence of Wiki and Buster. Flood and Kupe do their best as the detectives, but their parts are essentially colourless, merely functional. Wiki and Buster are rich, warm character studies, bringing emotional depth and – as we move into their story – sometimes joy, and sometimes an aching sadness. Their scenes – individually or together – breathe life into the whole. They help shift The Gone into something approaching a mood piece – a meditation on the importance of connection to each other (they have been together 30 years, mostly running a safe house for troubled teenagers). It becomes a homage to a town (the difference it makes to know generations of the people around you is often evoked, particularly in the long friendship between Wiki and a local police sergeant), and also to the land (there is a lovely exchange about the “fucking English” and their propensity to take that which does not belong to them).
Evidence of foul play mounts, clues are uncovered, leads are followed, libellous articles are published. A Fallon is found to have made his way to New Zealand too, people are endangered, CEOs become increasingly anxious as investors become increasingly spooked, bits of plot join up, then other bits come along and complicate things all over again. Violence builds and erupts – and yes, secret sorrows are aired and childhood traumas resolved. Though the script sometimes stumbles, there are also enough moments of wry humour and resonant truth to keep the whole thing more than merely watchable. If you need something else to tip you over the edge, there’s the scenery too. How New Zealanders get anything done with the vistas spread before them I do not know.
The Gone is on BBC Four and is available on BBC iPlayer, and on Apple TV and Amazon Prime Video in Australia.
