‘Silent Witness,’ Season 27 (BBC, 2024)
Are the writers getting tired? Perhaps the audience is – well, I am – too familiar with the trick, what the cultural critic Sianne Ngai (2020) calls the “gimmick” of the novel of ideas and other forms of writing that try to deal with philosophical problems in prose and drama. The formula of “Silent Witness” is now well established. A puzzling, deeply troubling death leads the police to call on the services of a private, specialist, forensic laboratory, the Lyell Centre. Its experts’ scientific inquisitiveness, and lack of emotion at the horrors they see, gradually locate truth over each of its two-hour episodes, broadcast in one-hour segments over consecutive nights. So far, so CSI.
What distinguishes “Silent Witness,” or testator silens, as the haunting theme tune in Latin reminds us, is its commitment to the questions of social justice that lie beneath the dead bodies and above the script. One story in Season 27, “Grievance Culture,” tells the story of a forensics professor who is hounded by students for declaring that when a body comes to the table in the morgue, it’s either male or female, or in rare cases something in between.
The script is a commentary on a topic of wide public concern and widespread campus debate, around the Western world, concerning the rights of trans people. It leads us to think: If the tools of analysis are what we currently understand of DNA and physiology, and if the body is desiccated, destroyed in a fire, or dissolved in acid, then isn’t the professor is correct, whatever the certificate held in a government database might say? Where lies truth? But does holding any view justify the murder of people who challenge it?
The problem is that the relentless slow march of evidence collection and evaluation drowns out the ideas – the philosophical puzzle – about gender, rights, pain, and dull anguish that the storyline raises into view and then sidelines. The problem is not that the show hasn’t solved that puzzle. No one has. No one could expect two hours of prime-time television to do that. Instead, the problem is that it raises the issues and then doesn’t explore them. We get a satisfactory resolution of the plot, yes, but no change in the characters and no growing appreciation (if not quite understanding) of the complexity of the problem.
The next story, “Invisible,” tells us about the death of a drug addict, or is she?, found in an apartment owned by a landlord who is fiddling the welfare system. The apartment is in a neglected building in a city – London – desperately short of housing and full of people who are neglected and neglect each other. No one knew the dead neighbor, and the body has lain there, undiscovered, for perhaps a year. Residents have complained about the smell, but the landlord has paid no attention.
The gimmick this time is a real-life news story running in background for a couple of years now, long enough that writers can script, and producers can shot, edit, and air the episode. In real-life, a child died in one such neglected, mold-covered apartment. Residents complained repeatedly. The landlord did nothing. The tenants – and the child – were invisible.
Part 1 ends as the newest member of the ensemble cast – a Lyell Centre lab technician of budding brilliance and a religious past he is trying he’s trying to escape – retreats to his “home.” It’s a dreary apartment in a run-down building. He shivers, pulls his overcoat around his body, and settles in to sleep – or not to – on what looks like a foldaway bed. His personal life, in this huge, vibrant and expensive city, is invisible even to his colleagues working in their gleaming and spacious laboratory, paid for by the profits of their outsourcing contracts with the police and courts over the past 27 seasons.
Perhaps the plight of young Velvy, as the character is called, will come to the fore in future episodes and his neglectful colleagues will come to see their blindness to the facts of their own case. That could be an insightful ending for this long-running series. If so, will it puzzle afresh over the many social issues and the philosophical problems the show has raised but not quite explored?
Ngai, S. (2020, 25 June). The Gimmick of the Novel of Ideas. blog post at The Paris Review. Retrieved from https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/06/25/the-gimmick-of-the-novel-of-ideas/